In a move that could help increase home-ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders. The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring. Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans among low- and moderate-income people and felt pressure from stockholders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

— The lead paragraphs of Steven A. Holmes’s article in the Sept. 30, 1999, New York Times, headlined “Fannie Mae eases credit to aid mortgage lending.”