I have called the CRA blame meme “the big lie” -- and with good reason. It’s an old trope, tinged with elements of dog-whistle politics, blaming low-income residents in the inner cities regardless of what the data show.
But if you really want to blame a CRA, I can offer you some help -- check out the credit rating agencies. As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded in its autopsy of the crisis: “The three credit-rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval.”
The raters stamped AAA grades -- the same as given to U.S. government debt -- on what they should have known were junk mortgage securities in order to gain market share and win big fees. With the raters’ seal of approval, the country's biggest banks gorged on this garbage. The results, as we now know, were catastrophic.