ABSTRACT
The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) is a private, nonprofit corporation founded in 1988 to help provide national leadership on fair housing issues. The mission of NFHA, which represents virtually all of the private, nonprofit fair housing agencies in the nation, is to promote “the policy of the United States to provide, within constitutional limitations, for fair housing throughout the United States.” This chapter focuses on the purpose of mortgage lending testing, the types of testing used to measure lending discrimination and to investigate individual allegations of lending discrimination, and the resolutions reached with lenders stemming from fair lending investigations. Testing is a controlled method of documenting differences in treatment, availability, terms and conditions, and price that can be attributed to a particular protected characteristic, such as race, ethnicity, familial status, or disability. Enforcement-based testing is designed to evaluate the validity of the reason for loan denial or the change in terms or conditions of the loan.
