Judging Treasury's Housing Report
Felix Salmon submits: I’m impressed with Treasury’s long-awaited report on reforming the US housing market. It’s a good length — it comes in under 11,000 words, which makes it shorter than, say, Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair article on Ireland. It’s written in a very clear manner, laying out in a simple and honest way exactly what went wrong, and what Treasury is proposing. And although it might look as though providing three different options for reform is a bit of a cop-out, in fact they’re not as far apart from each other as you might think, and all of them would constitute a radical change from the status quo. The message is clear: what we have right now is unacceptable, and we need to do something big; the main choice facing Congress is between a modest government housing guarantee, a tiny one, or none at all. It’s worth reading the rest of the report, too, not just the section laying out options at the end. One very welcome theme running through the report, from the beginning of the introduction, is that an important part of “affordable housing” is giving people “rental options near good schools and good jobs” which don’t take up an inordinate proportion of total income. This kind of language appears all too rarely in papers on mortgage-market reform: Today, renters often face significant affordability challenges. Half of all renters spend more than a third of their income on housing, and a quarter spend more than half. And for low-income renters,Complete Story »
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