Frank: GOP Housing Attacks Racially Motivated

BOSTON -- Rep. Barney Frank said Republican criticism of Democrats over the nation's housing crisis is a veiled attack on the poor that is racially motivated.

Frank told a mortgage foreclosure symposium in Boston on Monday that Republicans are appealing to their base by blaming the economic crisis on efforts to expand affordable housing.

He said "the fact that some of the poor people are black doesn't hurt" the GOP critics with their political base.

But the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee says the Community Reinvestment Act has helped expand affordable housing to low- and moderate-income buyers.

He says the larger subprime mortgage mess is instead responsible for the vast majority of foreclosures and the financial problems on Wall Street.