A New Mortgage Lending Resource for Indian Country
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data Now Available on CICD’s Reservation Profiles
By: Kevin Johnson, Data Analyst, and Richard M. Todd
In early 2017, the Center for Indian Country Development (CICD) introduced its Reservation Profiles to provide basic demographic information from the American Community Survey (ACS) on federally recognized American Indian reservations with populations of at least 2,500. We recently updated this information to include data from the 2012-2016 ACS. In addition, the CICD significantly expanded the Reservation Profiles of these reservations by adding information on home lending collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) for the years 2012 through 2016.
Enacted by Congress in 1975, HMDA requires the most home lenders, including many banks, credit unions, and specialized mortgage lending institutions, to annually provide data on their home loan applications and home loans. (See About the Data for more information on HMDA data.) These data are an important source of publicly available information on the U.S. home loan market, partly because they include information not just on loans but also on loan applications that are denied or for other reasons do not lead to a loan origination. The HMDA data also are special because they include detailed information on the gender, race, and ethnicity of loan applicants, including American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) applicants.