About

The Consumer & Housing Project is dedicated to improving housing conditions for people with people with low incomes and to protecting North Carolinians from harmful and abusive business practices.

Our Goals

Create an adequate supply of safe, decent, and affordable housing
Increase, maintain, and enforce protections and rights for tenants
Reduce the loss of homes to foreclosures and unfair practices, and end predatory mortgage lending
Ensure protections are in place to prevent abuses by banks and finance companies, and stop payday lenders from returning to North Carolina
Litigate cases that increase protections and recover damages for consumers with low incomes
Create affordable access to utilities, transportation, and energy efficient homes and other services

LEGISLATIVE ADVOCACY
We have helped to ensure North Carolina has some of the best consumer protections in the nation; our advocacy efforts on housing are so widely known and respected that there is a statewide award that bears our director of advocacy’s name. We work on consumer issues such as:

Financial Consumer Protections
Homeowners’ Rights
Tenants’ Rights
Affordable Housing
Access to Transit and Essential Services
Energy Efficiency

LEGAL WORK
We pursue high-impact litigation that has the potential to protect and expand the rights of groups and individuals living with low incomes. We have also helped to recover millions of dollars for North Carolina consumers through class-action lawsuits. Our legal work primarily focuses on:

Payday Lending Lawsuits
Foreclosure Prevention
Tenants’ Rights
Fair Housing