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Journal Article
Student Debt vs. Homeownership
How Young Adults’ Homeownership Differs Across Generations
St. Louis Fed economist Victoria Gregory discusses her research on wealth, homeownership and location patterns for young adults from the baby boom to Gen Z.
Working Paper
Credit Score Doctors
We study how the existence of cutoffs in credit scores affects the behavior of homebuyers. Borrowers are more likely to purchase houses after their credit scores cross over a cutoff to qualify them for a higher credit score bin. However, the credit accounts of these individuals (crossover group) are more likely to become delinquent within four years following home purchases than the accounts of those who had stayed in the same bin (non-crossover group). The effect is not only concentrated in subprime bins, but in other bins as well. It is neither limited to pre-crisis period nor curtailed by ...
Report
Home Improvement Lending in the Third Federal Reserve District: Patterns by Income, Race, and Gender
Historically, local, state, and federal policies in the U.S. have encouraged households of all backgrounds to pursue homeownership because of the various benefits of owning a home, such as wealth building, protection against housing cost inflation, and psychological well-being, among others.1 Research has demonstrated that the financial, physical, and psychological benefits associated with owning a home have accrued to homeowners of all stripes. However, LMI, minority, and elderly households often face financial barriers to sustaining homeownership over the long run.
Journal Article
Overview of the Section 8 home-ownership option
Seeking to promote affordable housing for low-income families, Congress created the home-ownership option for families receiving Section 8 tenant-based assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued its final rule implementing the Section 8 home-ownership program on October 12, 2000.e-Perspectives asked Roman Palomares, deputy director of HUD's Office of Public Housing in Fort Worth, Texas, to provide an overview of the program. Here's what he had to say.
Working Paper
Leaving Households Behind: Institutional Investors and the U.S. Housing Recovery
Ten years after the mortgage crisis, the U.S. housing market has rebounded significantly with house prices now near the peak achieved during the boom. Homeownership rates, on the other hand, have continued to decline. We reconcile the two phenomena by documenting the rising presence of institutional investors in this market. Our analysis makes use of housing transaction data. By exploiting heterogeneity in zip codes' exposure to the First Look program instituted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that affected investors' access to foreclosed properties, we establish the causal relationship between ...
Discussion Paper
Do People View Housing as a Good Investment and Why?
Housing represents the largest asset owned by most households and is a major means of wealth accumulation, particularly for the middle class. Yet there is limited understanding of how households view housing as an investment relative to financial assets, in part because of their differences beyond the usual risk and return trade-off. Housing offers households an accessible source of leverage and a commitment device for saving through an amortization schedule. For an owner-occupied residence, it also provides stability and hedges for rising housing costs. On the other hand, housing is much ...
Journal Article
Intergenerational Homeownership and Mortgage Distress
Rates of US homeownership have declined in the past two decades, and the decline has been especially pronounced for young adults. Motivated by recent research that explores the ways in which personal experiences can affect financial attitudes and beliefs, we explore whether the negative homeownership experiences of parents during the 2008 financial crisis could have caused their children to view homeownership less favorably. We find that parental mortgage distress negatively correlates with the probability that a child will purchase a home, and we explore various channels through which this ...
The Great Recession’s Impact on Homeownership
In the recession’s aftermath, there were generational differences in homeownership rates, with progressively worsening rates for younger generations.
Journal Article
San Antonio Tackles Foreclosure
A look-to city for programs to help low- and moderate-income working families build assets, San Antonio has taken on the challenge of homeownership preservation.