The New York Law School invited me to be part of a special social justice project along with fellow NYU classmates and Ballot Boxer partners, Matthew Chmiel and Fernando Cervantes. We worked with law professor Richard Marsico of New York Law School. The focus of the project is an online service to help legal experts, bankers, academics and community activists calculate the complex annual lending data required by the landmark Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the equally important Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). This project was proposed after an introductory meeting in August 2006 with Professor Marsico, who specializes on enforcement of these laws.

In brief, these Acts require lending institutions to meet the credit needs of the community, including low and moderate income (LMI) neighborhoods, and they require disclosure of information about lending according to race. Since these laws were enacted, banks have made significant increases in loans to LMI communities, in large part because of the efforts of local not-for-profit organizations and other activists. Forcing banks to comply with these laws is complicated and, as a result, people of color are frequently issued loans with terms that are not as favorable as those for whites and borrowers from middle and upper income levels. The government has mandated that all lenders keep, and make public, statistics about their lending amounts, interest rates and how those figures relate to income and race. Although they do make this data available, it is hard to find and even more difficult to manage.

Through his research, Professor Marsico had developed a series of very effective methods for crunching this lending data to calculate discrepancies based on race and to detect predatory lending practices, such as those found in subprime lending. In addition to the fact that the data is vast and hard to locate, Professor Marsico's collection and calculation protocol was complex. Together we refined the process and created an online tool to help users collect, calculate and evaluate this data. We simplified the process by dynamically generating the instructions and calculation tables. This way, users only collect and calculate the data that they require. The HMDAnalysis beta version is currently available to the general public for free and it can support analyses in all 50 states. The project was recently presented by Professor Marsico in Washington.