Download or read book The Great American Housing Bubble written by Adam J. Levitin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of the housing bubble that caused the Great Recession—and earned Wall Street fantastic profits. The American housing bubble of the 2000s caused the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. In this definitive account, Adam Levitin and Susan Wachter pinpoint its source: the shift in mortgage financing from securitization by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “private-label securitization” by Wall Street banks. This change set off a race to the bottom in mortgage underwriting standards, as banks competed in laxity to gain market share. The Great American Housing Bubble tells the story of the transformation of mortgage lending from a dysfunctional, local affair, featuring short-term, interest-only “bullet” loans, to a robust, national market based around the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, a uniquely American innovation that served as the foundation for the middle class. Levitin and Wachter show how Fannie and Freddie’s market power kept risk in check until 2003, when mortgage financing shifted sharply to private-label securitization, as lenders looked for a way to sustain lending volume following an unprecedented refinancing wave. Private-label securitization brought a return of bullet loans, which had lower initial payments—enabling borrowers to borrow more—but much greater back-loaded risks. These loans produced a vast oversupply of underpriced mortgage finance that drove up home prices unsustainably. When the bubble burst, it set off a destructive downward spiral of home prices and foreclosures. Levitin and Wachter propose a rebuild of the housing finance system that ensures the widespread availability of the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, while preventing underwriting competition and shifting risk away from the public to private investors.

Download or read book The Affordable City written by Shane Phillips and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Miami, US cities are struggling to address the twin crises of high housing costs and household instability. Debates over the appropriate course of action have been defined by two poles: building more housing or enacting stronger tenant protections. These options are often treated as mutually exclusive, with support for one implying opposition to the other. Shane Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance. He offers readers more than 50 policy recommendations, beginning with a set of principles and general recommendations that should apply to all housing policy. The remaining recommendations are organized by what he calls the Three S’s of Supply, Stability, and Subsidy. Phillips makes a moral and economic case for why each is essential and recommendations for making them work together. There is no single solution to the housing crisis—it will require a comprehensive approach backed by strong, diverse coalitions. The Affordable City is an essential tool for professionals and advocates working to improve affordability and increase community resilience through local action.

Download or read book Race for Profit written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Download or read book Golden Gates written by Conor Dougherty and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Time 100 Must-Read Book of 2020 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • California Book Award Silver Medal in Nonfiction • Finalist for The New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism • Named a top 30 must-read Book of 2020 by the New York Post • Named one of the 10 Best Business Books of 2020 by Fortune • Named A Must-Read Book of 2020 by Apartment Therapy • Runner-Up General Nonfiction: San Francisco Book Festival • A Planetizen Top Urban Planning Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice “Tells the story of housing in all its complexity.” —NPR Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties of the homeless. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale. With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty chronicles America’s housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking readers inside the activist movements that have risen in tandem with housing costs.

Download or read book Other People s Money written by Charles V. Bagli and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A veteran New York Times reporter dissects the most spectacular failure in real estate history Real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of dollars when their much-vaunted purchase of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village in New York City failed to deliver the expected profits. But how did Tishman Speyer walk away from the deal unscathed, while others took the financial hit—and MetLife scored a $3 billion profit? Illuminating the world of big real estate the way Too Big to Fail did for banks, Other People’s Money is a riveting account of politics, high finance, and the hubris that ultimately led to the nationwide real estate meltdown.

Download or read book Permanent Supportive Housing written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2018-08-11 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronic homelessness is a highly complex social problem of national importance. The problem has elicited a variety of societal and public policy responses over the years, concomitant with fluctuations in the economy and changes in the demographics of and attitudes toward poor and disenfranchised citizens. In recent decades, federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the philanthropic community have worked hard to develop and implement programs to solve the challenges of homelessness, and progress has been made. However, much more remains to be done. Importantly, the results of various efforts, and especially the efforts to reduce homelessness among veterans in recent years, have shown that the problem of homelessness can be successfully addressed. Although a number of programs have been developed to meet the needs of persons experiencing homelessness, this report focuses on one particular type of intervention: permanent supportive housing (PSH). Permanent Supportive Housing focuses on the impact of PSH on health care outcomes and its cost-effectiveness. The report also addresses policy and program barriers that affect the ability to bring the PSH and other housing models to scale to address housing and health care needs.

Download or read book Preventing the Next Mortgage Crisis written by Dan Immergluck and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great U.S. mortgage crisis was a transformative event that will reverberate for decades across families, neighborhoods, and cities. After years of research on various aspects of the crisis, Dan Immergluck examines what went wrong, identifying the factors that created the fragile housing finance system, which provided fertile ground for calamity. He also examines the federal response to the crisis, including who benefitted most from the response, and how a more effective and fair response could have been formulated. To reduce the incidence of future crises, Immergluck provides a pathway for building a more stable and fair housing finance system that would be less vulnerable to the booms and busts of global finance. Housing finance helps determine access to stable, decent-quality, affordable housing and also affects the geography of housing and educational opportunities. Thus, housing markets shape our communities, our neighborhoods, and our social and economic opportunities. Immergluck’s analysis and formulation of a way forward will be of particular interest to those concerned with urban form, neighborhood change and stability, and urban planning and policy, as well as those interested in housing and mortgage markets more generally.

Download or read book Shut Out written by Kevin Erdmann and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-21 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States suffers from a shortage of well-placed homes. This was true even at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. Using a broad array of evidence on housing inflation, income, migration, homeownership trends, and international comparisons, Shut Out demonstrates that high home prices have been largely caused by the constrained housing supply in a handful of magnet cities leading the new economy. The same phenomenon is occurring in leading countries across the globe. Gentrifying cities have become exclusionary bastions in the new postindustrial economy. The US housing bubble that peaked in 2005 is more accurately described as a refugee crisis than a credit bubble. Surging demand for limited urban housing triggered a spike of migration away from the magnet cities among households with moderate and lower incomes who could no longer afford to remain, causing a brief contagion of high prices in the cities where the migrants moved. In this book, author Kevin Erdmann observes that the housing bubble has been broadly and incorrectly attributed to various “excesses.” Policymakers and economists concluded that our key challenge was that we had built too many homes. This misdiagnosis of the problem, according to Erdmann, led to misguided public polices, which were the primary cause of the subsequent financial crisis. A sort of moral panic about supposed excesses in home lending and construction led to destabilizing monetary and regulatory decisions. As the economy slumped, a sense of fatalism prevented the government from responding appropriately to the worsening situation. Shut Out provides a much-needed correction to the causes and consequences of financial crises and secular stagnation.

Download or read book In Defense of Housing written by Peter Marcuse and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In every major city in the world there is a housing crisis. How did this happen and what can we do about it? Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement on this crisis from leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They look at the causes and consequences of the housing problem and detail the need for progressive alternatives. The housing crisis cannot be solved by minor policy shifts, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots—and therefore requires a radical response.

Download or read book The National Homeownership Strategy written by United States. Department of Housing and Urban Development and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Evicted written by Matthew Desmond and published by Crown. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • One of the most acclaimed books of our time, this modern classic “has set a new standard for reporting on poverty” (Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review). In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY President Barack Obama • The New York Times Book Review • The Boston Globe • The Washington Post • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • The New Yorker • Bloomberg • Esquire • BuzzFeed • Fortune • San Francisco Chronicle • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Politico • The Week • Chicago Public Library • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly • Booklist • Shelf Awareness WINNER OF: The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction • The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • The PEN/New England Award • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE AND THE KIRKUS PRIZE “Evicted stands among the very best of the social justice books.”—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Commonwealth “Gripping and moving—tragic, too.”—Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones “Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem written by Gregg Colburn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

Download or read book Homewreckers written by Aaron Glantz and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[I] can’t recommend this joint enough. ... An illuminating and discomfiting read.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates "Essential reading." —New York Review of Books A shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class—among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle. Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008, Donald Trump looked forward to a crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” he said. But our future president wasn’t alone. While millions of Americans suffered financial loss, tycoons pounced to heartlessly seize thousands of homes—their profiteering made even easier because, as prize-winning investigative reporter Aaron Glantz reveals in Homewreckers, they often used taxpayer money—and the Obama administration’s promise to cover their losses. In Homewreckers, Glantz recounts the transformation of straightforward lending into a morass of slivered and combined mortgage “products” that could be bought and sold, accompanied by a shift in priorities and a loosening of regulations and laws that made it good business to lend money to those who wouldn’t be able to repay. Among the men who laughed their way to the bank: Trump cabinet members Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, Trump pal and confidant Tom Barrack, and billionaire Republican cash cow Steve Schwarzman. Homewreckers also brilliantly weaves together the stories of those most ravaged by the housing crisis. The result is an eye-opening expose of the greed that decimated millions and enriched a gluttonous few.

Download or read book The US Housing Crisis written by Judith Keller and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Missing Middle Housing written by Daniel G. Parolek and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, there is a tremendous mismatch between the available housing stock in the US and the housing options that people want and need. The post-WWII, auto-centric, single-family-development model no longer meets the needs of residents. Urban areas in the US are experiencing dramatically shifting household and cultural demographics and a growing demand for walkable urban living. Missing Middle Housing, a term coined by Daniel Parolek, describes the walkable, desirable, yet attainable housing that many people across the country are struggling to find. Missing Middle Housing types—such as duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts—can provide options along a spectrum of affordability. In Missing Middle Housing, Parolek, an architect and urban designer, illustrates the power of these housing types to meet today’s diverse housing needs. With the benefit of beautiful full-color graphics, Parolek goes into depth about the benefits and qualities of Missing Middle Housing. The book demonstrates why more developers should be building Missing Middle Housing and defines the barriers cities need to remove to enable it to be built. Case studies of built projects show what is possible, from the Prairie Queen Neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska to the Sonoma Wildfire Cottages, in California. A chapter from urban scholar Arthur C. Nelson uses data analysis to highlight the urgency to deliver Missing Middle Housing. Parolek proves that density is too blunt of an instrument to effectively regulate for twenty-first-century housing needs. Complete industries and systems will have to be rethought to help deliver the broad range of Missing Middle Housing needed to meet the demand, as this book shows. Whether you are a planner, architect, builder, or city leader, Missing Middle Housing will help you think differently about how to address housing needs for today’s communities.

Download or read book The Global Financial Crisis written by George K. Zestos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although banking and sovereign debt crises are not unusual, the crisis that has unfolded across the world since 2007 has been unique in both its scale and scope. It has also been unusual in being both triggered by, and mainly affecting, developed economies. Starting with the US subprime mortgage crisis, and the recession in 2007-2009, the problem soon erupted into financial crisis in Europe. A few of these countries came to the brink of bankruptcy, and were rescued by the EU and the IMF on the condition they adopt austerity measures. The detrimental social effects of the crisis in both the US and Europe are still emerging. Although there have been several studies published on the US crisis in particular, there has so far been an absence of an accessible comparative overview of both crises. This insightful text aims to fill this gap, offering a critical overview of causes, policy responses, effects and future implications. Starting with the historical context and mutation of the crisis, the book explores the policies, regulations, and governance reforms that have been implemented to cope with the US subprime mortgage crisis. A parallel analysis considers the causes of the European sovereign debt crisis and the responses of the European Union (EU), examining why the EU is as yet unable to resolve the crisis. This book is supported with eResources that include essay questions and class discussion questions in order to assist students in their understanding. This uniquely comprehensive and readable overview will be of interest and relevance to those studying financial crises, financial governance, international economics and international political economy.

Download or read book Underwater written by Ryan Dezember and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors. In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess. A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.