April 30, 2015
Thurday’s Advocacy & Think Thank Round-Up
- Federal Reserve Bank of NY Study Insolvency after the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform finds that the decline in bankruptcy filings resulted in a rise in the rate and persistence of insolvency as well as an increase in the rate of foreclosure.
- Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ Eradicating Substandard Manufactured Homes: Replacement Programs as a Strategy, this paper aims to make recommendations for the design of nonprofit-based programs for the replacement of older, substandard manufactured housing and its potential as an affordable housing solution.
- The Technical Assistance Collaborative (TAC) and the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) released Creating New Integrated Permanent Supportive Housing Opportunities for ELI Households: A Vision for the Future of the National Housing Trust Fund. This report highlights important innovations in affordable housing financing policy designed to benefit Extremely Low Income (ELI) households, including people with significant and long term disabilities who need Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). According to the authors, PSH approach is a highly cost-effective best practice housing strategy that combines ELI housing with voluntary community-based support services.
April 30, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
April 29, 2015
HELOC vs. Cash-out Refinance for Card Debt Repayment
CreditCards.com quoted me in HELOC vs. Cash-out Refinance for Card Debt Repayment. It reads, in part,
On paper, it may look as if it makes a lot of sense to replace high interest card debt with a low interest payment if you have home equity you can tap into. If it’s available and will ease your pay-off pain, why not use it, right?
While using a home equity line of credit (HELOC) or cash-out refinance (in which you refinance your mortgage, but tack on an additional cash payout) to rectify your debt woes might seem like a no-brainer, there are lots of factors to consider to determine which avenue is right for you or if you should go that route at all.
“One size doesn’t fit all,” says Malcolm Hollensteiner, director of retail lending sales at TD Bank. “Utilizing equity to pay down or eliminate higher interest rate consumer debt can be a very beneficial strategy, but it should be done in moderation, accessing some — not all — of your equity,” he says.
Gone are the days when banks allowed homeowners to tap into 125 percent of their home value (thanks to the lessons learned during the real estate market meltdown, which left many people “underwater,” owing more on their home loans than the value of the home). And, you’ll need to have a respectable credit score to qualify. But even with more restrictions in place now than in years past, borrowers still should tread carefully if they’re contemplating borrowing against their home.
“Although the interest rates are much lower on a HELOC or cash-out, the issue becomes that you’re taking your short-term debt and turning it into something you’re going to be paying back for 30 years,” says John Walsh, CEO of Total Mortgage Services.
And then there’s the risk factor. Before you jump on that lower rate, you have to understand that if you cannot keep up with your new payments, you risk going into foreclosure, warns David Reiss, professor of law and research director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School, who also writes the REFinBlog. “In other words, you are getting the lower rate in exchange for putting up your house as collateral for the debt,” he says.
With stakes this high, it’s not as simple as using a HELOC or cash-out refinance as your “get out of debt free” card. Here are the factors you need to consider.
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As you consider your options, think about both the short-term and long-term benefits and costs, says Reiss. “You can’t think of home equity as free money. That’s your retirement, money you may leave to your children or use for an emergency. It’s money that your future self may need,” he says. If you do decide to move forward, make sure you’re using your home equity wisely — paying off your debt would fall into that category, as long as you commit to smart spending habits moving forward.
Take an honest assessment of where you are in life, and think through your ability to pay off the debt in whatever form it may take. “Run some numbers, and talk this through with someone whose financial judgment you trust,” says Reiss. By being honest with yourself and becoming an educated consumer, you can figure out which option makes the most sense for you.
April 29, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- The Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, by W. Scott Frame, Andreas Fuster, Joseph H. Tracy & James I. Vickery, FRB Atlanta Working Paper No. 2015-2.
- Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment, by Sarah Schindler, 124 Yale Law Journal 1934 (2015).
- Assessing Financial Security of Low Income Households in the United States, by Jae Min Lee & KyoungTae Kim, Journal of Poverty, Forthcoming.
April 29, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
April 28, 2015
What Do People Do When Mortgage Payments Drop?
I went to an interesting presentation today on a technical paper, Monetary Policy Pass-Through: Household Consumption and Voluntary Deleveraging. While the paper (by Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani & Rodney Ramcharan) itself is tough for the non-expert, it has some important implications that I discuss below. The abstract reads,
Do households benefit from expansionary monetary policy? We investigate how indebted households’ consumption and saving decisions are affected by anticipated changes in monthly interest payments. We focus on borrowers with adjustable rate mortgages originated between 2005 and 2007 featuring an automatic reset of the interest rate after five years. The monthly payment due from the average borrower falls by 52 percent ($900) upon reset, resulting in an increase in disposable income totaling tens of thousands of dollars over the remaining life of the mortgage. We uncover three patterns. First, the average household increases monthly car purchases by 40 percent ($150) upon reset. Second, this expansionary effect is attenuated by the borrowers’ voluntary deleveraging, as a significant fraction of the increased income is deployed to accelerate debt repayment. Third, the marginal propensity to consume is significantly higher for low income and underwater borrowers. To complement these household-level findings, we employ county-level data to provide evidence that consumption responded more to a reduction in short-term interest rates in counties with a larger fraction of adjustable rate mortgage debt. Our results shed light on the income channel of monetary policy as well as the role of debt rigidity in reducing the effectiveness of monetary policy. (1)
The paper cleverly exploits
the anticipated changes in monthly payments of borrowers with adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) originated between 2005 and 2007, with a fixed interest rate for the first 5 years, which is automatically adjusted at the end of this initial period. These cohorts experience a sudden and substantial drop in the interest rates they pay upon reset, regardless of their financial position or credit worthiness and without refinancing. These cohorts are of particular interest because the interest rate reduction they experienced is sizeable: the ARMs originated in 2005 benefited from an average reduction of 3 percentage points in the reference interest rate in 2010. (3)
I will leave it to individual readers to work through how they designed this research project and move on to its implications:
The magnitude of the positive income shock for these households is large indeed: the monthly payment falls on average by $900 at the moment of the interest rate adjustment. Potentially, this could free up important resources for these indebted and mainly underwater households. We show that households increase their car purchase spending by more than $150 per month, equivalent to a 40 percent increase compared to the period immediately before the adjustment. Their monthly credit card balances also increase substantially, by almost $200 a month within the first year after the adjustment. Moreover, there is not any sign of intertemporal substitution or reversal within two years of the adjustment. . . . However, we also show that households use 15% of their increase in income to repay their debts faster, almost doubling the extent of this effort. (38-39)
There are all sorts of interesting implications that follow from this study, but I am particularly intrigued by its implications for “debt rigidity — the responsiveness of loan contracts to interest rate changes.” (6) While the authors are interested in how debt rigidity can impact monetary policy, I am interested in how it can impact households. There is much in the American housing finance system that keeps households from refinancing — high title insurance charges and other fees, for instance — but we do not often focus on the impact that rigid mortgage contracts have on the broader economy. This paper demonstrates that the effects are not borne by consumers alone. This paper quantifies the effects on the consumer economy to some extent and reveals that they are quite significant. Policy makers should take note of just how significant they can be.
April 28, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- The House recently passed H.R. 4383 which would cap the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and mandate creation of a Small Business Advisory Board, this is essentially a budget cut despite the fact that The CFPB receives its funding as transfers from the Federal Reserve and is not part of the congressional appropriations process.
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced changes to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, DASP will now require a loan servicer to wait 1 year before commencing disclosure proceedings. The changes will also include strict compliance requirements and harsher penalties for non-compliance by servicers.
April 28, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
April 27, 2015
Abusive Non-Rent Fees for Rent Stabilized Tenants
The Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project has issued a report, The Burden of Fees: How Affordable Housing is Made Unaffordable. The introduction reads,
Tenants in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods are under attack. Despite the existence of laws such as rent stabilization to protect tenants from high rents, landlords are creating new ways to push rent stabilized tenants out of their homes. One such tactic is the use of non-rent fees, a confusing and often times unwarranted set of charges that are added to a monthly rent statement . . .. These include fees on appliances (air conditioner, washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher), legal fees, damage fees, Major Capital Improvement (MCI) rent increases and other miscellaneous fees. Often these fees appear on a tenant’s rent bill without any explanation. If a tenant fails to pay, even if they are unaware of why the fee was imposed, they are sent letters that make them feel that they are being harassed and are threatened with eviction by the landlord. Most tenants have a right to object to many of these fees, and landlords are legally prohibited from taking tenants to Housing Court solely for non-payment of additional fees. But many tenants don’t know their rights about the fees and often pay them when they shouldn’t. For low-income and working class tenants who struggle each month to pay rent, these fees add up and make their housing costs unaffordable. While some of the fees are legal, many of them are not, and the consistency and pattern of the way the fees are being charged and collected suggests that some landlords are intentionally increasing tenants’ rent burdens to push out long- term, rent stabilized tenants.
This problem is proliferating in the Bronx, where New Settlement’s Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) works to improve living conditions and maintain affordable housing. This is particularly apparent in buildings owned by Chestnut Holdings, a company that is fast becoming one of the biggest landlords of rent stabilized buildings in the Bronx.
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All survey respondents live in rent stabilized buildings owned by Chestnut Holdings. In total, the coalition collected 172 surveys from 23 buildings, representing 13% of the number of apartments in those buildings. The research sample accounts for 4% of all the apartments that Chestnut Holdings owns, and 28% of the buildings. Researchers also collected rent bills and other supplemental materials (including letters to and from landlords, housing court decisions, and more) from 196 Chestnut Holdings tenants. Coalition members chose to focus on these buildings because they are rent stabilized and located in the neighborhoods where each organization is actively working. Data in this report comes from surveys, recent rent bills collected from Chestnut Holdings’ tenants and interviews with tenants.
Overall, we found that the problem of non-rent fees is serious and widespread in the Bronx. 81% of the tenants we surveyed had been charged some sort of fee. From the rent bills we reviewed for this report, the average tenant had $671.13 in non-rent fees on their most recent rent bill. (1-2)
This document is obviously an advocacy document and not a piece of objective scholarship. Moreover, its methodology may not be rigorous enough to allow us to extrapolate much from its findings. That being said, the survey responses themselves reveal a serious problem: alleged average non-rent fees of nearly $700 for each survey respondent seems very, very high, even if we limit the findings to the respondents themselves.
In the 1970s, predatory landlords hired bruisers with bats and pit bulls to frighten tenants into leaving their homes. In the 2000s, a new generation of predatory landlords used abusive court filings to achieve the same purpose. There is a very real risk that high non-rent fees represent a new tactic for predatory landlords to drive out rent-regulated tenants with under-market rents. To the extent that non-rent fees represent a new tactic to harass tenants, government regulators should actively seek to end it and punish those who employ it.
April 27, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Monday’s Adjudication Roundup
- Quicken Loans Inc. filed a complaint against the Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development claiming that they tried to get Quicken to make false admissions during a settlement. The Government in turn sued Quicken under the False Claims Act for improper underwriting of mortgages and benefitting under the Federal Housing Administration insurance payouts.
- The United States Supreme Court denied cert to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which argued that using contracts rather than grants to fund Section 8 public housing projects would impair the program.
- The Second Circuit Court of Appeals revived suit against Citigroup. The claims, which alleged that Citigroup tricked a Korean bank into taking $25 million in toxic collateralized debt obligations, were dismissed in the New York District Court in March 2013.
- Federal court requires RBS Securities to hand over which specific loans it is going to re-underwrite to National Credit Union Administration after allegedly causing the failure of at least two credit unions by misleading investors over hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities.
- Bank of America asks Second Circuit to vacate a $1.3 billion fine after jury found BofA had defrauded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac using its “High-Speed Swim Lane” program.
April 27, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
