On Our Radar

CNBC, February 21, 2023, Wall Street Has Purchased Hundreds Of Thousands Of Single-Family Homes Since The Great Recession. Here’s What That Means For Rental Prices Institutional investors may control 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes by 2030, according to MetLife Investment Management. And a group of Washington, D.C., lawmakers say Wall Street needs to back […]

The New York Times, February 21, 2023, The Era Of Shutting Others Out Of New York’s Suburbs Is Ending For much of the 20th century, towns surrounding New York City used a stomach-churning mix of racial covenants and restrictive zoning laws to shut out Black Americans and others considered undesirable from thriving suburbs. The federal

Bloomberg, February 20, 2023, Wall Street Clashes With Green Bankers Fed Up With Oil Agenda The Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which is a sub-unit of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, faces a potentially embarrassing mutiny from some of the world’s most climate-conscious lenders after it decided against imposing binding restrictions on fossil-fuel financing. One lender, Germany’s

Urban Institute, February 7 2023, Why Did Black And Latino Homeownership Increase During The Pandemic? During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black and Latino homeownership increased more than white homeownership, with Black and Latino homeownership rates increasing by 2 and 2.5 percentage points, respectively, while the white homeownership rate increased just 1 percentage point. On its surface,

The Washington Post, February 17, 2023, Why does the South have such ugly credit scores? Today, we look at a big, fat map of credit scores reproduced from a recent economics paper. And while the map suggests any number of tantalizing questions, we are most intrigued by that big band of credit-score calamity that stretches across

The Washington Post, February 19, 2023, The Next Hot Housing Market Is Out of This World. It’s in the Metaverse. The twin home is in the metaverse — a catchall phrase for the growing conglomerate of immersive digital worlds where avatars work, play and purchase goods. Pixelated parcels of land are being bought, sold and

Axios Phoenix, February 21, 2023, Arizona Bill Aims To Ease Housing Shortage By Overriding City Control Savage says the legislature should instead consider inclusionary zoning that imposes requirements for certain numbers of affordable housing units, tax increment financing, or legislation similar to a 2019 affordable housing law in Utah that encourages cities to permit more affordable housing.

E & E News, February 16 2023, Biden Orders Agencies: Do More On Racism, Environmental Justice Environmental justice has been a key component of Biden’s plan to use the government to advance racial equity. The administration’s Justice40 initiative aims to ensure that 40 percent of the overall benefits of federal investments in climate and clean

Crain’s Chicago Business, February 15, 2023, Is Lightfoot’s Signature Housing Policy Working? Depends On Who You Ask. City approvals for marquee apartment projects have been smaller and less frequent since the City Council passed Lightfoot’s 2021 revamp of the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance, an Illinois Answers Project analysis shows. Some builders point to the trend

The Washington Post, February 14, 2023, Inflation Eases Again, But Bringing Prices Further Down Will Take Work Housing costs were by far the largest contributor, accounting for nearly half of the monthly increase. Fed officials and economists expect rent inflation eventually to fall as costs for new leases cool off. But that has not happened

American Banker, February 13, 2023, Status quo ‘is not acceptable’ for Home Loan banks, FHFA chief says Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Sandra Thompson is calling for an end to “the status quo” at the Federal Home Loan Bank System and for more funding for underserved, rural and tribal communities.  For the first time since

MarketPlace, February 11, 2023, Redlined: David Brancaccio’s Thought on “The Big Payback” “This exhibit helps explain how a permanent or long-standing African American community was developed when in 1900 there was no such thing as a Black community, a Jewish community, a German community, a Polish community,” exhibit designer and nonprofit leader Morris “Dino” Robinson

The Washington Post, February 10,2023, Gentrification by Fire Climate change and its most extreme consequences are pushing up the price of homes throughout much of the American West, as fires and flooding carve into existing housing stock and restrict the amount of land suitable for future building. Over several harrowing weeks in October 2017, the

The Guardian, February 10, 2023, Is living in an empty office the answer to the housing crisis? The 2022 State of the Nation’s Housing report from Harvard University revealed that the US housing supply is at a deficit of 3.8m homes. Meanwhile, in a city like San Francisco, where the availability of affordable housing has reached an

American Banker, February 10, 2023, FHFA’s Thompson: Taxpayers are stakeholders in FHLBs Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Sandra Thompson said that taxpayers are “absolutely” stakeholders in Federal Home Loan Banks, an issue that’s increasingly of interest to policy watchers as revelations about the ways that crypto banks have used the FHLBs to offset plummeting deposits.