the Sandlers was Steven Schlein, who never seemed to tire of pointing out that the “founders of the Center for Responsible Lending” had been exposed as the “toxic mortgage king and queen.”
As if all the negative reports about the Sandlers weren’t bad enough for the CRL, another major donor, John Paulson, wore a similarly large target on his back. Paulson was a hedge fund manager who so firmly believed that loose lending standards would cause deep troubles in the broader economy that he bet against the real estate market. Paulson & Co. made $15 billion in profits in 2007, $3.7 billion of which Paulson himself pocketed. That is believed to be the largest one-year payday in Wall Street history. In 2008, his firm collected another $5 billion in profits. In different circumstances, Allan Jones might have been impressed, but Paulson had donated millions to the CRL, so Jones was disgusted.
“It was un-American what he did,” Jones said. “He made his money betting against our country. This is who’s funding the CRL.” Jones then brought up the Sandlers, who he claimed “started the credit meltdown” when they sold Golden West to Wachovia. “You look at how dirty the CRL is,” he said. “And after knowing that, you’d even listen to a word they have to say about us?”
Bill Faith didn’t mince words when his fellow activists in Dayton asked him at the start of the 2000s about Dean Lovelace’s plan to introduce a local law to restrict the city’s predatory home lenders. “I told them, ‘No offense, but you don’t have the capacity, you don’t know what you’re doing,’” Faith said. The states and the federal governments have agencies in place to monitor lenders, he told them; cities don’t. But Faith was also the state’s most prominent housing advocate, so when his allies in Dayton moved ahead anyway, he did what he could to help. Faith shrugged when we met in his offices a few blocks from the state capitol in Columbus in the fall of 2008. “I figured if it got attention for the issue, that’d be a good thing,” Faith said. The city councils in Cleveland and Toledo would pass bills similar to Dayton’s.
In theory, Ohio was a strong home-rule state that granted municipalities broad powers over the regulations inside their borders. In reality, though, the mortgage industry had the cash and the clout to convince the Ohio state legislature, one year after Dayton’s legislation, to pass a law stripping Dayton, Cleveland, and Toledo of the authority to regulate the mortgage lenders operating within their city limits. The boilerplate anti-predatory language its sponsors added to the bill was largely lifted from the 1994 HOEPA statute, and therefore already law, but that didn’t prevent Governor Bob Taft, a Republican, from patting himself on the back. This bill, Taft declared when signing the measure into law, proves that in Ohio “we will not tolerate predatory lenders, or loan sharks, who take advantage of senior citizens, people with limited incomes, or people with bad credit histories.” More revealing, though, were the reactions of partisans to its passage. “We certainly think it’s a good bill,” said Dayna Baird, the head of the Ohio Consumer Finance Association and the chief lobbyist for large lenders such as Household and CitiFinancial. In contrast, Jim McCarthy in Dayton dismissed the new law as a “canard” and Bill Faith dubbed it “the most arrogant bill I’ve seen in all my years in Columbus.
“There’s this subprime problem going on all over the state and what do our legislatures do?” Faith asked. “They pass a bill that says to the cities, ‘We’re going to preempt you from doing anything about predatory lending, that’s the state’s job, but, oh, by the way, we’re not going to do anything about the problem.” If there was the occasional tale of a borrower harmed by a particularly noxious subprime loan, legislators were told, that was the work of a rogue agent whose misdeeds had been exaggerated by a press corps on the hunt for the sensational. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, it seemed, were inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt to any lender willing to work with borrowers of modest means.
The bill, passed during the 2002 legislative session, did create a sixteen-person Predatory Lending Study Committee that would travel the state to assess the problem. When they hit Dayton, so many people wanted a turn at the microphone that, despite a strict five-minute limit on speeches, the meeting lasted three hours. The committee chairman Chuck Blasdel, a Republican state legislator who had been the primary sponsor of the preemption bill, told the
Among his fellow activists, Bill Faith, the executive director of the Columbus-based Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, or COHHIO, is celebrated for his ability to get along with legislators on both sides of the aisle. Around the state capital, you’re as likely to spot Faith out with a Republican legislator as a Democrat, and over the years he would describe any number of conservative legislators as his friends. Ron Bridges, a lobbyist for AARP, only wishes he could be more like Faith. The AARP was a key ally in the fight against predatory lending and more than once Bridges joined Faith as he tried to work on Blasdel. “I was always two seconds away from wringing the guy’s neck because I see all the people getting hurt,” Bridges said. “But Bill sees the same thing, which is why he makes sure to get along with guys like Blasdel. He sees the bigger picture.” Apparently, though, that means sometimes missing the smaller details. A few years later, Faith and Bridges were on the verge of finally besting the mortgage industry and Bridges looked down to discover that his friend had just spent an hour meeting with the Ohio Senate leadership while wearing two mismatched shoes.
Bill is different than most activists,” Mike Toman, a partner in the lobbying firm The Success Group, is explaining to me at his office a block from the state capitol in Columbus. “He knows the inside game.” To Toman and his partner, Dan McCarthy, lobbying is best left to the professionals—but Faith is one of those rare social justice crusaders who not only understands how to sell a story to a member of the legislature but also has an innate sense of who to approach and when.
“Most activists want to be right,” McCarthy said. “But Bill wants to get things accomplished.”
“He’s still an activist,” Toman said. “He has that passion.”
“But he understands how to make a deal,” McCarthy said.
And then both more or less said in unison: Bill Faith likes to win.
Faith is a beefy man with a bearish physique and white gray hair that seems perpetually unkempt, as if he is suffering from an incurable case of bed-head. He wears a goatee and has a husky, heavy person’s voice that can sometimes makes him sound a bit like John Madden. He’s a talker, so much so that his friends joke that they don’t dare call him unless they know they will be in the car for at least an hour. He smokes, he swears, and he obviously drinks; when we met at the bar at Mitchell’s, a stylish steak house one block from the capitol, a Ketel One and cranberry cocktail appeared in front of him without him needing to ask for it. He wore a sport coat and tie that night, a common occurrence for someone who runs a statewide nonprofit with a multimillion-dollar budget, yet somehow the outfit seemed wrong on him. It might have been the quizzical, boyish way he examined the toast points and goat cheese that accompanied his beet salad (he may be a regular at the bar but he runs a housing advocacy group, and if he eats at Mitchell’s, it’s a rare treat because someone else is picking up the tab); it might have been the informal “How ya doin’?” greeting he gave most everyone, from the retired Senate president having a drink in the bar area to the hostess showing us to our seats.
His mother would drag him to civil rights protests as a kid. His father, a Presbyterian Republican raised in rural Indiana, was unhappy she was bringing their son to places where they were often the only whites in the room aside from the media. His mother was devastated when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. His father considered the civil rights leader a communist who had brought tragedy upon himself. Faith grew up in the People’s Republic of Youngstown, a staunchly pro-union town and firmly Democratic, but that’s only because his father was a farm implement salesman dispatched to eastern Ohio to grow the market there. “A lot of my relatives still live in rural Indiana and rural Illinois,” Faith said. “So I know those people. I can talk to them.”
Faith was never much of a student. He dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year, but a year back in Youngstown was all he needed to get serious about his studies. “I didn’t want to work in the mills,” he said, “but that’s exactly where my life was headed.” He was accepted into Ohio State in the mid-1970s, where his future started to take shape. He read about the Catholic Worker movement and imagined himself as a social worker. He liked the fit and even converted to Catholicism. “I was looking at this small sliver of the Catholic Church and ignoring
