Principles To Guide Housing Policy at the Beginning of the Millennium (original) (raw)
Related papers
Principles to Guide Housing Policy at the Beginning of the New Millennium
Cityscape a Journal of Policy Development and Research, 2001
The 1990s were a tumultuous time for Federal housing policy. The decade began with deep divisions in the housing community over how to deliver housing assistance. For the first time in recent history, Federal budget cuts in the mid-1990s essentially froze the number of households that received housing assistance. At roughly the same time, the continuing existence of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was itself in doubt, and in 1995 the New York Times Magazine published a lead article with the title "The Year That Housing Died." However, as the new millennium begins, the situation has changed dramatically. Not only is Congress no longer seriously questioning whether to disband HUD, but, in response to a record-setting economic expansion and internal reforms within the agency, Congress also has substantially increased HUD's budget. In marked contrast to the beginning of the past decade, remarkable consensus exists among housing policymakers and analysts about the future direction of housing policy. In this article, we explore this emerging consensus and set forth our views regarding the principles that should guide housing policy over the next decade.
Affordable Housing for the 1990's
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 1986
The lack of affordable housing has also ominously climbed the socioeconomic ladder, and the gap between consumer income and housing cost is constantly widening. At the same time, the federal government's involvement in housing has been decreasing ever since the New Deal.
Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2001
The Home Front (Newmann, 1999) examines federal housing policy visa -vis recent changes in the U.S. welfare system. Three themes structure the book. First, how do new welfare rules affect providers and recipients of housing assistance? Second, how might housing assistance programs alter the working of the new welfare system? And third, how might the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) obtain better answers to the preceding questions? The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PROWRA) replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Both TANF and AFDC have funded state government welfare payments to households, with provisions that have effectively limited such welfare participation to single parent households. TANF differs from AFDC in four chief respects: (i) eligibility for welfare payments is time limited by TANF, but was not by AFDC; (ii) with exceptions, TANF requires welfare recipients to work, as AFDC did not; (iii) TANF allows states to add more stringent non-federal eligibility requirements for welfare, as AFDC did not; and (iv) TANF makes fixed sum federal payments to states, whereas AFDC had matched a fraction of each state's expenditures. PROWRA did not change the U.S. housing assistance system; it remains a patchwork quilt of programs funded largely with federal money. For the past 30 years, presidential efforts to revamp the welfare system have ignored housing policy. Within Congress, separate committees treat housing policy and welfare; within the executive branch, HUD has long operated in splendid isolation from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). To integrate housing policy into welfare policy would have required a slew of additional political players on an already crowded field. Changing the welfare system is daunting enough without such a further complication. Assisted housing divides into three distinct categories: (i) public housinghousing owned by local governments and administered by federally subsidized Local Housing Authorities (LHAs); (ii) publicly assisted housing-privately
Federal Housing Administration in the New Millennium
Journal of Housing Research, 2000
The first challenge in attempting to predict the future of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is to understand why it is still here. No other depression-era mortgage-market institution has survived without substantial modification. We conclude that its survival has depended on its ability to invent new purposes for itself. For example, it changed from a replacement for failed prívate mortgage insurance using economic soundness asan insurance criterion toan innovator in high-risk lending based on an acceptable risk criterion. FHA has developed special programs to serve the needs of specific groups. We believe this pattern of change in purposes also is the key to FHA survival in the new millennium. We review potential future purposes for FHA and find that several-particularly, maintaining mortgage credit flows in declining regional housing markets-will require a substantial FHA presence in mortgage markets. This is important because it implies that a marginalized FHA cannot serve severa! of the important purposes that it is likely to be asked to serve in the new millennium. Accordingly, we believe that FHA market share will be maintained and perhaps expanded in the new millennium, even with increasing competition from conventionallending.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1992
This article examines the current system for targeting federal rental housing assistance, a rationed program rather than an entitlement, to households with the greatest need. It describes the current systems for eligibility and for ranking households on waiting lists, and then analyzes relative needs for assistance among different groups of households. We conclude that the main policy objective should be to maintain the present system against the leakages that are starting to occur. We also recommend that assistance be targeted more heavily to families than at present and less to the elderly, and that nonelderiy single persons be made fully eligible for assistance. Since the mid-1970s the American Housing Survey (AHS) has made possible analysis of policy choices for housing the poor that are informed by detailed statistics on the housing conditions and expenditures of a large sample of households.' This capability has been used most often for two purposes: to dramatize the magnitude of the need for additional federal housing subsidies or to debate the relative merits of rent subsidies in the existing housing stock I The American Housing Survey, called the Annual Housing Survey until its redesign in 1983, has since 1973 been the nation's major source of intercensal data on characteristics of housing and households. It is funded and managed as part of HUD's research program and produced by the Bureau of the Census. Since 1985 a national stratified sample of 55,800 housing units has been surveyed biennially to produce data for the nation and for the city, suburban, and nonmetropolitan portions of the four census regions on the size, age, equipment, utilities, and quality of housing units and on the size, composition, demographics, tenure, income, and housing costs of households. National data are published in Current Housing Reports, Series H-150. The 1985 national volume is Arnm'can Housing Survey for the United States in 1985, H-150-85. Like all sample data, AHS data have problems of coverage, definition, response, and inconsistencies over time that affect estimates of housing problems and household characteristics. The most important issues influencing the estimates presented here are summarized in notes to this article; they are discussed more fully in Nelson [1990].
Comment on" Housing Policy, Mortgage Policy, and the Federal Housing Administration
Authors Jaffee and Quigley focus their chapter on an analysis of federal programs that provide insurance and housing credit guarantees. After a description of a variety of federal government programs, including the federally-chartered government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they concentrate specifi cally on the changes and challenges to the mortgage insurance and guarantee programs managed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). They offer specifi c, policy-oriented recommendations to bolster the FHA's declining market share. After the Great Depression, the FHA pioneered the introduction of the thirty-year self-amortizing fi xed rate mortgage, the standard mortgage that prevailed in the United States for decades. The FHA and Fannie Mae, and its predecessor the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)-a federal entity-succeeded in reviving a mortgage market then in collapse due to the prevalence of "bullet" loans. After World War II, loans insured by the FHA lost market share to similarly structured nongovernment or "conventional" loans. The FHA's role evolved to serve lower income households who lacked the 10 percent down payment required by the conventional prime market. With the explosion (now implosion) of subprime over the past decade, FHA's market share decreased even further until 2008 when, in response to the collapse of subprime, FHA market share increased to its current 25 percent level. The ongoing subprime mortgage market crisis (similar to the Great Depression, centered on loans that require refi nancing at a time when fi nancial markets seize up) makes the role of the FHA newly relevant. 1 A large segment of the Jaffee and Quigley chapter is devoted to a comprehensive and very useful description of all federal housing programs. The chapter sets out an historical and contextual analysis of the evolution of housing programs over time, pointing to the elimination of supply-side public housing in favor of demand-side housing vouchers. The chapter contrasts this-and other directly funded programs that have lost federal support-with the growth of programs indirectly funded through federal tax expenditures, including the homeowner deduction and the low income
The Federal Housing Administration in the New Millennium 371
2000
The first challenge in attempting to predict the future of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is to understand why it is still here. No other depression-era mortgage-market institution has survived without substantial modification. We conclude that its survival has depended on its ability to invent new purposes for itself. For example, it changed from a replacement for failed prívate mortgage insur-ance using economic soundness asan insurance criterion toan innovator in high-risk lending based on an acceptable risk criterion. FHA has developed special programs to serve the needs of specific groups. We believe this pattern of change in purposes also is the key to FHA survival in the new millennium. We review potential future purposes for FHA and find that several-particularly, maintaining mort-gage credit flows in declining regional housing markets-will require a substantial FHA presence in mortgage markets. This is important because it implies that a marginalized FHA cannot se...