News and Reviews
Fox Business News
Yeah, you read it right. All in all, not a bad experience, and I was glad to script the Chyron as Fox’s guest expert with bullet points like “Support rental housing” and “Keep a strong govt mortgage market backstop.”
All Things Considered
NPR’s All Things Considered just interviewed me on what it means to be a renter in the United States – namely, freewheeling and flexible but also often unstable and deprived of financial benefits that government policies grant to homeowners.
It’s Here: Paperback!
For those of you who have been holding out (don’t feel bad – I do it all the time): Our Lot is now available in paperback. And hardcover still, and Kindle. And even available at these funny places they call bookstores.
Harry Chapin Media Award
Great news: I’m now the proud winner of a Harry Chapin Media Award from WhyHunger, in the best periodical journalism category, for my American Prospect story “There Goes the Neighborhood”.
Chicago Hearts Texas
Mary Umberger at the Chicago Tribune has written a kind and thoughtful article about my Texas prescription for avoiding future foreclosures: limit cash-out refinancing to 80 percent of a home’s value.
Expert/friends I’ve been talking to since my article ran in The Big Money/Slate/Washington Post note that constitutionally any legislation directly restricting cash-outs, Texas-style, would have to take place at the state level. So how about it, Illinois? Sure, it’ll be a tough sell politically, especially once the lobbyists and donors descend. I can already hear the cry: The politicians are stealing Americans’ freedom [to destroy their family finances]!
But as Umberger notes the real estate biz is more split on cash-outs than you might imagine. The Texas Realtors, for one, have vigorously defended the state’s cash-out limits. After all, they want selling a home to be the readiest way to tap home equity.
Harry Chapin Media Awards
In the toot-my-own-horn department: The World Hunger Year Harry Chapin Media Awards has nominated my American Prospect article “There Goes the Neighborhood,” about the devastating toll of foreclosures on Atlanta neighborhoods, for best story in a periodical. It’s up against worthy competition: Jon Lee Anderson on hunger in Zimbabwe for Dispatches, and fellow Nation Institute Investigative Fund grantee Paul Reyes on Miami’s Take Back the Land movement for Virginia Quarterly Review.
Media and Economic Understanding
In NYC on April 6? Then think about coming to a conference, sponsored by Columbia U’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Roosevelt Institute: “Facing the Fracture: Media and Economic Understanding.”
Featuring a stellar lineup of smart folks, most of whom really really want to make financial issues comprehensible to the uninitiated, including Joseph Stiglitz, Arianna Huffington, Amy Goodman, Peter (no relation to Amy) Goodman, Mike Hudson, Yves Smith, and many more, including yours truly. See you there.
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.
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.