HERA's core practice areas for purposes of direct client representation are fair housing and predatory lending. Below is a brief description about each of these subject areas.

What is Fair Housing?
Fair housing laws are a form of civil rights protection. In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act which outlawed private discrimination, focusing particularly on racial discrimination in housing.(1) Subsequently, in 1988 this Act was amended to become the Fair Housing Amendments Act, expanding the protections of the original act. Under federal law, people are protected against discrimination in their efforts to seek or maintain housing (e.g. through rental, purchase, mortgage borrowing, and acquiring insurance).

Most states, including California, have also since enacted their own fair housing laws. In California, when seeking or maintaining housing, people are entitled to not be discriminated against based on the following characteristics: race, national origin, gender, disability (both mental and physical), familial status, age, source of income, sexual orientation or other personal characteristics. Some common examples of fair housing abuses include:

  • discrimination based on race or national origin — e.g., when a landlord refuses to show a rental unit to a person of color, claiming that it has already been rented, but then later shows or rents the same unit to a Caucasian person.
  • discrimination based on gender — e.g., when a property owner or manager pressures a renter to date or have unwanted physical or intimate contact in order to maintain housing.
  • discrimination based on disability — e.g., when a landlord refuses to allow a tenant with a disability to physically modify a rental unit as a reasonable accommodation (e.g. installation of a ramp for a wheelchair).
  • discrimination based on familial status — e.g., when a landlord places all families with children under age 18 in ground-floor units, or only in certain buildings at a complex.
Housing providers who are covered by fair housing laws include: most landlords, managers, realtors, brokers, insurance providers and their designated employees and authorized agents.

Predatory Lending
Predatory lending encompasses a host of fraudulent financial practices, ranging from the deceptive to the criminal, that exploit vulnerable populations—the elderly, the lower and moderate income, racial/ethnic minorities, and often women—through grossly misrepresented and unfair lending strategies. As a result, a growing number of victims are losing their homes—often their sole principal real asset and source of present and future security—to wide-ranging, sophisticated scams by con artists. Predatory lending is destructive not just to individuals, but also to community-level progress. It takes root in neighborhoods embodying its target demographics, and these areas then lose overall economic resources, social capital, and stability. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has documented high rates of foreclosures linked to subprime loans.(2) Subprime lending has increased by almost 1000% in 5 years.(3) The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that U.S. borrowers lose $9.1 billion annually to predatory lending practices.(4)

California alone accounts for over one-fourth of all the mortgage market (prime and subprime) in the United States. Given the high volume of mortgage lending in the state and its complex and diverse population, California has become host to many incidents of predatory lending abuse and nefarious schemes. A 2001 report by the California Reinvestment Coalition concluded that over one-third of borrowers in its study (in three California cities, including Oakland) may have been victimized by predatory mortgage lending.(5)

Examples of predatory lending practices or loan terms include:

  • high pressure sales and marketing tactics
  • deceptive and aggressive tactics aimed at confusing and coercing borrowers
  • targeting of vulnerable persons (e.g., seniors, people with disabilities, immigrants)
  • bait and switch tactics
  • failure to provide proper loan term disclosures
  • patently unfair loan terms (e.g. excessively high points and fees)
  • title and foreclosure schemes
  • home improvement scams
  • loan servicing abuses
(1) Pub. L. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73 (1968). See Part I, Chapter 2 for discussion of the federal fair housing act's application to zoning. For more information on the legislative history of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, See Robert G. Schwemm, Housing Discrimination, Law and Litigation, West Group Civil Rights Law Library (2003).

(2) Curbing Predatory Home Mortgage Lending: A Joint Report, U.S. Department of HUD and U.S. Department of Treasury (2000).

(3) Id. at 28-29.   The five year period is from 1993-1998.

(4) Quantifying the Economic Cost of Predatory Lending, Center for Responsible Lending, p.2 (2001).

(5) Stolen Wealth: Inequities in California’s Subprime Mortgage Market. California Reinvestment Committee (2001). The report focused on 125 respondents in four cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Oakland, in order of sample size).