This week, Joint Center for Housing Studies This year’s “State of the Nation Housing” was released at Harvard University. The report is damning for those trying to expand home ownership opportunities and presents an incredible challenge to policymakers, stating, “As the cost of home ownership rises , the less likely it is to eliminate the racial home ownership gap.”
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The report highlights how the lack of affordable housing supply coupled with high interest rates is affecting marginalized populations, especially focusing on minorities.
The impact highlighted in the report is clear, noting that in the last year alone, “millions of renters were denied home ownership.”
Consider this: When looking at new units being built for housing, aside from single-family, condo, 2-4, 5-20, 20+ and manufactured housing, the new supply of housing being built today outstrips previous years ‘s shadow. In fact, the current situation of new units being built is worse than it has ever been since the early 1930s.
It is indeed a disgrace to a nation that recognizes the value of home ownership. What we are learning so far is that talk is cheap, but real work is very difficult.
Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in Maryland in February about the importance of home ownership in which she shared her story about growing up. “For most of my childhood, our family rented. And then it happened one afternoon when my mother – our mother – invited my sister Maya and me inside. We were in high school at that time. And he called us into the kitchen, and he showed us this picture. And it was a picture of a one-story, dark brown house with a tile roof and a beautiful lawn. And Mom, as we called her, was telling us that after years of savings, she was ready to be a homemaker,” the Vice President said.
The opportunity to live in their own home was a life-changing event.
There is a need to stop the speech from government debt sources and the times of haphazard pricing policies. This problem is so serious, and getting worse, that it requires presidential focus, policy leadership, and agency coordination if we really want to turn this retreat from opportunity into what we’re seeing today.
There is a dire need in America today to provide executive leadership and focus on housing, and time is running out. But we have a model for this. In 2009, when I was in the Obama Administration, the “Housing Team” was formed. It consisted of “principal” and “deputy”.
The principals all report directly to the cabinet-level president. They included Larry Summers (NEC director), Shawn Donovan (HUD secretary), Tim Geithner (Treasury secretary), and Auston Goolsby (CEA) and many others. And the meetings often included the OMB director, the president’s chief of staff, and several senior staff members.
Representatives reported to the principals and included assistant secretaries and other senior staff from relevant agencies at the time. I was part of this group, but it included many of today’s most prominent government leaders, including Michael Barr, who is now its vice president. federal Reserve For supervision, President Raphael Bostic Federal Reserve Bank of AtlantaK Jim Parrott urban instituteand many others.
Delegates met several times per week, specifically a core group of us, to discuss efforts to solve the housing crisis threatening the country at the time. I remember the time some of us would get a call from Secretary Geithner’s office saying he wanted to meet. We would drop whatever we were doing and head over to Treasury to discuss the current concern or issue.
Considerable time and attention went into formulating a policy to determine whether and how to submit recommendations to the President. And it was all about housing and mortgage policy. And we implemented — we implemented.
My point? In the Obama administration, housing issues were a top executive priority for the President of the United States. Issues were not decided at random or independently. We worked hard to determine the best way to address housing and mortgage challenges in a large, multi-agency environment.
What appears to be a somewhat arbitrary and possibly less effective set of policy steps as we see them today is that this administration should instead provide the same level of focus as the housing team operated during the Obama administration. .
This year’s Harvard study is almost an indictment on the state of housing policy and its effectiveness. And yet the problems in this country are clear and they include:
1. Quickly setting the priority for this country that housing is a foundation for family security and inter-generational wealth-building in a country that faces growing wealth gaps and low housing supply and a lack of implementable policy ideas The reason is decreasing. To move the dial.
2. The need to rebuild neighborhoods to support new homeownership opportunities, especially in urban centers such as those present in the “Rust Belt” inner cities.
3. Meaningful solutions for improving affordability with creative financing vehicles to include concepts such as equity sharing, scalable down payment assistance and interest rate subsidy (buy-down) to make payments affordable.
4. Making affordable housing supply a priority and transforming it from talking points in speeches to executable plans that actually build units at a record pace.
5. A national focus on financial literacy training for young people, especially those living in disadvantaged communities, to prepare them for a future of home ownership.
This reduction in the effectiveness of the policy today is not intentional. But I strongly recommend that this administration engage some prominent business leaders in this effort. While we have had some great policy leaders walking inside the Beltway of Washington DC for decades recommending housing policy to the political leadership, it was always clear to me while working in DC that there is an administration that Also recruiting people who understood the industry and how it operated versus just having people who had thoughtful ideas about how to bring change to consumers was of the utmost importance.
Between skill sets and top-to-executive focus, this administration is ignoring the growing lack of opportunity for those who don’t have access to homeownership today. Focus, Priorities, Skill Sets: The Administration Needs to Show It’s Serious About Housing – The challenges today are as big and dire as any this country has seen in decades. This is a real crisis and JCHS at Harvard has made it abundantly clear.
David Stevens has held various positions in real estate finance, including serving as Senior Vice President of Single Family at Freddie Mac, Executive Vice President at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Assistant Secretary to the Housing and FHA Commissioner, and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association is included.
This column does not necessarily reflect the views of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
on dave stevens [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
at Sarah Wheeler [email protected]
