Tag Archives: HUD
Who Benefits from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit?
HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research has released a report, Understanding Whom the LIHTC Program Serves: Tenants in LIHTC Units as of December 31, 2012. By way of background,
The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Program provides tax credits to developers of affordable rental housing. The tax credits are provided during the first 10 years of a minimum 30-year compliance period during which rent and income restrictions apply. The LIHTC Program, although established in the U.S. Internal Revenue Code (IRC), is structured such that state-allocating agencies administer most aspects of the program, including income and rent compliance, with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) providing oversight and guidance. Local administration allows states to address affordable housing needs specific to their populations. (1)
Here are some findings of note:
- Approximately three-fourths of reported households include disability status for at least one household member.
- 36.4 percent of reported LIHTC households had a least one member under 18 years old.
- Nearly 33 percent of reported LIHTC households have an elderly member, and 28.6 percent of reported LIHTC households have a head of household at least 62 years old.
- The overall median annual income of households living in LIHTC units was $17,066, ranging from $8,769 in Kentucky to $22,241 in Florida. By comparison, the median income of HUD-assisted tenants was $10,272 in 2012.
- Approximately 60 percent of reported households nationwide had incomes below $20,000.
- The study found that approximately 39 percent of all LIHTC households paid more than 30 percent of their income for rent, thus making them housing cost burdened. Ten percent of all LIHTC households faced a severe housing cost burden, paying more than 50 percent of their income towards rent.
- In 23 states, HUD was able to collect some data on the use of rental assistance in LIHTC units, which can eliminate cost burden for households who have it. Approximately half of reported households receive some form of rental assistance, with the greatest use in Vermont (64 percent) and least use in Nevada (23 percent).
The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 requires that this information be collected on an ongoing basis. It should be of great value as policymakers formulate federal housing policy for low-income households going forward.
S&P’s Upbeat Outlook on Mortgage Market
S&P posted U.S. RMBS Roundtable: Mortgage Origination And Securitization In The Post-Qualified Mortgage/Ability-To-Repay Market. The roundtable discussion offers views on many aspects of the 2015 mortgage market, but I found this passage to be particularly interesting:
Originators agreed loans that fall outside of the safe harbor by virtue of interest-only (IO) features have been and will continue to be attractive non-QM lending products. These loans have been originated post-crisis, and originators expect to continue lending to high-quality borrowers with substantial equity in their properties. There was general consensus that IO loans should not have been automatically excluded from QM treatment.
However, large bank depository lenders have shown a desire to originate and hold larger balance IO loans on their balance sheets rather than including them in securitizations. One participant from a major depository institution indicated that, given the increasing IO concentration on those institutions’ balance sheets, there may be a desire to securitize these loans upon meeting balance sheet thresholds. (1)
After Dodd-Frank, there was a lot of concern that the Qualified Mortgage and Ability-to-Repay rules would shut down the mortgage markets. It seems pretty clear to me that lenders are figuring out how to navigate both the plain-vanilla world of the Qualified Mortgage and the exotic world of the non-Qualified Mortgage, with its interest-only and other non-prime products. Lenders are still figuring out how far afield they can roam from a plain-vanilla product, but that is to be expected during a major transition such as the one from the pre- to the post-Dodd-Frank world.
Reiss on Fair Housing Falsehood
The Providence (R.I.) Journal quoted me in its Truth-O-Meter column: Mike Stenhouse: According to HUD, It’s Unfair, Unjust for Wealthy to Live in Exclusive Neighborhoods. The column reads, in part,
For more than three years, the Rhode Island Division of Planning has been working on RhodeMap RI, a long-term economic development plan meant to help guide efforts to improve the state’s economy.
The process, partly financed by a $1.9-million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), didn’t get much notice until a nearly 200-page draft of the plan was released in mid-September, igniting a firestorm of controversy.
Critics of the plan denounced it as a thinly disguised blueprint for social engineering. If it is implemented, they say, local communities will be forced to cede authority to the federal government on issues such as affordable housing and land use, and individual property rights will be under threat.
Supporters, including Governor Chafee and the planners and community leaders who drafted the plan, say it’s a well crafted, comprehensive guide that will help move the state’s economy forward over the decades ahead. They say there’s nothing in the plan that would infringe on individual property rights or local home rule.
The debate grew so heated at one meeting a shouting match broke out, with charges of racism and bigotry hurled. And last week, at a meeting of the Statewide Planning Council, opponents called it unconstitutional, socialist and even treasonous. Nonetheless, the council voted unanimously to adopt it.
Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a conservative research group, has led the opposition. A few weeks ago, he talked about the plan on WPRO-AM’s “The Dan Yorke Show.”
Yorke asked Stenhouse to cite a component of the plan “that highlights what you think is problematic.”
“I’m going to give you my interpretation,” Stenhouse responded. “I don’t have their plan in front of me. What we believe, for instance, take Poppasquash Point in Bristol. According to HUD, it is patently unfair and socially unjust that wealthy people can live in an exclusive neighborhood.”
We wondered whether Stenhouse was right about HUD’s view of wealthy neighborhoods such as Poppasquash Point, one of the state’s priciest enclaves.
When we asked Stenhouse about his statement, he told us he was not directly quoting HUD, but said that his statement was “an accurate interpretation of HUD’s openly stated intent.” He provided links to multiple documents to support his position.
While we don’t view Stenhouse’s statement as a direct quote of HUD policy, we do believe that listeners who heard Stenhouse’s preface — “according to HUD” — would assume he was summarizing HUD’s policy.
Stenhouse’s backup is comprised primarily of links to a news story and an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily and links to various legal documents and HUD regulations.
* * *
According to David Reiss, a professor of real estate and housing policy at Brooklyn Law School, “HUD does not interpret the FHA [Fair Housing Act] to mean that `wealthy people’ can’t `live in an exclusive neighborhood.’”
“An exclusive neighborhood is an expensive one – the FHA does not ban expensive neighborhoods.” Reiss continued in an email statement. “What it does do is ban exclusionary practices. Exclusionary practices are those that exclude people based on certain of their characteristics such as their race, sex or religion. To my knowledge, HUD has never taken the position that merely living in an exclusive – that is, expensive — neighborhood violates the FHA.”
We also asked HUD whether Stenhouse had accurately characterized its rules.
“There are simply no policies, practices, regulations or anything that can validate such hyper hyperbole,” Brian Sullivan, a public affairs officer with HUD, said in an email statement.
Our ruling
Mike Stenhouse said “According to HUD, it is patently unfair and socially unjust that wealthy people can live in an exclusive neighborhood.”
There’s no doubt that HUD has challenged what it considers to be discriminatory practices at the community level, including exclusionary zoning ordinances.
But that’s not nearly the same as objecting to the right of wealthy people to live in expensive neighborhoods.
We rule Stenhouse’s claim False.
Reiss on GSE Privatization
GlobeSt.com quoted me in Waiting to Say Goodbye to the GSEs. It reads in part,
US HUD Secretary Julian Castro added another “to do” item to the lame duck Congress’ list of things they should get done before they adjourn on Dec. 11: pass the bipartisan Johnson-Crapo Senate bill introduced earlier this year that would wind down the GSEs.
“This could be, I believe, a good victory in the lame duck session or next term of Congress for housing finance reform,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television earlier this week. The crux of the plan – doing away with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, creating a backstop for these loans and removing tax payer risk – are all supported by the Obama Administration, he said.
“Housing finance reform will continue to be a priority for the Obama Administration,” Castro said.
The multifamily finance industry has been expecting GSE reform for years now; certainly there have been calls for their dismantlement when they were placed in conservatorship in 2008 during the depth of the financial crisis. Many in the industry, in fact, would welcome their sunset, in the expectation that the private sector could fully and more efficiently and more cheaply provide the same level of funding.
That is not the unanimous sentiment though. In fact, opinions about the subject in commercial real estate range, widely, across the board from “it is about time” to “the politics are too strident for it to happen” to “maybe it will happen but it is difficult to believe the GSEs could entirely be replaced by the private sector.”
* * *
David Reiss, a professor of Law and Research Director, Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE) at Brooklyn Law School, has been calling for the privatization of Fannie and Freddie for some time and is dismissive of the “Chicken Little claims” that the sector will collapse if the government reduces its footprint in multifamily and single-family housing finance.
“With a carefully planned transition, it is eminently reasonable to believe that we can put private capital in a first loss position for multifamily housing so long as the government retains a role in subsidizing affordable housing and acting as a lender of last resort when necessary,” he tells GlobeSt.com.
FHA’s Financial Health Looking Up
HUD has released the Annual Report to Congress Regarding the Financial Status of the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund Fiscal Year 2014. It appears that things are looking up for the FHA, particularly after last year’s mandatory appropriation from the Treasury, the first in the FHA’s 80 year history. For those of you who are not housing finance nerds, the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund (MMIF) is the financial backbone of the FHA’s single-family mortgage insurance program. When it is in bad shape, the FHA is in bad shape.
As Secretary Castro notes in his forward to the report,
The value of the Fund has improved significantly, now standing at $4.8 billion. The increased economic value represents a capital reserve ratio of 0.41. This improvement shows tremendous progress, especially considering that the Fund had a negative value of $16.3 billion just two years ago. The two-year gain in Fund value is an impressive $21 billion. The performance of the portfolio has improved dramatically in a short period of time. Foreclosures are down 68 percent since the height of the crisis and recoveries to the Fund have improved 68 percent from their lowest level–saving billions of dollars. While FHA must still respond to challenges presented by legacy books and market volatility, the independent actuary’s report demonstrates that FHA is firmly on the right track and is projected to continue improving. (1)
The MMIF is supposed to have a capital reserve ratio of 2 percent, so the FHA is still quite a bit away from receiving a clean bill of health. But according to projections, it should achieve that level in 2016 and then continue to improve from there. (35, Ex. II-3)
While this is all pretty abstract, there are some pretty concrete aspects to the health of the MMIF. The size of FHA premiums, paid by homeowners borrowing FHA-insured mortgages, is set in the context of the health of the MMIF because the FHA is a self-funded government agency. So low reserves means that it is harder to cut premiums. Higher FHA premiums mean that mortgages are more expensive for the low- and moderate income borrowers who make up a large part of the FHA’s book of business. So the health of the MMIF is an indicator of sorts of the health of the housing market overall.
Homeless in America
The Department of Housing Urban Development released Part 1 of The 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress. Part 1 provides Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness. Its key findings include,
- In January 2014, 578,424 people were homeless on a given night. Most (69 percent) were staying in residential programs for homeless people, and the rest (31 percent) were found in unsheltered locations.
- Nearly one-quarter of all homeless people were children under the age of 18 (23 percent or 135,701). Ten percent (or 58,601) were between the ages of 18 and 24, and 66 percent (or 384,122) were 25 years or older.
- Homelessness declined by 2 percent (or 13,344 people) between 2013 and 2014 and by 11 percent (or 72,718) since 2007. (1)
The report notes that in “2010, the Administration released Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, a comprehensive plan to prevent and end homelessness in America.” (3) The plan had four goals:
- Finish the job of ending chronic homelessness in 2015
- Prevent and end homelessness among Veterans by 2015
- Prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children by 2020
- Set a path to ending all types of homelessness (3)
HUD claims success on all four fronts:
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The number of individuals experiencing chronic homelessness declined by 21 percent, or 22,892 people, between 2010 and 2014.
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The number of homeless veterans declined by 33 percent (or 24,837 people) since 2010, and most of the decline was in the number of veterans staying in unsheltered locations.
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Since 2010 the number of homeless people in families has declined by 11 percent (or 25,690 people).
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Overall, homelessness has declined by more than 62,000 people since 2010 (62,042), a 10 percent reduction since the release of Opening Doors. (3)
In many ways, the success of American housing policy comes down to the question — can all Americans have a safe and affordable place to call home? The Administration answers this question in the affirmative. And this report appears to demonstrate that the Administration’s plan to end homelessness is working.
While I am skeptical of claims that we have finally figured out how to systematically address homelessness, I am happy to see that it is trending downward over the last few years. This report was authored by some serious people, including Dr. Dennis Culhane of the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans at the University of Pennsylvania, so there is reason to trust these numbers. One can hope that this trend continues, but given the financial insecurity so many households face, I am worried that it will not.
