In May of 2020, a top-producing loan officer for Fairway Independent Mortgage Company sent an email to a loan processor about a possible property purchase in Ensley, a majority-Black neighborhood in Birmingham, which said, “Ensley is the GHETTO. We don’t own a house there, I promise. LOL!”
The Fairway Mortgage processor responded, “‘ROFLOL,’ presumably meaning ‘rolling on the floor laughing out loud,’” according to a court document , which noted that the lender had accepted no loan applications in the Ensley area from 2018 to 2021.
No one at Fairway Mortgage is laughing now, after a four-year investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Justice Department this week pushed the mortgage lender into an $8 million settlement to address its alleged discriminatory lending practices, including redlining of Black neighborhoods in and around Birmingham.
Redlining is an illegal, discriminatory practice by which lenders and other businesses make credit and other financial services out of reach for residents of certain areas based on race ethnicity, or national origin.