More Detail on the Subprime Mortgage Push

More Detail on the Subprime Mortgage Push

In this case, from Dennis Sewell in the British magazine The Spectator:

Let’s wind back to 1993 and Roberta Achtenberg’s arrival on the Washington political scene. Achtenberg had made her name in San Francisco as a civil rights lawyer and activist, campaigning to keep open the city’s gay bathhouses, and (I promise I’m not making this up) pressing for an increase in the number of gay Scoutmasters. Bill Clinton offered her a job in his new administration, and Roberta Achtenberg became the first openly lesbian nominee ever to receive a Senate confirmation. She duly took up her post as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The main thrust of the Clinton housing strategy was to increase home ownership among the poor, and particularly among blacks and Hispanics. White House aides, in familiar West Wing style, could parrot the many social advantages that would accrue: high levels of home ownership correlated with less violent crime, better school performance, a heightened sense of commun-ity. But standing in the way of the realisation of this dream were the conservative lending policies of the banks, which required such inconvenient and old-fashioned things as cash deposits and regular repayments — things the poor and minorities often could not provide. Clinton told the banks to be more creative.
Meanwhile, Ms Achtenberg, a member of the kickass school of public administration, was busy setting up a network of enforcement offices across the country, manned by attorneys and investigators, and primed to spearhead an assault on the mortgage banks, bringing suits against any suspected of practising unlawful discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender or disability. Achtenberg believed racism was a big factor in keeping minorities from enjoying the same level of home ownership as whites. She doubted if much could be done to change people’s attitudes on racial matters, but she was confident she, in cahoots with Attorney General Janet Reno, could use the law to change the behaviour of banks.
However, when little or no overt or deliberate racial discrimination was discovered among the mortgage lenders, HUD’s investigators turned to trying to prove ‘disparate treatment’ of minority groups, a notion similar to that of unintentional ‘institutional racism’. If a bank refused loans to proportionally more black applicants than white ones, for instance, the onus would fall on it to prove it had good grounds for doing so or face settlement penalties running into millions of dollars. A series of highly publicised cases were brought on this basis, starting in 1994.
Eventually the investigators would turn somewhat desperately to ‘disparate impact’, a form of discrimination so abstract and rarefied as to be imperceptible to its supposed victims, and indeed often only discernible at all through the application of multivariate regression analysis to information stored on regulators’ databases. In fact, by 1995 Achtenberg was actually having to rein in her zealots, issuing a clarification that the use of the phrase ‘master bedroom’ in a property advertisement was, despite its clear patriarchal and slave-owning resonances, not actually an actionable offence under the anti-discrimination laws.

I can't say that I am surprised that Achtenberg was involved. Back in the early 1990s, there was a brief media storm when it was discovered that the North American Man-Boy Love Association was holding meetings in a San Francisco public library. One of the local TV stations sent a reporter in undercover with a camera, and when the reporter eventually identified himself, the meeting broke up like cockroaches running from the light. (Sorry to insult cockroaches with this unfair comparison.)

So next the reporter went around to some of the gay bookstores in town, and discovered that all but one of the establishments he entered had NAMBLA's publication, BulliTEN (get it?) for sale. The reporter then went to talk to Robert Achtenberg, at the time, the only openly homosexual member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, and therefore the most obvious gay leader to ask about this. Achtenberg made a big point of the fact that pedophiles aren't gay, that NAMBLA was not part of the gay community, and so on. Then the reporter asked Achtenberg why BulliTEN was for sale in nearly every gay bookstore. Achtenberg's response was that the First Amendment protected their right to publish a magazine--but simply refused to answer why gay bookstores were selling such a magazine, if NAMBLA wasn't part of the gay community.

I learned a lot that day about the intellectual integrity of Robert Achtenberg. I am not surprised to see that she played a part in creating this disaster.