Posts Tagged ‘Obama’
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.
Growing rancor over homeowner bailout
Over at Politico, Andie Coller has a smart piece looking at the brewing resentments around the Obama homeowner bailout and the perhaps inevitable divisions between those getting financial help from the government and those who cannot. I’m quoted in the kicker.
F(raud) H(ere) A(lways)
Wow. I’m not sure which act was weirder — President Bush giving a pardon to a Long Island developer convicted of fraud under the Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance program or his subsequent reversal of that pardon, which I learned of while writing this.
Better to look ahead, and I worry. Business Week had a great cover story earlier this month about the perils of HUD’s aggressive expansion of FHA as a source of mortgages as the private sector pulls back on lending. As of the new year, the agency will insure loans that in some parts of the country will near $700,000. Again and again in its history, FHA mortgages, sold by independent brokers, have been fodder for fraud, including many of the practices — flipping, rigged appraisals, and the rest — that later became synonymous with subprime lending. Usually, the companies selling the mortgages have been central players in the schemes. See City Limits‘ series on FHA fraud in the late 1990s, which I edited.
FHA at its core is a deeply valuable institution. If it’s going to once again serve as the backbone for homeownership as a source of security for middle-class Americans, instead of fodder for a Sopranos plotline (third season), FHA is going to need as big an overhaul as any government agency in the Obama administration. Obama’s nominee for HUD Secretary, Shaun Donovan, is as capable as anyone of fixing FHA. The bad news is that some very talented people tried to set it straight under President Clinton, only to be thwarted by the Contract With America crowd. Housing and health care are now in the same boat — Obama’s people are going to have to win the fights that Clinton’s lost.
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
Tags
American Prospect Ameriquest Andrew Cuomo Atlanta Barney Frank Bloomberg News Bloomsbury Bush Business Week California Clinton Community Reinvestment Act Consumer Financial Protection Agency Dean Baker Elizabeth Warren Fannie Mae Felix Salmon FHA financial stability foreclosures Freddie Mac Gale Cincotta Gretchen Morgenson Home Mortgage Disclosure Act homeownership Larry Summers loan modifications media mortgage-backed securities Mortgage Bankers Association mortgage brokers mortgage fraud mortgage suicides New York Times Obama Paul Krugman publishing Rick Santelli Salon subprime tenants Texas The Big Money Timothy Geithner Wall Street Journal