From 1993:

QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous.

Here, as in affirmative-action efforts in hiring, college admissions, and the drawing of voting districts, the Washington establishment is obsessed with “disparate impact,” which it equates with racism. In the mortgage-lending area, there is ample evidence of disparate impact to feed this obsession. Data collected by the Federal Government reveal that in 1992, while 16 per cent of white applicants for mortgage loans were rejected, 36 per cent of black applicants were rejected.

But does disparate impact indicate racism?

To a liberal, yes.

Racism had affected housing policy, with red lining invented by none other than liberal diety, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Federal Home Ownership Loan Corporation, a New Deal agency that invented the 30-year mortgage before it morphed into the FHA, also invented redlining.

The agency, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s initiatives to help recover from the Great Depression, sent inspectors to look at housing across the country to determine where federal investment would help the most. The inspectors, reflecting the prejudices of the era, marked red on their maps to forbid making the loans in areas where there were not enough “red-blooded, high-quality Americans.”

So, with the federal government inducing lenders to make risky loans, the seeds were sown. A warning came in 2000:

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being.

The CRA’s premise sounds unassailable: helping the poor buy and keep homes will stabilize and rebuild city neighborhoods. As enforced today, though, the law portends just the opposite, threatening to undermine the efforts of the upwardly mobile poor by saddling them with neighbors more than usually likely to depress property values by not maintaining their homes adequately or by losing them to foreclosure. The CRA’s logic also helps to ensure that inner-city neighborhoods stay poor by discouraging the kinds of investment that might make them better off.

If you’re not in the mood to read, here’s a video that connects plenty of dots.