The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act: A Synopsis and Recent Legislative History

This article describes the provisions of the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), tracing its legal evolution since 1989, when Congress expanded HMDA to require reporting of home mortgage lending by ethnicity and race. HMDA requires most lenders to report the demographic makeup and geographic distribution of home mortgages to the federal government. The 1989 amendments and later developments transformed HMDA from a law exclusively concerned with geographic disinvestment to one concerned with lending disparities by ethnicity and race. In the process, HMDA evolved from an obscure reporting statute to a flashpoint for debates over lending discrimination and subprime lending.