During this reform effort, an interesting thing happened. You can see it in the numbers. Between 1993 and 1994 alone, there was a 27 percent increase in conventional home purchase loans to low-income households nationwide. The most recent data show that this improvement continued throughout 1995 for African-American and Hispanic mortgage applicants. Today, to keep this momentum going, we are continuing to make the new CRA regulation as effective as possible.
Any transition raises a lot of questions and generates a lot of uncertainty.
All of us in the regulatory community realize that we have an obligation to make the transition to the new CRA rule as smooth as possible. That is why all the regulators have worked together over the past 18 months to respond to questions about the new rule and to clarify how it will be implemented. We have made public new performance-based examination procedures. We have also provided instructions on how banks can partner with their communities to prepare CRA strategic plans, and we've issued interpretive opinions highlighting opportunities to perform under the new rule. Further, we have issued a document clarifying how banks should collect and report the data on small business lending that our new rule requires them to disclose for the first time.