The White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders reports that a coalition of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community leaders met with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November. ASIA’s executive director Michael Byun was among the representatives who voiced the needs of AAPIs to the Bureau:
We all know that mortgage paperwork is complicated. As Nam Pham, a community leader from Dorchester, Massachusetts, explained, if American-born citizens with fluent English are getting cheated or misunderstand the mortgage process, how are AAPIs with limited English proficiency supposed to get a fair deal?
We heard from Michael Byun, from Asian Services in Action in Cleveland, Ohio, that fair homeownership needs to be more accessible, both through providing more loan documents in plain English, and translating those documents into AAPI languages. Participants were excited to learn that the CFPB currently offers a complaint helpline that has interpretation available in 189 languages.
Read the full story here on the AAPI Initiative’s blog.