March 12, 2015
Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Round-Up
- National Affordable Housing Coalition Releases it’s 2015 Advocates Guide an Educational Primer on Federal Resources Related to Affordable Housing and Community Development; and its March Housing Spotlight Issue entitled: Affordable Housing is Nowhere to be Found for Millions
- National Association Of Realtors released: The Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends Report finding that Millennials represent the largest share of new home buyers
March 12, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
March 11, 2015
Housing Affordability Across The Globe
The 11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2015 has been released. The survey provides ratings for metropolitan markets in Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. There are some interesting global trends:
March 11, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- Countercyclical Regulation and Its Challenges, by Patricia A. McCoy, Boston College Law School Legal Research Paper No. 351.
- Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Developments and Neighborhood Property Conditions, Kelly D. Edmiston, February 20, 2015.
- First Principles for Regulating the Sharing Economy, by Stephen R. Miller, February 20, 2015 (focusing on the short-term rental market, for instance, Airbnb).
- The Future of Foreclosure Law in the Wake of the Great Housing Crisis of 2007-2014, by Judith L. Fox, Washburn Law Journal, 2015, Forthcoming.
- Regional Redistribution Through the U.S. Mortgage Market, by Erik Hurst, Benjamin J. Keys, Amit Seru, & Joseph Vavra, February 25, 2015.
March 11, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
March 10, 2015
Countercyclical Regulation of Housing Finance
Pat McCoy has posted Countercyclical Regulation and Its Challenges to SSRN. The abstract reads,
Following the 2008 financial crisis, countercyclical regulation emerged as one of the most promising breakthroughs in years to halting destructive cycles of booms and busts. This new approach to systemic risk posits that financial regulation should clamp down during economic expansions and ease during economic slumps in order to make financial firms more resilient and to prick asset bubbles before they burst. If countercyclical regulation is to succeed, however, then policymakers must confront the institutional and legal challenges to that success. This Article examines five major challenges to robust countercyclical regulation – data gaps, early response systems, regulatory inertia, industry capture, and arbitrage – and discusses a variety of techniques to defuse those challenges.
Readers of this blog will be particularly interested in the section titled “Sectoral Regulatory Tools.” (34 et seq.) This section gives an overview of countercyclical tools that can be employed in the housing finance sector: loan-to value limits; debt-to-income limits; and ability-to-repay rules. McCoy ends this section by noting,
The importance of the ability-to-repay rule and the CFPB’s exclusive role in promulgating that rule has another, very different ramification. It is a mistake to ignore the role of market conduct supervisors such as the CFPB in countercyclical regulation. The centrality of consumer financial protection in ensuring sensible loan underwriting standards – particularly for home mortgages – underscores the vital role that market conduct regulators such as the CFPB will play in the federal government’s efforts to prevent future, catastrophic real estate bubbles. (44)
While this seems like an obvious point to me — sensible consumer protection acts as a brake on financial speculation — many, many academics who study financial regulation disagree. If this article gets some of those academics to reconsider their position, it will make a real contribution to the post-crisis financial literature.
March 10, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- House Introduced this Bill, H.R. 1266, to Create Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Commission
March 10, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
March 9, 2015
How Housing Matters
The Urban Law Institute, with support from the MacArthur Foundation, has launched a web portal devoted to housing, How Housing Matters. According to the website,
the Foundation selected the Urban Land Institute Terwilliger Center for Housing to create and curate a new online portal that would serve as the central source for the growing body of research on how housing matters to other pivotal drivers of individual and community success.
Through this portal and wide-ranging research, publications, convenings, awards, and technical assistance, the ULI Terwilliger Center facilitates the provision of a full spectrum of housing opportunities—including affordable and workforce housing—in communities across the country.
The How Housing Matters site is both a clearinghouse for crosscutting research and a platform for engaging practitioners, policymakers, and researchers across a range of fields. The resources on the site offer practical tools for those committed to using evidence and an interdisciplinary approach to create higher-quality housing.
Through How Housing Matters, the Foundation and the Institute hope to encourage practice and policy innovations that facilitate collaboration among leaders and policymakers in housing, education, health and economic development. The ultimate goal is to better and more cost-effectively help families lead healthy, successful lives.
I am not sure that I like how the website is organized — I don’t find it very intuitive — but I am sure that it will be populated with a lot of important research.
March 9, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
