The Administration’s Short-Sale Program
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on March 8, 2010
The New York Times is reporting a new tack taken by the Obama administration to address the foreclosure crisis, this time acknowledging that some homeowners need to simply get out of their mortgage by way of a short sale, where a property is sold for less than the mortgage balance.
This new maneuver comes just a week after President Obama headed to Nevada to promote the $1.5 billion, Help for the Hardest Hit Housing Markets program that hones in on five states hit hardest by the housing bustNevada, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, and Californiaand works with state and local housing finance agencies to increase their capacity in addressing areas that have seen a 20 percent drop in home prices since their peak.
But with this short-sale initiative, the administration is taken arguably its most aggressive step in trying to address the housing crisis—a crisis where solutions have been elusive to say the least.
The Times reports that under the short-sale program,
“the servicing bank, as with all modifications, will get $1,000. Another $1,000 can go toward a second loan, if there is one. And for the first time the government would give money to the distressed homeowners themselves. They will get $1,500 in relocation assistance.”
Ideally, the program will allow the servicers to get more money than they would with a foreclosure, and for the borrower, the ability to short-sale could limit credit damage than damage incurred when defaulting on a loan. The Times also notes that it could also benefit communities, limiting the number of vacant properties in line to be sold by banks.
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Redefining Detroit
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on March 4, 2010
A Detroit-based community development trade association, The Community Development Advocates of Detroit, has released a report that, among other proposals, suggests that certain residential areas be transformed into “green venture zones,” “naturescapes,” and “green thoroughfares,” in addition to commercial hubs, and traditional residential sectors.
The report, Neighborhood Revitalization Strategic Framework comprises a number of neighborhood revitalization recommendations and “is the work of a unique, multi-sector collaborative representing over 85 community development organizations, government, funding institutions, businesses, educational institutions, and city-wide and regional nonprofit organizations,” according to a CDAD press release
With more than 30 percent of the city’s 139 square miles vacant, the idea of handling what are not only long-term, but permanent changes to Detroit’s physical and socioeconomic makeup, has long been on the radar of city government, CBOs, and local planners. Early last year, Dan Pitera, a Dan Pitera, a professor of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy, assembled a map that illustrates how to fit the land mass of Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston and their combined populations into Detroit—roughly 3 million people.
According to Tim Thorland, chairman of the CDAD board:
“It is only when we understand the conditions and strategies necessary for the entire city, that we can begin to make decisions about specific neighborhoods. Furthermore, we cant simply ignore areas of the City without understanding what their new purpose might be. We must determine what entity should own and manage that land. Otherwise crime, environmental dumping and other negative factors will surely result.”
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Making Home (Really) Affordable
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on March 1, 2010
As President Obama last week headed west to Nevada to promote a $1.5 billion program that would hone in on five states—Nevada, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, and California—hit hardest by the housing bust, concerns for a real overhaul of the Treasury’s Making Home Affordable, in light of the program’s disappointing first year in creating permanent mortgage modifications, are being voiced anew.
The New York Times published a cogent editorial today praising the administration’s efforts to work with state housing agencies to develop programs that address problems in hard-hit housing markets, but argued that this latest step should be taken to scale nationwide, rather than in targeted markets. Moreover, it addressed the ever-allusive mortgage modification by way of principal reduction—a plan of action long advocated by housing policy experts like Barry Zigas, who has written that “principal modifications are emerging as the key variable in creating lasting, stable mortgage modifications.”
This tack has been resisted by the administration, even though mortgage modification by reducing interest rates resulting in monthly payment reductions doesn’t really fly with folks who are unemployed or underwater. The Times editorial states:
Unemployed homeowners often cannot make even reduced payments and underwater borrowers need principal reductions to succeed over the long run, not lower rates.
Of course it’s the banks, and subsequently the administration, that have resisted principal reduction, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out, and how long the administration takes this course of action.
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Housing, Transportation, and Workforce Development: A Coordinated Attack
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on February 26, 2010
The Center for Housing Policy and the Metropolitan Planning Council released a pair of policy briefs this week that promote improved coordination as related to housing, transportation, and workforce policies.
The briefs represent the work done in a series of “listening sessions” in Atlanta and Minneapolis-St. Paul in spring 2009 “to explore regional perspectives on the coordination of housing, transportation and workforce policies,” according to NHC’s Open House blog.
While the foreclosure crisis has dominated the attention of housing policy practitioners and policymakers during much of 2008 and 2009, these briefs look to the future to address other current and looming housing challenges that are critical to the long-term success and sustainability of many communities nationwide.
The first brief, How Transportation Reform Could Increase the Availability of Housing Affordable to Families with a Mix of Incomes Near Public Transit, Job Centers, and Other Essential Destinations looks at how the reauthorization of the federal transportation bill help to improve coordination of transportation, housing, and land use policy. The second brief, Regional Coordination in Atlanta Metro and in the Twin Cities: Understanding the Challenges and Opportunities of Coordinating Housing, Transportation and Workforce Policies looks at existing coordinated efforts related to land-use, transportation, and workforce policy.
Shelterforce, in its fall/winter 2009 issue, took a look at Twin Cities collaborations and how government, CBOs, foundations, and CDCs are making a combined effort to address neighborhood stabilization.
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Rivlin, SEIU’s Stern, Picked for Debt Commission
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on February 26, 2010
President Obama announced today that it had chosen SEIU’s Stern to serve on his deficit commission, formally dubbed the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.” Stern, will serve on the 18-member commission that also includes Alice Rivlin, the former Federal Reserve Vice Chair and senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, Honeywell International Inc. Chief Executive David Cote, and former Young & Rubicam Chief Executive Ann Fudge.
The commission “will make recommendations to Congress by December 1, 2010 to put the budget in primary balance so that all operations and programs for the federal government are paid for (achieving deficits of about 3 percent of GDP) by 2015 and to meaningfully improve the long-term fiscal outlook,” according to a White House statement.
The move to appoint Stern came something as a surprise, considering SEIU’s initial opposition to the debt commission when it was being considered in the Senate, but the labor leader has been involved at a number of White House summit meetings. His appointment has also sparked the expected response from conservative groups.
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Greening Indy’s Redevelopment District
Posted by Kaid Benfield on February 15, 2010
About two miles from downtown Indianapolis is the city’s designated smart growth revitalization district, a distressed area with many vacant properties, including a largely abandoned industrial corridor along a rail line, but also good bones for renewal including a resilient population, a good street grid, some stable residential blocks, and prospects for a new, state-of-the-art transit line in the old rail corridor. I spent a few days there last fall as part of an AIA advisory team. Ive been running a series on the neighborhood in my NRDC blog, summarizing what we saw and heard while there.
In my most recent post, I offer some thoughts on what strategies might give redevelopment there the best chance of success as a smart, green model project.
Achieving a path of sustainability in the district will be a challenge, and not just because of issues within the neighborhood. For example, Indianapolis as a whole is extraordinarily automobile-dependent: Of the nations 60 largest cities, it ranks 6th in the portion of its commuters who drive alone to work. In addition, disinvestment is a well-established pattern in Indiana: the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy found that an astonishing 94 percent of development in the state has been taking place on greenfields, outside of existing areas. (By comparison, in Oregon the portion is 52 percent; in Colorado, 62 percent.)
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Cooper Village & Stuyvesant Town: Can’t Quite Walk Away
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on February 12, 2010
When Tishman Speyer Properities and Blackrock announced a few weeks back that they would default on their $3 billion mortgage loan, it looked as though the principal owners of New York City’s sprawling, 11,000-unit Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town would follow the national trend of simply walking away from their mortgage, ceding their loan to creditors.
But walking away is apparently harder than they had anticipated. Reports surfaced yesterday that the owners had to pay roughly $90 million in back taxes before giving control over to lenders. According to Bloomberg News:
Even in foreclosure, any property transfer in Manhattan requires payment of city and state taxes, and Tishman is negotiating with CWCapital, the special servicer for the senior debt, over who must pay them.
Bloomberg quoted Rafael Cestero, New York Citys commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development:
“The reality is they cant just turn back the keys.”
Tishman and Blackrock purchased the complexes, spread out over 80 acres of Manhattan’s East side and originally built in the 1940s as affordable housing for returning veterans, in 2005 for $5.4 billion—the largest residential real estate transaction in history. The sale sparked an immediate reaction from tenants and advocates, amid owners’ plans to raise rents, “evict illegal occupants and upgrade with amenities including a gym, concierge service and new gardens,” according to Bloomberg, in what was viewed as a threat to some of the last affordable, market-rate housing in Manhattan.
Those efforts, however, were put to rest after tenants won a court challenge claiming that Tishmanhad wrongfully raised rents and deregulated apartments after receiving special tax breaks.
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Despite Missing Out On NSP2, There’s Still Much Work To Do in Chicago Suburbs
Posted by Kari Lydersen on February 7, 2010
Civic leaders and planners in the south and west Chicago suburbs were disappointed to learn that the regional collaborative proposals submitted by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) supporting their work and featured in the current issue of Shelterforce were not among the winners of the second round of Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP2) grants announced by HUD on January 14.
But they have little time to despair because in November 2009 the Collaboratives were awarded NSP 1 funding of about $12 million through Cook County. They had hoped their joint efforts would receive a second infusion of resources to help further the idea of combining forces rather than competing to push holistic, transit-oriented development and economic stimulus in neighboring but often socially disjointed communities.
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Modifying the Modification Program (HAMP)
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on February 1, 2010
The administration last week announced changes to its Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) after falling short of its goals of staving off foreclosures by way of mortgage modifications, with some saying the program has actually hurt the economic recovery because it only prolongs, in some cases, the inevitable foreclosure
That being said, the changes are largely good, and can better turn temporary loan modifications into permanents ones through better documentation and guidance. Though the one thing that most housing experts agree on is missing: principal reduction.
As of the end of 2009, roughly 110,000 loans had been permanently modified (and 900,000 trial modifications) since the $75 billion program went into effect in spring 2009, a number that was likely boosted late in the year by the administration’s requirement to place trial modifications in temporary review period “to ensure that all borrowers are being fairly evaluated for the program.” During that review period, banks were not allowed cancel HAMP modifications “for any reason other than failure to meet the HAMP property eligibility requirements.” Up until December, the number of permanent modifications had hovered at a significantly lower level—under 50,000.
But the one thing that banks had been hesitant to do is still not in the picture. Principal reduction, according to Barry Zigas, a Shelterforce contributor and director of housing policy for the Consumer Federation of America, “principal modifications are emerging as the key variable in creating lasting, stable mortgage modifications.”
The changes could, however, lead to good news for homeowners and for HAMP, Zigas writes, simply by getting rid of the some of the red tape during the process, and conducting various verification procedures at the outset, rather than while a homeowner is under trial modification:
“The loan mod program has been plagued by long start up times, confusion and lost paperwork as lenders try to scale up parallel underwriting practices in their servicing shops. One contributor to these delays have been documentation requirements that were adopted to prevent fraud, but seem to have been more effective in preventing legitimate modifications. Streamlining of required documents and quicker acceptance of initial qualifying material would be a big help in reducing the paper chase that has frustrated so many borrowers.”
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The Risk In The System Starts to Come Home
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on January 27, 2010
Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor who chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel that watches over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has never been known to mince words, and she’s not starting now. In the past few days by way of a handful of interviews and, most recently, an appearance on The Daily Show, she’s advocated aggressively for the passage of a Congressional Financial Protection Agency as a fundamental element of regulatory reform.
Moreover, it can’t be compromised for a variety of interests, namely those of insiders, she told The Huffington Post.
“We just can’t pass a regulatory reform bill that acquiesces to the industry on every front and where everything is so watered down that nobody has to take a hard vote.”
She’s not alone, of course. In the current issue of Shelterforce, John Taylor, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, advocated for the passage of a CFPA, and take “CRA and all of the existing fair lending and consumer protections away from the bank regulatory agencies and instead establish a consumer-focused agency to enforce these laws.”
But Taylor argues that HR 3126, the bill that was to create CFPA, was “significantly weaker than the one offered by President Obama,” most notably for the exclusion of CRA, leaving the oversight of the Community Reinvestment Act to the “same regulators who had failed to enforce it for so many years.” Though Taylor pointed to the Senate version of the CFPA bill, as part of a broader bank reform bill, that restored the amendments lost in the House Financial Services Committee. That language, which is “virtually identical to that offered by President Obama,” had led to a widespread mobilization effort across the country among community groups to support the initiative. That bill is now part of the larger regulatory reform bill, “HR 4173, or, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Warren, in her appearance on the Daily Show, displayed a fair level of urgency when it came to constituents calling their elected officials to encourage them to back this bill:
“This really is the moment, the chips are all on the table. we’re going to write what the American economy looks like for 50 years going forward, and right now, the CEOs have any real change bottled up in the Senate.
“If you have never written a senator before, now is the time.
“This is America’s middle class; we’ve hacked at it, and chipped at it, and pulled on it for 30 years now. And now, there’s no more to do: either we fix this problem going forward, or the game really is over.”
Watch a very informative and entertaining eight minutes here:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Elizabeth Warren | ||||
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National Housing Institute
