February 2, 2017
Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Roundup
- Kaitlyn Snyder and Rebekah King from the National Housing Conference write about the necessity of including affordable housing in any major infrastructure legislation, as part of a series of blog posts on the connection between housing and infrastructure by the Campaign for Housing and Community Development Funding (CHCDF). According to Snyder and King, providing affordable housing near jobs, similar to roads and bridges, helps connect workers to economic activity and ease congestion on transportation infrastructure.
- In a web seminar titled, How Should We Measure Affordability, Chris Herbert the Managing Director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies discusses the Joint Center’s annual State of the Nation’s Housing Report noted that the number of cost-burdened renters—those paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing—reached a record high of 21.3 million in 2014.
- The largest trade group in the mortgage finance space, the Mortgage Bankers Association, released its initial plans for its recommended approach for secondary mortgage market reform, unveiling the first product from its recently formed “task force,” which is made up of some of the top lenders and insurers in the industry. The paper is a first look at the MBA’s plans for ending the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises, with the full paper anticipated to come in April.
