June 2010

  • Walkability Dictates Severity of Housing Decline

    Here’s an interested graphic from Calculated Risk that reflects the recently released Case-Schiller Home Price Index. The chart indicates that those areas with more central, walkable downtowns have held up better in terms of property value loss than others, or,…

  • HAMP Takes a Licking

    All we can say is “ouch.” Dow Jones reports that Thursday’s hearings held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee designed to assess HAMP’s progress resulted in what amounted to a criticism of the changing rules and bureaucratic hurdles…

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    NHI’s John Atlas to Discuss New ACORN Book

    John Atlas, a founder of the National Housing Institute and Shelterforce, will appear today in the 1 p.m. hour (eastern) on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show to discuss his new book, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial…

  • Banks Cleaning up Their Mess to Count as CRA Credit?

    Financial regulators proposed yesterday to allow all activities carried out under the auspices of NSP to count toward a lender’s CRA compliance. This would only last as long as NSP is in effect. So, for example, donating foreclosed properties in…

  • Some Relief in the Gulf for Homeowners

    Housing Wire reported this morning that mortgage giant Fannie Mae has authorized its servicers to reduce mortgage payments or suspend payments altogether for those homeowners affected by the BP oil spill, either by lost wages or damages to property. According…

  • The Case For Rentals Over Homeownership

    Richard Florida, chronicler of societal trends and Twitter addict (follow him at your peril), believes that there is a strong case to be made that America should shift somewhat away from homeownership and toward more rentals, perhaps achieving a 50-50 balance between the two. In the video below, he points out that homeownership has been massively subsidized, to the extent that we now have an eight-year surplus of housing on the market for sale to owner-occupants. He believes that we need to ‘reinvent rental’ into a more robust and flexible system. As I pointed out at my blog, I’m not entirely sure I agree with the premise, by the way. True, homeownership is subsidized, but in my experience owner-occupiers are frequently willing to invest in a property beyond what landlords do, to the benefit of neighborhood and place. The subsidy may, in fact, be in the public interest. Moreover, while many cite the mortgage interest deduction as a cause of sprawl, that deduction is just as available to those who buy in cities and walkable suburbs. (It is also worth pointing out that those who invest in rental properties have the benefit of a range of business deductions and subsidies not available to ordinary homeowners.) But RF’s point of view is interesting nonetheless. Check it out: more

  • Does Public Housing Have a Future?

    Everybody hates public housing, except the low-income people who live there and the people on the long waiting lists to get in. Now, after years of neglect, the Obama Administration wants to save public housing for future generations. It has…

  • Strategic Default Can Make Sense, Right? Well, Not So Fast

    Walking away from one’s mortgage, particularly a mortgage that is underwater, has increasingly become a viable option for homeowners who can no longer live by the terms of their mortgage contract — a contract that stipulates that a homeowner pays…

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    Had Enough of the Spill? Stop Sprawl and Support Revitalization

    Enraged at the spill in the Gulf and the American appetite for oil that ultimately caused it? Stop land development on farmland, forests and other fringe locations and direct future development to close-in opportunities. A massive new study, years in…

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    Housing Markets that Will Never Recover?

    Residents of Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, Buffalo are probably surprised to know that they didn’t make 24/7 Wall Street’s list of 13 Housing Markets that Will Never Recover. This is probably just because their housing prices hadn’t risen enough to take…