Susan Wachter Briefs House Committee on CRA

On January 23, Susan Wachter, Penn IUR Co-Director and Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance, The Wharton School, briefed the Committee on Financial Services for the U.S. House of Representatives on proposed changes to the Community Reinvestment Act. Committee staff sought her input on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for changes to the CRA issued on January 9, 2020 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in advance of OCC Comptroller Joseph Otting’s testimony on January 29 before the full house committee convened by Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

“The CRA comes closest to reaching its potential when it takes into account the needs of each community,” said Wachter. Wachter’s statement is a continuation of her work on the modernization of the CRA, including two research symposiums held in Washington D.C. (on February 1, 2019, convened by Penn IUR, the Federal Reserve Board and the Philadelphia Fed, and on October 29, 2019, convened by Penn IUR and the Wharton Public Policy Initiative); the publication in January 2020 of a special volume in Housing Policy Debate (Vol. 30, No. 1), co-edited by Wachter and Lei Ding, Senior Economic Advisor for Community Development, Philadelphia Fed and co-published as a Penn IUR paper series; and a Penn IUR Policy Brief titled “Modernizing the CRA (While Preserving Its Spirit),” which summarizes the perspectives of experts who spoke at the October 29 event as well as of academics who contributed to the special edition of Housing Policy Debate.