Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Affordable Housing Underwriting topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Resident urges manual underwriting as part of affordable-housing discussions at CRA meeting
Summary
Resident Dennis Conklin urged the CRA to consider manual underwriting practices for people without credit histories when the agency discusses affordable-housing programs. He cited multiple document types that can support manual underwriting and referenced the U.S. Constitution during remarks.
Resident Dennis Conklin urged the Community Redevelopment Agency to consider manual underwriting methods for affordable-housing applicants who lack conventional credit histories during public comment Tuesday.
Conklin said roughly "about 17 and a half percent" of U.S. residents have no credit rating and argued that manual underwriting — relying on alternative documents rather than a FICO score — should be available to avoid excluding those people from homeownership or rental housing. He said there are "four examples of documents" listed in the materials and "almost a dozen" total acceptable documents for manual underwriting; he did not enumerate them during his remarks. "These are the people that basically are not a credit risk because they don't expose themselves to the slavery of the creditor or the lender," Conklin said.
Conklin also criticized federal housing-market influences, asserting the federal government "owns 70% of the mortgages in America," and he connected his remarks to monetary policy and the Constitution, citing "Article 1 Section 10." He prefaced his comments with an apology for being disruptive at a prior meeting. No action or direction to staff resulted from the public comment recorded in the transcript.
The CRA did not vote on policy changes during the public-comment period; Conklin's remarks were recorded for the public record.
