Quicken Loans' Detroit land grab was made possible by the Obama administration

Quicken Loans is based in Detroit, Michigan and in 2014, President Obama appointed the company's founder and chairman, Dan Gilbert, to his administration's Blight Removal Task Force. The announcement involved officials from HUD, DOT, and the US Attorney General. With the Task Force came a promise of $300 million in federal aid to the city of Detroit.

That money was primarily earmarked for demolition of blighted properties. Charges soon emerged that the aid was masking a land grab, involving a scheme to make urban land viable (after government-funded demolition) and then available to real estate moguls like Gilbert at rock-bottom prices, all in the name of “redevelopment.”

Two years later, President-elect Trump named Quicken in-house lobbyist Shawn Krause to his HUD transition team. At the time, HUD was also involved in a federal lawsuit against Quicken Loans, but the company's vice chairman, Bill Emerson, didn't think her overlap represented a conflict of interest.

According to the Metro Times, “Among the most damning of the lawsuits [against Quicken Loans] is one filed by the Justice Department in 2015. It alleges that Quicken Loans improperly originated and endorsed Federal Housing Administration loans for unqualified buyers, leading to $500 million in claims against HUD. The suit charges that Quicken 'miscalculated income, ignored red flags on loan applications, and created a value-appeals process, which permitted employees to request specific inflated values from appraisers in order to make a loan eligible for FHA insurance.' The complaint includes emails from senior Quicken management in which it admits to lying about mortgage applicants’ income.”

Note that Megan Cummings, another Quicken Loans in-house lobbyist, was formerly the finance director of the National Republican Congressional Committee.