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Homeownership Rates: It depends on whether you are married
The attached piece originally appeared in the Autumn 2016 edition of Housing Finance International. American political rhetoric endlessly repeats that homeownership is part of the “American Dream.” So...
View ArticleWe can build our way out of housing crisis
In 1998, I left a small city in Ohio for Southern California, trading one of the nation’s lowest-priced housing markets for one of its highest. The trade-off was worth it, but I recall my wife’s...
View ArticleWe Can Build Our Way Out of the Housing Crisis
In 1998, I left a small city in Ohio for Southern California, trading one of the nation’s lowest-priced housing markets for one of its highest. The trade-off was worth it, but I recall my wife’s...
View ArticleBureaucracy, funding no cure for homeless problem
My office is located in a part of downtown Sacramento that the Sacramento Bee recently referred to as a “blighted and foreboding stretch of K Street.” It’s not that the buildings are so decrepit. In...
View ArticleR Street’s priorities for the next administration
The incoming Trump administration will inherit numerous challenges that must be dealt with in year one, such as overwhelming shortfalls in the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. and debt restructuring for...
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The housing bubble renewed?
Average U.S. house prices are back over their 2006 bubble top, as measured by the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. “Home Prices Recover Ground Lost During Bust” read the Wall Street Journal headline....
View ArticleWhether thriving or failing, cities need investment
Seven years into the recovery from the Great Recession, unemployment is down, gross domestic product is up, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed recently at an all-time high. Yet for millions of...
View ArticleBig news from 2016 highlights rapidly changing county
My first encounter with an Orange County politician came in the mid-1990s, when I met then-U.S. Rep. Bob Dornan during his ill-fated 1996 presidential run. Dornan was speaking to a small group of GOP...
View ArticleThe Cincinnatian Doctrine revisited
The attached policy study originally appeared in the Winter 2016 edition of Housing Finance International. Ten years ago, in September 2006, just before the great housing bubble’s disastrous collapse,...
View ArticleSmarterSafer comments on private flood insurance standards
SmarterSafer is pleased to submit this letter of comment on the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s joint notice of proposed rulemaking on Loans in Areas Having Special Flood Hazard: Private...
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What is the actual collateral for a mortgage loan?
“Economics and finance are like going to the dog races,” my friend Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute is fond of saying. “Stand in the same place and the dogs will come around again.”...
View ArticleU.S. banks’ real estate boom could be signaling next crisis
Excessive real estate credit is the most common cause of banking booms, busts and collapses, throughout history, right up through the most recent financial crisis and around the world. The U.S....
View ArticleAccessory Dwelling Units: A flexible free-market housing solution
Much of the American built environment was constructed in the post-World War II era, when government policy and planning fashion favored a highly dispersed development model centered on the primacy of...
View ArticleA flawed process generated by a flawed structure
Testimony to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Madam Chairman, Ranking Member Green and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the...
View ArticleAlex Pollock Testimony: FSOC must fix process to designate systemically...
The Financial Stability Oversight Council’s process for identifying systemically important nonbank financial institutions is beset by politically influenced assumptions and inconsistent analytical...
View ArticleCostly veterans’ homes not serving broad population
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been a font of scandal in recent years, with various reports showcasing the way the agency charged with caring for our nation’s veterans has fallen down on...
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What’s next for U.S. housing finance?
The attached policy study originally was published in the Spring 2017 edition of Housing Finance International. With the new administration of President Donald Trump, and simultaneous Republican...
View ArticleHousing crisis is latest excuse to take aim at Prop. 13
There’s little question that California’s rapidly rising home prices have become something of a crisis for low- and middle-income people. “California is rapidly becoming a renter majority state,”...
View ArticlePollock to speak at the 30th World Congress of the International Union for...
R Street Distinguished Senior Fellow Alex Pollock will speak on a panel at the 30th World Congress of the International Union for Housing Finance. The conference is scheduled for June 25-27, 2017, in...
View ArticleDiscussing the future of the GSEs on the Investors Unite podcast
I recently joined Investors Unite founder Tim Pagliara on the group’s housing podcast for a broad-ranging discussion about what a future arrangement for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might look like....
View ArticleCoppage talks urbanism on the Matt Lewis Show
R Street Visiting Senior Fellow Jonathan Coppage was a recent guest on the Matt Lewis Show, where he made the case for the Federal Housing Administration to re-legalize Main Street. Full audio is...
View ArticleSacramento discovers a housing ‘crisis’
Nineteen years ago, I made the trek from a small, industrial city in Ohio to Orange County, California, to take a job at a large daily newspaper. Oddly enough, my friends in Ohio thought I was crazy to...
View ArticleHousing risk
In the May 27 Up & Down Wall Street column (“Bitcoin and Tech Stocks: A 21st Century Tulipmania?”), Randall W. Forsyth sharply criticized the mortgage-interest deduction, but passed over without...
View ArticlePresentation to IUHF World Congress
The attached presentation on the topic of federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market was delivered by R Street Distinguished Senior Fellow Alex Pollock at the 30th International Union...
View ArticleAmerica’s upper middle class problem
Richard Reeves’ new book “The Dream Hoarders” (Brookings, 2017) forwards a thesis that should disturb all Americans who hold professional or managerial jobs. A Brookings Institution scholar and former...
View ArticleBubbles, memory and governments
The attached policy short originally appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of Housing Finance International. It does not seem possible that in a reasonable let alone a rational world, housing bubbles or...
View ArticleSouth Miami solar mandate would trample property rights
Expanding solar energy to rely less on oil, gas and other nonrenewable resources is an almost universal goal, regardless of one’s political persuasion. Indeed, with growing concerns about climate and...
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Is the real estate double bubble back?
Average U.S. commercial real estate prices are now far over their 2007 bubble peak, about 22 percent higher than they were in the excesses of a decade ago, just before their last big crash. In...
View ArticleDemocrats and Republicans see different solutions to California housing crisis
Before the recent legislative recess, California Democratic leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown announced their intention to tackle one of the state’s biggest crises: housing affordability. It’s the rare...
View ArticleBe very afraid, as Democrats ‘fix’ the housing crisis
It’s common to hear complaints about a “do nothing” Congress, but California’s Legislature has the opposite problem. It wants to do just about everything. Whether it’s fighting global warming or...
View ArticleFannie and Freddie face the moment of truth on their taxpayer bailouts
Almost nine years ago, in September 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were broke and put into government conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Less than two months before, the regulator...
View ArticleCalifornia can’t fix its housing problems
Even California’s liberal Democrats are starting to understand that the state’s housing crisis is fundamentally a supply-and-demand problem. Home prices have soared to astronomical levels, with a...
View ArticleTreasury should not bail out Fannie and Freddie’s subordinated debt
When the U.S. Treasury bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008, holders of $13.5 billion in Fannie’s and Freddie’s subordinated debt—debt paid off after senior debt is repaid—were completely...
View ArticleLegislature is back and focused on housing, recall and bail
California’s Legislature is back from its recess and legislators kicked off the session by focusing on two highly partisan matters. Assembly Republicans first voted to keep Chad Mayes as Republican...
View ArticleDon’t be alarmed if California’s housing package makes things worse
I’ve occasionally quoted journalist H.L. Mencken’s quip that the “whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an...
View ArticleHow does the United States rank in homeownership?
There are a lot of different housing-finance systems in the world, but the U.S. system is unique in being centered on government-sponsored enterprises. These GSEs—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—still...
View ArticleEnd of session defined by higher taxes, anti-Trump and union priorities
California’s legislative session, which completed its work in the wee hours Saturday morning, was one of the more controversial ones in years, given the degree to which the Democratic majority was able...
View ArticleCalifornia’s soaring poverty rates tied to its fiscal irresponsibility
The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest statistics, released this month, find that California’s poverty rate remains the highest in the nation, despite dipping ever so slightly. The reason is no surprise: It’s...
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Has Canada’s housing bubble finally reached bursting point?
The attached policy brief originally appeared in the Autumn 2017 issue of Housing Finance International, the quarterly journal of the International Union for Housing Finance. Both Canadian and foreign...
View ArticleCalifornia housing plan is a dud, but local rules are biggest problem
Perhaps it’s the sign of Capitol hubris, but lawmakers in the waning days of the legislative session touted their “housing package” as a big part of the solution to California’s ongoing housing...
View ArticlePRI Podcast: Steven Greenhut’s end-of-session wrap
R Street Western Region Director Steven Greenhut joins Pacific Research Institute’s Another Round podcast to discuss the California Legislature’s housing package, its recent cap-and-trade deal, bills...
View ArticleTaxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay for Fannie and Freddie’s risk exposure
As the old Washington saying goes, “When all is said and done, more is said than done.” This certainly applies to the years of congressional debates about how to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They...
View ArticleWe can’t reduce housing costs by wishing for rent control
The term “magical thinking” describes people who believe, as one psychology related website puts it, “that one’s own thoughts, wishes or desires can influence the external world.” It’s the idea that if...
View ArticleFHFA’s g-fee calculation ignores the law
In a recent report to Congress, the Federal Housing Finance Agency once again failed to satisfy a fundamental legal requirement. This is a requirement that the FHFA keeps ignoring, apparently perhaps...
View ArticleDesignation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as SIFIs
Dear Secretary Mnuchin: The Treasury Department has just issued a new review of “Financial Stability Oversight Designations,”[1] and we are writing to you in your capacity as Chairman of the Financial...
View ArticleRealtors’ initiative could boost home sales, limit property taxes
Property-tax-limiting Proposition 13 has long been viewed as the “third rail” of California politics given its continued popularity among the home-owning electorate. Public-sector unions occasionally...
View ArticleThe hidden cost of California’s housing crisis
*Patrick T. Brown cowrote this oped. For many California families, the accelerating housing crisis affects not just their budget, but their way of life. Every year over the past decade, the state...
View ArticleAEI Event: Eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without legislation
A panel of housing finance experts met at AEI last Tuesday to discuss how the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be eliminated without legislation. Moderated by R...
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House prices: What the Fed hath wrought
A version of this op-ed ran on The Hill. After the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, U.S. house prices fell for six years, until 2012. Are these memories getting a little hazy? The Federal Reserve,...
View ArticleCalifornia’s Maduros face housing crisis
Economic illiteracy has an astoundingly high cost. In Venezuela, children are dying of hunger but the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, has a bizarre new idea for making food affordable again. His...
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