It's really not. First of all, the affordable housing market isn't where the housing market was most inflated so the author's entire premise is wrong. Secondly

It's really not. First of all, the affordable housing market isn't where the housing market was most inflated so the author's entire premise is wrong. Secondly, the author of that article is pretty clearly shilling to privatize Fannie Mae. Thirdly, nobody here seems to understand what the community lending standards actually were and just wants to use it as a post to rest their argument on. This is a much better, though still critical of the CRA article that goes into actual detail on what the problems were: https://www.city-journal.org/html/financial-crisis-and-cra-10483.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/financial-crisis-and-cra-1... But it's still an overly reductive and misguided argument. As Noah Smith points out here: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/did-risky-mortgage-lending-cause.html https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/did-risky-mortga...