Authors

John Olson, Prabal Chakrabarti, and Ren Essene, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

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Volume 4, Issue 1 | February 1, 2009

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 was enacted to address the concern that depository institutions had not met the credit needs of their entire communities. In many ways, the act can be credited with changing the way that banks do business in low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. While the statute itself and the regulations that implement it have changed over the intervening decades, a re-examination of the CRA now seems particularly relevant as the financial crisis and the legislative and regulatory responses to it unfold.