- Enterprise Community Partners and the National Low Income Housing Coalition and 45 other affordable housing advocates signed a letter to the appropriations committees of the house and senate urging them to pride at least $1.2 billion for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME). a block grant that provides states and localities critical resources to help them respond to affordable housing challenges.
- A recent study by the National Association of Realtors finds that formerly distressed homeowners with restored credit are re-entering the housing market, nearly a million of these former owners have likely already purchased a home again, and an additional 1.5 million are likely to become eligible and purchase over the next five years, representing an additional source of buyer demand for the housing market.
- National Association of Realtors also released it’s March Realtor Confidence Index which finds gains in home sales and prices but noted concern over lender delays and tight inventory, especially for affordable units.
Tag Archives: affordable housing
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- Enterprise Community Partners made comments to the Senate Finance Committee’s Community Development and Infrastructure Tax Reform Working Group, as part of a New Market Tax Credit Coalition, which is calling for preservation of the credit as it has been critical to the development of affordable housing.
- Federal Housing Finance Agency finds, after studying the matter, “no compelling economic reason” to change the guarantee fees charged by Fannie May and Freddie Mac. FHFA’s review focused on reaching an appropriate balance between FHFA’s statutory obligations to: 1) ensure the safety and soundness of the Enterprises, and 2) foster a liquid national housing finance market.
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- Amidst the Walking Dead: Judicial and Nonjudicial Approaches for Eradicating Zombie Mortgages, by Andrea Clark, Emory Law Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3, Forthcoming.
- The Paradox of Judicial Foreclosure: Collateral Value Uncertainty and Mortgage Rates, by David Harrison & Michael Seiler, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2015.
- Debt, Default and Crises: A Historical Perspective, by Antonie Kotze, Financial Chaos Theory; Department of Finance and Investment Management.
- Demographic and Financial Determinants of Housing Choice in Retirement and the Rise of Senior Living, by Calvin Schnure & Shruthi Venkatesh, March 31, 2015.
- The Impact of State Foreclosure and Bankruptcy Laws on Higher-Risk Lending: Evidence from FHA and Subprime Mortgage Originations, by Qianqian Cao & Shimeng Liu, February 19, 2015.
- Zoning and Land Use Planning: How Real is Gentrification, by Michael Lewyn, 43 Real Est. L.J. 344 (Winter 2014).
- Maximizing Inclusionary Zoning’s Contributions to Both Affordable Housing and Residential Integration, by Tim Iglesias, Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 54, No. 4, 2015.
The Future of Fannie and Freddie: The Definitive Panel!
The NYU Journal of Law & Business has published The Future of Fannie and Freddie (also on SSRN):
This is a transcript of a panel discussion titled, “The Future of Fannie and Freddie.” The panelists were Dr. Mark Calabria from the Cato Institute; Professor David Reiss from Brooklyn Law School; Professor Lawrence White from NYU Stern School of Business; Dr. Mark Willis from NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. The panel was moderated by Professor Michael Levine from NYU School of Law. Panelists looked at economic policy and future prospects for Fannie and Freddie. My remarks focused on the goals of housing finance policy.
The actual panel occurred some time ago, but it remains current given the limbo in which housing finance reform finds itself.
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- The Role of Prepayment Penalties in Mortgage Loans, by Andrea Beltratti, Matteo Benetton & Alessandro Gavazza, CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP10504.
- Inclusion by Design, Thinking Beyond a Civil Rights Paradigm, by Robin Paul Malloy, Land Use Law and Disability: Planning and Zoning for Accessible Communities, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Cancer Diagnoses and Household Debt Overhang, by Arpit Gupta, Edward R. Morrison, Catherine Fedorenko & Scott D. Ramsey, Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 514.
- Zoning and Land Use Planning: How Real is Gentrification, by Michael Lewyn, 43 Real Est. L.J. 344 (Winter 2014).
- Maximizing Inclusionary Zoning’s Contributions to Both Affordable Housing and Residential Integration, by Tim Iglesias, Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 54, No. 4, 2015.
- Securitization and Mortgage Default, by Ronel Elul, FRB of Philadelphia Working Paper No. 15-15.
- The Effect of Large Investors on Asset Quality: Evidence from Subprime Mortgage Securities, by Manuel Adelino, W. Scott Frame, & Kristopher Gerardi, FRB Atlanta Working Paper No. 2014-4.
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development Recently Released an Evaluation of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) which finds that NSP was too modestly funded to consistently arrest the declines in property values or achieve the impacts that were hoped for.
Housing and Transportation Affordability Index
The Center for Neighborhood Technology has a Housing and Transportation Affordability Index which
provides a more comprehensive way of thinking about the true affordability of place. It presents housing and transportation data as maps, charts and statistics for 917 metropolitan and micropolitan areas—covering 94% of the US population. Costs can be seen from the regional down to the neighborhood level.
The recent focus on combined housing and transportation costs is very useful when planning affordable housing policies as total housing and transportation costs provide a better guide to housing cost burden than housing costs alone.
The Housing and Transportation Affordability Index
shows that transportation costs vary between and within regions depending on neighborhood characteristics:
- People who live in location-efficient neighborhoods—compact, mixed-use, and with convenient access to jobs, services, transit and amenities—tend to have lower transportation costs.
- People who live in location-inefficient places—less dense areas that require automobiles for most trips—are more likely to have higher transportation costs.
The traditional measure of affordability recommends that housing cost no more than 30% of household income. Under this view, a little over half (55%) of US neighborhoods are considered “affordable” for the typical household. However, that benchmark fails to take into account transportation costs, which are typically a household’s second-largest expenditure. The H+T Index offers an expanded view of affordability, one that combines housing and transportation costs and sets the benchmark at no more than 45% of household income.
When transportation costs are factored into the equation, the number of affordable neighborhoods drops to 26%, resulting in a net loss of 59,768 neighborhoods that Americans can truly afford. The key finding from the H+T Index is that household transportation costs are highly correlated with urban environment characteristics, when controlling for household characteristics.
A lot of housing policy rests on the definition of affordability, whether it is that housing cost should be no more than 30% of household income or that housing and transportation costs should be no more than 45% of household income. It would be useful for researchers to take a fresh look at those benchmarks to ensure that they make sense in today’s economy.
