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Research & Policy
Implications and Geography of Office to Housing Conversions
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 converted in recent years. This post describes three resources to help inform the conversions debate.
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Research & Policy
Current GSE Guarantee Fees Are Too Low to Be Consistent with Regulatory Capital: Does This Mean a Large Increase Is Coming?
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, is among the most closely-watched numbers by housing finance policymakers and the mortgage lending industry. The G-fee level has been strategically steady since it rose to its current range (between 0.45 percent to 0.49 percent) in 2014, after having been purposefully increased by the FHFA and the two GSEs in prior years. Unfortunately, that level began to be called into question by the adoption in 2020 of a new and much higher capital requirement by the FHFA, which in turn seems to require a much higher average G-fee. As such a higher G-fee has not yet been seen, it creates a major policy uncertainty overhanging the mortgage lending system – is a big G-fee increase inevitably coming?
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Research & Policy
Manufactured Housing Is a Good Source of Unsubsidized Affordable Housing - Except When It’s Not: Key Facts and Figures, and Some Unusual Economics (Part 1)
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. This article aims to take a fresh look at MH to determine just how much it truly can be a large-scale natural source of additional affordable housing, whether owner-occupied or rental, as claimed by its supporters in the industry and policy community. As Part 1 of a three-part series, this article will go over some basic facts and figures about MH.
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News & Events
Policy Breakfast: The Proposed New York Housing Compact
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.
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Research & Policy
Eviction practices across subsidized housing in New York State
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.
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News & Events
Roundtable Discussion on the Biden-Harris Administration’s Housing Supply Action Plan
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 for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley held a joint webinar on October 28th.
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Research & Policy
Will the GSEs Repeat 2007 - 2009’s Large Losses?
The housing market has just experienced one of the largest upcycles in history. But what goes up usually does eventually come down - and very rapidly in this case. During the last major downcycle, i.e., when the mortgage bubble burst 15 years ago, the two companies lost the confidence of the markets as they began to suffer massive losses. So, given this history, it is reasonable to ask: Did the two GSEs forget the lessons of the past? Are they about to suffer those massive losses again?
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News & Events
Policy Breakfast: Measuring the Success of Housing Our Neighbors
On Monday, October 3, 2022 NYU Furman Center held a hybrid Policy Breakfast titled Measuring the Success of Housing Our Neighbors. The discussion examined the five-pillar plan entitled Housing Our Neighbors, which the Adams Administration released earlier this Spring to address New York City’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis. Panelists discussed how to evaluate progress towards the city’s housing goals, and the factors and data that can be used for guidance.
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The Latest GSE Stress Test Results: Showcasing the Need for Regulatory Capital Revision (Part 2)
On August 11, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator and conservator of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), released the latest annual regulatory stress test results for the two firms, based upon their yearend 2021 financial statements. This is the ninth year of the legally-mandated test, which has at its core the “severe adverse” economic scenario produced by the Federal Reserve. This second of a two-part series shows how the stress test result—i.e., a $4.5 billion loss for the two GSEs combined—is consistent with a level of required capital for the GSEs that is conservatively calculated to be in the $120-135 billion range.
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The Latest GSE Stress Test Results: Confirming a Major De-risking Success (Part 1)
On August 11, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator and conservator of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), released the latest annual stress test results for the two firms. This is the ninth year for the GSEs to be subject to the legally-mandated test, which reflects the “severe adverse” economic scenario produced by the Federal Reserve being applied to the companies’ year-end 2021 financial statements.
