By Marci Greenstein It’s hard to find any hopeful news about the housing crisis.  There was a sharp decline in home sales in December.  And the federal Home Affordable Modification Program, which was supposed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, is not working.  But Ruth Simon of the Wall Street Journal highlighted ...

At least one part of the Obama administration is trying to do something about abusive mortgage lending. The Washington Post's Dina ElBoghdady reports that Housing and Urban Development's Federal Housing Administration wants stricter requirements on the home loans that it has traditionally insured -- one of the oldest ways ...

The New York Times' David Stretfield has a very good piece today about Housing and Urban Development's Federal Housing Administration pouring money into the real estate market. The Obama administration is "guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class homebuyers." ...

Housing Urban Development's Federal Housing Administration was created during the New Deal to rebuild confidence in the housing market. Today, it is the only federal agency to not rely on taxpayer dollars: its funding comes from borrowers who take out FHA-financed mortgages. However, the Washington Posts' Dina ElBoghdady explains ...

ProPublica's Paul Kiel blogs that the Treasury Dept. quietly announced Friday afternoon that it was providing another $15 billion in its bailout of now wholly government-owned mortgage financier Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae has received a total of $60 billion in taxpayer bailout money, while its sister company, Freddie Mac, has received $50 billion. That's $110 billion in bailout money that doesn't come from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but, as Kiel explains, a separate housing bailout. Barack Obama's home ownership assistance program has exacerbated Fannie Mae's troubles.

D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing, University of Chicago Press, 2009.  392 pages. By Matthew Blake In 1994, Republicans seized control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, and new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich set out to vanquish what remained of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. This included a threat to entirely de-fund the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which ran federally subsidized public housing projects in cities across the country. Gingrich’s proposed solution – eliminating federal support for impoverished urban tenants – was hardly humane.  But he did find a big problem in big government: decaying high-rise public housing projects that had become humanitarian disasters. Saved from the budget knife, the Clinton administration HUD discovered that while public housing was flawed across the country, it was at its worst in Chicago. In 1995, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros testified to Congress that of the 15 poorest communities in the country – not the poorest public housing communities, the poorest communities period – 11 were projects controlled by the federally-funded, locally-run Chicago Housing Authority. Roaches, broken elevators, drug dealing, violence and isolation from the rest of the city defined Chicago public housing. When Cisneros told CHA President Vincent Lane that Chicago’s housing authority a) “had failing grades across the board” and b) might be de-funded, Lane responded the most sensible way he could: he gave up.

The New York Times' David Streitfield and John Collins Rodolf report that state attorneys general might start suing mega-banks: Frustrated by the banks’ inability or unwillingness to stop an avalanche of foreclosures, the states are considering lawsuits over the creation and marketing of millions of bad loans as well as the dismal pace of mortgage modifications. Such cases would have been impossible until recently, because federal regulators had exclusive oversight of national banks. But a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision in June allowed the states to exercise their own supervision, giving them significant leverage. This Supreme Court case that gives state AGs some oversight over national banks is pretty amazing:

The demolition of a public housing high-rise in Chicago The videotaped fatal beating of 16-year-old Chicago Public School student Derrion Albert last month triggered a condemnation from Barack Obama and an emergency meeting at which Attorney General Eric Holder, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley tried to figure out how the education and criminal justice system had failed Albert. But these high-profile figures largely omitted one other important issue – public housing.  Derrion Albert grew up in the Altgeld Gardens homes, a public housing project with the kinds of problems that Chicago public housing residents have endured for decades – problems that result in a violent and dangerous environment, where poor building maintenance and security, drug dealing, petty crime, and even serious violence are facts of daily life. The Altgeld Gardens homes are the largest remaining housing project built and maintained by the Chicago Housing Authority (or CHA), which for decades has managed Chicago public housing with results that range from uneven to disastrous.  Chicago’s elected leaders have been at perpetual odds with the CHA – for years the mayor appointed its board of directors, but the mayor and city council distanced themselves from the housing authority’s decisions. That changed in February 2000 when Daley took over CHA and said all decisions would go through city hall. Further, Daley unveiled – in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – a ten-year “Plan for Transformation” for Chicago public housing. The worst projects – cheaply built concrete high-rises – would face the wrecking ball; slightly less hopeless projects like Altgeld would be rehabilitated; and public housing tenants – usually poor and usually black – would   live side-by-side with Chicagoans of all races and incomes. Nearly a decade later, that plan is far from completion.

Chicago may not have won the 2016 Summer Olympics, but, hey, they were chosen to hold the annual American Bankers Association conference. The city's festivities kicked off yesterday, reports the Chicago Tribune's Kristen Schorsch, with protests against the ABA: U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and nearly a dozen protesters called Sunday for banks that received billions in bailout money to help consumers who have fallen victim to bad loan practices and are losing their homes to foreclosure. "I would like the bankers who come to Chicago ... to visit 60629," Durbin said, referring to the city's Marquette Park neighborhood near Midway Airport. "Nice neat little brick bungalow homes well kept. Some swimming pools in the backyard. A lot of hardworking families. On every single block ... know what you're going to find? A foreclosed home." Durbin and the demonstrators are protesting about the right issue.

In March 2008, The Atlantic published an outstanding look forward, by Christopher Leinberger, at problems with the massive houses being built in America's suburbs. Leinberger concluded that many McMansions would be unsustainable as single-family housing and would eventually be abandoned or used for rental housing: The experience ...