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Frustrated and angry leaders and many nervous bankers attended the first two of seven scheduled hearings on community reinvestment this fall. Five national demands were put on the table in Des Moines and Cleveland as part of hearings attended by federal bank regulators, a victory won at last year's NPA conference.

"We're tired of being screwed" on CRA a crowd at last year's NPA community reinvestment workshop told federal regulators. "And when I get screwed, I want to be smiling," said Claire McGrath of Syracuse United Neighbors. McGrath led a team from groups across the country who got officials from the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Office of Thrift Supervision to agree to hear neighborhood people discuss the need for reinvestment in seven cities across the country.

In Des Moines, homeowners who received high-interest predatory subprime mortgages testified to the damage these loans do not only to individuals but to entire neighborhoods. Testimony also pointed out the ways that CRA has worked in that city as well as how the law could be even more successful, for example through better enforcement-considering 97 percent of all banks currently get satisfactory or better CRA ratings.

Predatory lending and the lack of basic banking services such as check cashing and deposit-taking surfaced as the major issues in Cleveland, where East Side Organizing Project hosted the event.

"We went to Washington last year and talked to the head of the House Banking Committee [U.S. Rep. Jim Leach], who told us there are plenty of laws on the books you can start enforcing right now," Inez Killingsworth of ESOP told regulators after one of them said regulators lacked power to fix the problems leaders addressed.

Local and national demands were on the agenda at both meetings. The five national demands are: 1. Interest rates, fees, and credit scores should be included in HMDA disclosure information; 2. Banks now rated nationally must receive local CRA ratings instead; 3. Better small business disclosure, we want to have at least as much information on small-business loans as HMDA now gives us about home loans; 4. Affiliates and subsidiaries of banks, or within the same holding company as the rated banks, should affect the rating of the bank (this means if a company owns a bank and a predatory lender, the bank's rating should suffer due to that); 5. Banks must not get CRA credit for loans they make to slumlords.

Starting with the hearing in the Bronx at the end of November, groups planned to ask the regulators for commitments to these demands.

The Bronx hearing took place in November. Upcoming hearings will take place on the following dates: Chicago, Jan. 25; Cincinnati, Feb. 6; Syracuse, Feb. 21, and Pittsburgh, March 8.