News and Reviews
Why Fannie & Freddie matter most
New from me in Politico: an op-ed stressing that as important as a Consumer Financial Protection Agency is, the most important looming financial reform battle on the Hill is over the future role of the federal government in backing homeownership. The administration knows that any debate touching on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and $300 billion or so in public investment is radioactive. It has been silent on the GSEs’ fate for more than a year, even after it promised that it would illuminate its plans this February.
The House Financial Services Committee was supposed to hear something, anything, about the future of housing finance from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a March 2 hearing that was then postponed to March 23. I’m marking my calendar again but not holding my breath.
Leonard Lopate Show Tues 2/16
I’ll be talking about Our Lot, the institution of homeownership and whether the costs outweigh the benefits, next Tuesday, February 16 starting at noon EST on WNYC Radio. If you’re in/near NYC, it’s 820 AM or 93.9 FM. Or listen on the internet.
UPDATE: Here’s the link to the archive.
If you missed New America talk
Here’s audio from yesterday’s talk at the New America Foundation. New America’s Ellen Seidman, an important and insightful advocate for mortgage markets supporting widespread homeownership, offered commentary afterwards (and said some very nice things about Our Lot). Thanks to everyone who braved the snow to show up. I got out of town just in time to miss the brunt of Snowpocalypse 2010.
New America Foundation book talk
I’ll be doing a lunchtime talk at the New America Foundation in Washington on February 5, about Our Lot and the past/future of homeownership as a means of building household wealth. The event is hosted by New America’s Asset Building Program. Senior Research Fellow (and community banker and ex-S&L regulator) Ellen Seidman will respond with comments, which are sure to be insightful.
Event starts at 12:15, at 1899 L Street NW, Suite 400. RSVP:
http://www.newamerica.net/events/2010/our_lot
Shelterforce review
At Shelterforce, an excellent magazine about community development, John Atlas reviews Our Lot.
With her keen eye, vivid descriptions, and a sense of irony, Katz helps us navigate this complex story by traveling across the country so we can meet the winners, and (mostly) the losers….Katz’s compelling narrative implicates the entire financial and housing food chain, which participated in this greedy shell game. Brokers who brought the borrowers to the lenders, mortgage companies that provided the mortgages, Wall Street firms who packaged the subprime loans into exotic investments, investors who bought the securities seeking the highest rates possible and credit agencies that cheated on the ratings. Greenspan and the regulators kept pumping money in, and instead of providing oversight, they just looked the other way. Some acted legally. Some acted illegally. But most of it was simply business as usual.
Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, in discussing the roots of our homeownership obsession, proves to be a remarkably thorough and perceptive analysis of the recent housing bubble, how the bubble contributed to the current recession, and what we should do to avoid another bubble And it’s a great read.
Action Speaks! The Rise of Levittown
This fall I had the pleasure of participating in Action Speaks!, a panel/radio broadcast series in Providence, RI, digging into unsung events in American history. I was invited, along with V. Elaine Gross of the Long Island group Erase Racism and architect Paul Lukez, to talk about the past and future of the suburbs and the American dream of owning a single-family detached home, apropos of Levittown.
Photo: Viera Levitt
We gathered at AS220, a community and arts space in downtown Providence that is a regional and national treasure – a place where any artist in Rhode Island can put on a show (performing, visual, political – all arts and expression welcome) and where performers from outside the Ocean State compete fiercely to get stage time. I know because my husband the booking agent has tried. Artistic director Bert Crenca has nurtured this remarkable institution from its days as a live/work space for himself and other Providence artists into much more than the arts space – upstairs is home to a youth program where teens can mix music, silkscreen, do computer art etc etc etc, and AS220 has lately been rehabbing historic buildings as artist live/work spaces.
The crowd for the panel was appropriately idealistic. Their questions reflected not only intense concern about the suburbs’ environmental impact but also for the cultural and social consequences of car dependence and limited public space. No creativity, TV instead of the arts, you know the stereotype. I warned them not to get complacent about the virtues of the dense urban environment to cultivate creative enterprise, to look at how New York City has effectively evicted its arts from the urban core, except for big-money establishment institutions that are as much about business as art. The city’s creative hub is now Brooklyn – the old ‘burbs. Now admittedly Brooklyn’s creative scenes cluster in walkable areas, and they’re linked by subway lines (yo, G-train). But the point is that that the economics of space, and mobility between spaces, are at least as important as their density. As inner-ring suburbs evolve as more economically and socially diverse communities than they’ve been historically, their combo of relatively inexpensive real estate, mass transit links and and cultural cross-pollination are bound to make them exciting places for the arts.
Okay, here’s the show.
Thank you host Marc Levitt (no relation to Levittown) for inviting me to Action Speaks! and for an inspired series.
Brooklyn Rail review
If you live outside the borough of Kings or City of New York you likely haven’t heard of The Brooklyn Rail, but it’s worthy of wider attention, and not just because it just ran a sharp review of Our Lot, which you can read here. The Rail takes on New York City neighborhood politics and avant-garde arts with a passion and seriousness so dismayingly absent from most allegedly alt-media. The Rail always reminds readers exactly what’s at stake, and it’s not lifestyle but the inverse and far more potent possibility that New Yorkers, and by extension the rest of the planet (for are we not a tiny, quasi-representative sample?) can live a meaningfully interconnected life in a delicately shared space.
NPR on Nehemiah
NPR’s Jim Zarroli had me back on this morning to discuss the Nehemiah Homes – the affordable homeownership program based in New York City that has seen remarkably few foreclosures in its roughly two-decade history, even though many those homes are located in the heart of the city’s foreclosure belt. The segment explains why: low costs, and tough standards for buyers. I was intrigued to learn just how tough: mortgage payments could be no more than 20 percent of household income, far below the usual standard . By contrast, the Making Home Affordable loan modification program sets 31 percent of income as a goal.
NewsHour: Making Sense of the Foreclosure Crisis
Here’s last night’s NewsHour segment featuring Queens homeowners saddled with outrageous mortgages, with me explaining the history of government promotion of homeownership and (in the words of reporter Paul Solman) “good intentions run amok.”
On PBS NewsHour tonight
Looks like it’s confirmed: I’ll be on NewsHour tonight with economics reporter Paul Solman and Queens homeowners who got set up with atrocious mortgages by an unscrupulous developer.
You can ask me questions here, which I’ll be answering at NewsHour’s website. I’ll post video once it’s available.
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.
The Latest
- Financial 411: More on Fannie & Freddie
- Why Fannie & Freddie matter most
- Nation Institute Investigative Fund
- Leonard Lopate Show Tues 2/16
- If you missed New America talk
- Anthropology of the bubble culture
- Housing Watch highlights
- New America Foundation book talk
- How income inequality caused the crash
- Shelterforce review