A Lot More
Observations on housing's wreckage and recovery
More on the booming loan mod industry
The Wall Street Journal does its take on the loan mod industry’s move to profit from the Obama homeowner bailout, as first seen in Salon. California’s list of authorized loan modification companies is now 300 deep.
More (from me) on the homeowner bailout
I just wrote a story for Salon about California’s booming loan modification industry — a cadre of mortgage brokers, many of whom sold toxic mortgages during the boom, now reinventing themselves as mortgage bailout heroes, helping homeowners avoid foreclosure. The new Obama administration loan modification program helps guarantee them a steady stream of business, since there’s nothing in Treasury’s new “Homeowner Affordability and Sustainability Plan” to preclude borrowers from turning to one of these companies to help process the deal.
And who the heck came up with “Homeowner Affordability and Sustainability Plan”? It’s not even grammatically correct. Is Treasury promising to make homeowners affordable and sustainable? If I write a check for $10,000 will a homeowner (current? former?) show up on my doorstep?
The homeowner bailout
New from me, in The Big Money: Why Obama’s plan to ease troubled mortgages will be harder than it sounds. Here’s a tease:
You might think that straightening out a $400,000 mortgage would be massively simpler than righting sinking financial institutions nominally worth billions. Yet rescuing homeowners could turn out to be among the toughest bailout challenges of all.
While I’m building the archive…
As you might be able to tell, I’ve been piecing this website together myself (thank you, WordPress!). While I work to put together an archive of my articles, here’s something I wrote recently for Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit in appreciation of the late Doris Dungey, aka “Tanta,” the brilliant mortgage industry blogger who made up half of the indispensable website Calculated Risk.
The great crusade
I wrote this in the spring of 2002. Add my voice to that of the econobloggers out there (like Krugman and Ritholtz) who say that yesterday’s big Times story on the Bush administration’s role in stoking the mortgage crisis made too much of too little. But as this editorial I wrote for City Limits magazine notes, the Bush crew did add some unique spins of its own to agenda already established by Clinton — namely, it pushed the quest for increased homeownership to even more tenuous extremes, like with that new program that encouraged families that paid the rent with Section 8 vouchers to use the government aid to buy a home instead. Just loony.
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.
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Organizations that matter
- Affordable Housing Centers of America
- Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
- Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
- Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
- Center for Responsible Lending
- Demos
- Drum Major Institute
- Joint Center for Housing Studies
- Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
- National Consumer Law Center
- National Housing Institute
- National Housing Trust
- National Low Income Housing Coalition
- National Training and Information Center
- Natn’l Community Reinvestment Coalition
- NEDAP
- New America Foundation
- PolicyLink
- Pratt Center for Community Development
- Revson Fellowship
- Smart Growth America
What Alyssa reads
- Baseline Scenario
- Ben Smith
- Bloomberg News
- Calculated Risk
- City Limits
- Consumer Law and Policy Blog
- Doug Henwood
- Felix Salmon
- Galleycat
- Housing Wire
- Mother Jones
- Next American City
- Paul Krugman
- PolicyCents
- Ryan Avent
- Shelterforce
- Street Level
- Talking Points Memo
- The Audit
- The Balance Sheet
- The Big Picture
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