Detroit’s mortgages return to pre-recession levels, still face obstacles

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2019/02/14/detroit-mortgages-2018/2795713002/ Detroit — Nearly 1,300 home buyers took out mortgagesin the city in 2018, a number not seen here since before the Great Recession.  The milestone signals a strengthening housing market in a city that once boasted one of the largest homeownership rates among African-Americans. But by 2012, the number of new mortgages had dwindled to just […]

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Understanding the Latest Housing Finance Reform Outline

https://www.enterprisecommunity.org/blog/2019/02/understanding-latest-housing-finance-reform-outline From Enterprise Community Partners: Last Friday, Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) released an outline for reform of the housing finance system that would convert Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (collectively, the government sponsored enterprises, or GSEs) into private guarantors of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that would then be sold through a platform operated by Ginnie Mae. […]

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Federal Watchdog Agency Steps Up Inquiry Into Home Contracts

An oldie but a goodie! Let’s remember that after our HSC committee members sent in letters to the CFPB they forced Fannie Mae to ban the largest companies perpetuating contract-for-deeds in the country. Fannie Mae sold foreclosed homes in bulk to companies post-bailout as the structure of Fannie Mae changes under new housing finance reforms. […]

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Harbour Portfolio Case Study

Conclusion: Thinking about the new wave of land installment contract purveyors as simply a resurgence of the Traditional Land Installment Contract Scheme, where the goal is to churn through as many buyers as possible, is a potentially simplistic view of the phenomenon of residential land installment contracts. Of course, there are reasons to doubt the […]

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Land contracts trip up would-be homeowners

BY Joel Kurth, The Detroit News (2/29/2016). It seemed like a sweet ticket to the American dream for Douglas Todd. Put $1,400 down, make monthly payments of $400 and own a house within five years. So he told his daughter, who also agreed to buy a home in northwest Detroit last year for similar terms. Now, after seven […]

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Where Evictions Hurt the Most

Read this great City Lab post here by Sarah HolderMeasuring the scale of America’s eviction problem has been a challenge—the data just isn’t available. While the U.S. Census bureau promised to start more diligently measuring evictions in 2017, there is not yet a national federal database. City-level records measure formal evictions, but are hard to […]

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Detroit: From Motor City to Housing Incubator

Detroit has been struggling to piece together its broken housing market, which has been partly frustrated by the unwillingness of banks to make small mortgages.CreditErin Kirkland for The New York Times; Photo illustration by The New York Times The 2008 financial crisis and 2013 city bankruptcy gutted Detroit’s housingmarket. Now, Detroit is experimenting with unorthodox […]

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