The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator and conservator of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), has been very prominently in the news lately.  This is due to the controversy surrounding how the agency has changed the specific amounts by which the two GSEs risk-adjust the interest rates at which they purchase mortgage loans. This has unexpectedly led to heated public commentary, including two highly critical Wall Street Journal editorials. The core claim made by critics is that the changes, implemented on May 1, are a mechanism for ..read more

NYU Furman Center Releases State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2022 We are thrilled to announce the release of the comprehensive report the State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods in 2022. This work sheds light on the evolving landscape of housing and communities in New York City, providing valuable insights into the city's vibrant and diverse neighborhoods. To read the full report, visit furmancenter.org/stateofthecity. This year’s Focus report explores the demographics of households in New York City’s low-density neighborhoods, including a closer look at renter a ..read more

Fair Housing Month may be drawing to a close, but the need for ensuring efficacy across Fair Housing policies continues. This is made clear in a recently published paper by Noah Kazis, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and Faculty Director Kathy O’Regan, The Weakness of Neighborhood Revitalization Planning in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program: Warnings from Connecticut. The paper uses empirical findings to shed new light on long-standing concerns of a crucial provision of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) meant to improve neighborhood conditi ..read more

Manufactured housing (MH) has recently taken on a high profile among affordable housing advocates, including in the Biden administration. MH’s supporters consider it naturally low-cost due to the efficiency of factory production, rather than via government subsidy.  As a result, the search for ideas to increase the usage of MH has been building given the critical affordable housing shortage that has grown for many reasons over at least the last decade. As described in Part 1 of this three-part series, MH – a term which in this paper refers to the factory-produced structure that is later ..read more

Office to residential conversions are a once-in-a-generation opportunity to provide affordable housing in New York City. In their “Making New York Work for Everyone” plan, released in January, Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul expressed eagerness to build more housing in New York City’s business districts after COVID. But due to significant financing, zoning, and design challenges in converting office buildings to residential, only select offices make good candidates for conversion, and few offices have actually been converted in recent years. Since then, a policy debate about providing both re ..read more

The average guarantee fee (G-fee) of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), who currently finance about half of the nearly $13 trillion of outstanding first-lien single-family mortgages in the country,1 is among the most closely-watched numbers by housing finance policymakers and the mortgage lending industry.2  In November of last year, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator and conservator of the two companies, issued its annual report on their G-fees (the G-fee Report), covering calendar year 2021.3   In that report, th ..read more

Photo of a manufactured housing neighborhood Introduction Manufactured Housing (MH), the official name for what have historically been called mobile homes, comprises the most prominent type of factory-built housing in the US.  MH units1 currently account for about 6% of the U.S. housing stock, including both owner- and renter-occupied housing.2  Against the backdrop of today’s rapidly deteriorating housing affordability,3 MH has recently become a priority topic among affordable housing4 advocates broadly and the Biden administration specifically.  This is because MH suppor ..read more

On Thursday, February 9, 2023 the Furman Center hosted a Policy Breakfast titled The New York Housing Compact: Implications for NYC. The conversation explored Governor Kathy Hochul’s recently released New York Housing Compact, a comprehensive, multi-pronged framework for communities across the state to increase housing supply, with the ambitious goal of building 800,000 new units across the state in the next decade. The panelists discussed several issues covered by the first policy briefs in the Furman Center’s new series Critical Land Use and Housing Issues for New York State in 2023. The Ne ..read more

In a new NYU Furman Center data brief, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O’Regan, and Ellie Lochhead used data on eviction cases from the New York State Office of Court Administration (OCA) to compare eviction patterns in different types of place-based subsidized housing in New York City and in other jurisdictions across New York State from 2016 to 2021. Cases filed due to non-payment of rent are the focus of the brief and represent the majority of eviction filings.  The authors find evidence that average eviction filing rates were consistently higher in public housing than in other types of ..read more

Introduction Proclaimed “the most comprehensive of all government efforts to close the housing supply shortfall in history,” the Biden-Harris Administration released a Housing Supply Action Plan in May 2022 to address the nation’s housing shortage. To discuss the plan and its implications at the local level, The National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University’s Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service, and the Terner Center ..read more