Tag Archives: white paper

American Bankers on Mortgage Market Reform

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The American Bankers Association has issued a white paper, Mortgage Lending Rules: Sensible Reforms for Banks and Consumers. The white paper contains a lot of common sense suggestions but its lack of sensitivity to consumer concerns greatly undercuts its value. It opens,

The Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System, enumerated in Executive Order 13772, include the following that are particularly relevant to an evaluation of current U.S. rules and regulatory practices affecting residential mortgage finance:

(a) empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace, save for retirement, and build individual wealth;

(c) foster economic growth and vibrant financial markets through more rigorous regulatory impact analysis that addresses systemic risk and market failures, such as moral hazard and information asymmetry; and

(f) make regulation efficient, effective, and appropriately tailored.

The American Bankers Association offers these views to the Secretary of the Treasury in relation to the Directive that he has received under Section 2 of the Executive Order.

 Recent regulatory activity in mortgage lending has severely affected real estate finance. The existing regulatory regime is voluminous, extremely technical, and needlessly prescriptive. The current regulatory regimen is restricting choice, eliminating financial options, and forcing a standardization of products such that community banks are no longer able to meet their communities’ needs.

 ABA recommends a broad review of mortgage rules to refine and simplify their application. This white paper advances a series of specific areas that require immediate modifications to incentivize an expansion of safe lending activities: (i) streamline and clarify disclosure timing and methodologies, (ii) add flexibility to underwriting mandates, and (iii) fix the servicing rules.

 ABA advises that focused attention be devoted to clarifying the liability provisions in mortgage regulations to eliminate uncertainties that endanger participation and innovation in the real estate finance sector. (1, footnote omitted)

Its useful suggestions include streamlining regulations to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens; clarifying legal liabilities that lenders face so that they can act more freely without triggering outsized criminal and civil liability in the ordinary course of business; and creating more safe harbors for products that are not prone to abuse.

But the white paper is written as if the subprime boom and bust of the early 2000s never happened. It pays not much more than lip service to consumer protection regulation, but it seeks to roll it back significantly:

ABA is fully supportive of well-regulated markets where well-crafted rules are effective in protecting consumers against abuse. Banks support clear disclosures and processes to assure that consumers receive clear and comprehensive information that enables them to understand the transaction and make the best decision for their families. ABA does not, therefore, advocate for a wholesale deconstruction of existing consumer protection regulations . . . (4)

If we learned anything from the subprime crisis it is that disclosure is not enough.  That is why the rules.  Could these rules be tweaked? Sure.  Should they be dramatically weakened? No. Until the ABA grapples with the real harm done to consumers during the subprime era, their position on mortgage market reform should be taken as a special interest position paper, not a white paper in the public interest.

Hope for the Securitization Market

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The Structured Finance Industry Group has issued a white paper, Regulatory Reform: Securitization Industry Proposals to Support Growth in the Real Economy. While the paper is a useful summary of the industry’s needs, it would benefit from looking at the issue more broadly. The paper states that

One of the core policy responses to the financial crisis was the adoption of a wide variety of new regulations applicable to the securitization industry, largely in the form of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”). While many post-crisis analysts believe that the crisis laid bare the need for meaningful regulatory reform, SFIG members believe that any such regulation must: ƒ

  • Reduce risk in a manner such that benefits outweigh costs, including operational costs and inefficiencies; ƒ
  • Be coherent and consistent across the various sectors and across similar risk profiles; ƒ
  • Be operationally feasible from both a transactional and a loan origination basis so as not to compromise provision of credit to the real economy; ƒ
  • Be valued by key market participants; and ƒ
  • Be implemented in a targeted way (i.e. without unintended consequences).

In this paper, we will distinguish between the types of regulation we believe to be necessary and productive versus those that are, at the very least, not helpful and, in some cases, harmful. To support this approach, we believe it is helpful to evaluate financial market regulations, specifically those related to securitization, under three distinct categories, those that are:

1. Transactional in nature; i.e., directly impact the securitization market via a focus on underlying deal structures;

2. Banking rules that include securitization reform within their mandate; and

3. Banking rules that simply do not contemplate securitization and, therefore, may result in unintended consequences. (3)

The paper concludes,

The securitization industry serves as a mechanism for allowing institutional investors to deliver funding to the real economy, both to individual consumers of credit and to businesses of all sizes. This segment of credit reduces the real economy’s reliance on the banking system to deliver such funding, thereby reducing systemic risk.

It is important that both issuers of securitization bonds and investors in those bonds align at an appropriate balance in their goals to allow those issuers to maintain a business model that is not unduly penalized for using securitization as a funding tool, while at the same time, ensuring investors have confidence in the market via “skin in the game” and sufficiency of disclosure. (19)

I think the paper is totally right that we should design a regulatory environment that allows for responsible securitization. The paper is, however, silent on the interest of consumers, whose loans make up the collateral of many of the mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities that are at issue in the bond market. The system can’t be designed just to work for issuers and investors, consumers must have a voice too.

Advancing Equitable Transit-Oriented Development

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photo by David Wilson

MZ Strategies has posted a white paper funded by the Ford Foundation, Advancing Equitable Transit-Oriented Development through Community Partnerships and Public Sector Leadership. It opens,

Communities across the country are investing in better transit to connect people of all income levels to regional economic and social opportunity. Transit can be a catalyst for development, and the demand for housing and mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods located near quality transit continues to grow. In some places like Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles (to name just a few) land prices and rents near transit have increased substantially creating concerns with the displacement of small businesses and affordable housing.

In response, multi-sector coalitions are forming in a number of regions to advance Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (eTOD), which aims to create and support communities of opportunity where residents of all incomes, ages, races and ethnicities participate in and benefit from living in connected, healthy, vibrant places connected by transit. These transit-oriented communities of opportunity include a mixture of housing, office, retail and other amenities as part of a walkable neighborhood generally located within a half-mile of quality public transportation. This white paper pulls together emerging eTOD best practices from four regions, and highlights opportunities to use federal finance and development programs administered by US Department of Transportation to create and preserve inclusive communities near transit. It offers lessons learned for other communities and a set of recommendations for the Federal Transit Administration to better support local efforts by transit agencies to advance eTOD.

Achieving eTOD involves an inclusive planning process during the transit planning and community development phases. This entails long-term and active engagement of a diverse set of community partners ranging from local residents, small business owners, community development players, and neighborhood-serving organizations located along the proposed or existing transit corridor, to regional anchor institutions and major employers including universities and health care providers, to philanthropy, local and regional agencies and state government partners.

Equitable outcomes require smart, intentional strategies to ensure wide community engagement. Successful eTOD requires planning not just for transit, but also for how this type of catalytic investment can help to advance larger community needs including affordable housing, workforce and small business development, community health and environmental clean-up. (1, footnote omitted)

The report presents e-TOD case studies from Minneapolis-St. Paul; Los Angeles; Seattle and Denver.  These case studies highlight the types of tools that state and local governments can use to maximize the value of transit-oriented design for broad swathes of the community.

 

What If . . . Fannie and Freddie Imploded?

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photo by US HUD

So, I was spending some quality time with the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of the Inspector General’s most recent Semiannual Report to the Congress. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is the regulator of Fannie and Freddie as well as their conservator. Essentially, the FHFA calls all of the shots for the two companies.

It got me to wondering, does the Office of the Inspector General really have a handle on whether Fannie and Freddie are in good shape or not? The report opens with a Snapshot of OIG Accomplishments. The Snapshot contains the following categories:

  • OIG Investigations Monetary Results
  • Judicial Actions
  • Hotline Contacts
  • Audit and Evaluation Reports Issued
  • White Papers Issued
  • Office of Compliance and Special Projects Reports Issued
  • Nonmonetary Recommendations Made
  • Regulations Reviewed
  • Responses to Requests Under the Freedom of Information Act

As I read through the report, I had the distinct feeling that I had got lost among the trees of bureaucratic oversight and had lost sight of the contours of the Frannie forest.

I want to know one thing — are the two companies solvent and will they be solvent for the foreseeable future? The OIG’s Snapshot is pretty backward facing and focuses on a lot of pretty minor issues, like counting hotline contacts, instead of focusing on the fundamentals.

I know, I know — if we can measure something, then we want to share it with the world, but the Snapshot actually decreases my faith that OIG and FHFA are taking care of the entire forest and not just a few of the trees they were able to measure.

That being said, the report does get  to some of the important issues later on. It acknowledges that

Since September 2008, FHFA has administered two conservatorships of unprecedented scope and undeterminable duration. Under HERA,the Agency’s actions as conservator are not subject to judicial review or intervention, nor are they subject to procedural safeguards that are ordinarily applicable to regulatory activities such as rulemaking. As conservator of the Enterprises, FHFA exercises control over trillions of dollars in assets and billions of dollars in revenue, and makes business and policy decisions that influence and impact the entire mortgage finance industry. For reasons of efficiency, concordant goals with the Enterprises, and operational savings, FHFA has determined to delegate revocable authority for general corporate governance and day-to-day matters to the Enterprises’ boards of directors and executive management. (10)

The OIG clearly understands what is at stake in the conservatorships. But as I read the remainder of the report, I did not see sufficient emphasis on the range of risks that Fannie and Freddie face, such as hedging risk and operational risk. Hopefully, someone at the FHFA is paying sufficient attention to the range of risks the two companies face. If not, we can expect a new type of crisis down the pike.

White-Segregated Subsidized Housing

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The  University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity has issued a report, The Rise of White-Segregated Subsidized Housing. While the report is focused on Minnesota, it raises important issues about affordable housing program demographics throughout the country:

  • To what extent do the populations served by programs match those of their catchment areas?
  • To what extent do the served populations match the eligible populations of their catchment areas?
  • To what extent do the served populations match the demographics of those who have applied for the programs?
  • To what extent do variants among those metrics matter?

The Executive Summary opens,

Subsidized housing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul is segregated, and this segregation takes two forms – one well-known, and the other virtually unknown.

At this point it is widely recognized that most Minneapolis and Saint Paul subsidized housing is concentrated in racially diverse or segregated neighborhoods, with few subsidized or otherwise-affordable units in affluent, predominately white areas. Because subsidized units are very likely to be occupied by families of color, this pattern increases the region’s overall degree of segregation.

But what has been overlooked until today, at least publicly, is that a small but important minority of subsidized projects are located in integrated or even-predominately white areas. Unlike typical subsidized housing, however, the residents of these buildings are primarily white – in many instances, at a higher percentage than even the surrounding neighborhood. These buildings thus reinforce white residential enclaves within the urban landscape, and intensify segregation even further.

What’s more, occupancy is not the only thing distinguishing these buildings from the average subsidized housing project. They are often visually spectacular, offering superior amenities – underground parking, yoga and exercise studios, rooftop clubrooms – and soaring architecture. Very often, these white-segregated subsidized projects are created by converting historic buildings into housing, with the help of federal low-income housing tax credits, historic tax credits, and other sources of public funding. Frequently, these places are designated artist housing, and – using a special exemption obtained from Congress by Minnesota developers in 2008 – screen applicants on the basis of their artistic portfolio or commitment to an artistic craft.

These places cost far more to create than traditional subsidized housing, and include what are likely the most expensive subsidized housing developments in Minnesota history, both in terms of overall cost and per unit cost. These include four prominent historic conversions, all managed by the same Minneapolis-based developer – the Carleton Place Lofts ($430,000 per unit), the Schmidt Artist Lofts ($470,000 per unit), the upcoming Fort Snelling housing conversion ($525,000 per unit), and the A-Mill Artist lofts ($665,000 per unit). The combined development cost of these four projects alone exceeds $460 million. For reference, this is significantly more than the public contribution to most of the region’s sports stadiums; it is $40 million less than the public contribution to the controversial downtown football stadium.

These four buildings contained a total of 870 units of subsidized housing, most of which is either studio apartments or single-bedroom. For the same expense, using 2014 median home prices, approximately 1,590 houses could have been purchased in the affluent western suburb of Minnetonka.

In short, Minneapolis and Saint Paul are currently operating what is, in effect, a dual subsidized housing system. In this system, the majority of units are available in lower-cost, utilitarian developments located in racially segregated or diverse neighborhoods. These units are mostly occupied by families of color. But an important subset of units are located in predominately white neighborhoods, in attractive, expensive buildings. These units, which frequently are subject to special screening requirements, are mostly occupied by white tenants.

As a matter of policy, these buildings are troubling: they capture resources intended for the region’s most disadvantaged, lowest-income families, and repurpose those resources towards the creation of greater segregation – which in turn causes even more harm to those same families.

Legally, they may well run afoul of the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights law. Recent developments have established that the Fair Housing Act forbids public or private entities from discriminating in the provision of housing by taking actions that create a disparate impact on protected classes of people, including racial classes. Moreover, recipients of HUD funding, such as the state and local entities which contribute to the development of these buildings, have an affirmative obligation to reduce segregation and promote integration in housing.  (1-2)

No doubt, this report will spur a lot of soul searching in Minnesota. It may also spur some litigation. Other communities with subsidized housing programs should take a look at themselves in the mirror and ask if they like what they see. They should also ask whether federal judges would like it.

The Silent Housing Crisis

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J. Ronald Terwilliger

J. Ronald Terwilliger

The J. Ronald Terwilliger Foundation for Housing America’s Families, a new entity, has issued its first white paper on the Silent Housing Crisis: A Snapshot of Current and Future Conditions. The paper covers some of the same ground as another recent Urban Institute report that I had recently blogged about (and, indeed, it is informed by the work of those UI researchers, as can be seen in the endnotes), but it raises some interesting issues of its own.

The white paper opens with a quotation from President Truman’s Statement upon signing the Housing Act of 1949, which

establishes as a national objective the achievement as soon as feasible of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family, and sets forth the policies to be followed in advancing toward that goal. These policies are thoroughly consistent with American ideals and traditions. They recognize and preserve local responsibility, and the primary role of private enterprise, in meeting the Nation’s housing needs. But they also recognize clearly the necessity for appropriate Federal aid to supplement the resources of communities and private enterprise. (3)

The white paper argues that the United States

is unprepared for the tremendous challenges that a rapidly expanding renter population will pose to the already strained housing system. Absent a comprehensive and sustained policy response, it is likely that rental cost burdens will only grow in intensity and scope, undermining the stability and dampening the hopes of millions of American families. These conditions, in turn, will exacerbate income inequality, diminish the prospects of social mobility for countless individuals, make us less competitive in the global marketplace, and ultimately hinder America’s economic growth. (6)

While the white paper has a lot to offer in diagnosing problems in the American housing sector, I was surprised to find that it failed to discuss the role of restrictive zoning in increasing the cost of housing, particularly in the vibrant communities that are the main engines of job creation. Any serious effort to address the lack of decent and affordable housing has to tackle the problem of restrictive zoning.

The Terwilliger Foundation was founded in 2014 and “seeks to recalibrate federal housing policy so that it more effectively addresses our nation’s critical affordable housing challenges and meets the housing needs of future generations. The Foundation will offer a set of practical suggestions for tax, spending, and mortgage finance reform that is responsive to the ongoing crisis in housing and the profound demographic changes now transforming America. ” (2) It is good to have another voice in the mix on these important issues. The foundation’s namesake is the Chairman of Terwilliger Pappas Multifamily Properties and is the Chairman Emeritus of Trammell Crow Residential Company, the largest multifamily developer in the U.S. for many years.

Frannie Conservatorships: What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

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The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General has posted a White Paper, FHFA’s Conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: A Long and Complicated Journey. This White Paper on conservatorships updates a first one that OIG published in 2012. This one notes that over the past six years,

FHFA has administered two conservatorships of unprecedented scope and simultaneously served as the regulator for these large, complex companies that dominate the secondary mortgage market and the mortgage securitization sector of the U.S. housing finance industry. Congress granted FHFA sweeping conservatorship authority over the Enterprises. For example, as conservator, FHFA can exercise decision-making authority over the Enterprises’ multi-trillion dollar books of business; it can direct the Enterprises to increase the fees they charge to guarantee mortgage-backed securities; it can mandate changes to the Enterprises’ credit underwriting and servicing standards for single-family and multifamily mortgage products; and it can set policy governing the disposition of the Enterprises’ inventory of approximately 121,000 real estate owned properties. (2)

I was particularly interested by the foreward looking statements contained in this White Paper:

Director Watt has repeatedly asserted that conservatorship “cannot and should not be a permanent state” for the Enterprises. Director Watt has indicated that under his stewardship FHFA will continue the conservatorships and build a bridge to a new housing finance system, whenever that system is put into place by Congress. In this phase of the conservatorships, FHFA seeks to place more decision-making in the hands of the Enterprises. (3)

Those who have been hoping that the FHFA will act decisively in the face of Congressional inaction should let that dream go. And given that just about nobody believes (I still hope though) that there will be Congressional reform of Fannie and Freddie during the remainder of the Obama Administration, we must face the reality that we are stuck with the conservatorships and all of the risks that they foster for the foreseeable future. Today’s risks include historically high rates of mortgage delinquencies and exposure to defaults by counterparties like private mortgage insurers. As I have said before, the risks that Fannie and Freddie are nothing to laugh at. Let’s hope that the FHFA is up to managing them until Congress finally acts.