Subject: Policies

  • Occupied Owner: Our Lot, by Alyssa Katz

    For decades, the United States government, pushed by its business partners in the financial and real estate world, "marched the nation into a delusion." The fantasy is that we can create wealth for millions of homeowners by enriching investors, brokerage and mortgage companies and Wall Street bankers "to the fullest extent possible with few boundaries."

  • The Continued Importance of Fair Lending in the Age of Obama

    Housing discrimination continues to plague the market, as does the myth that the housing crisis resulted from extending homeownership and home mortgage credit to historically underserved groups: minority families. Even with the Obama administration's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan and, within that, the Making Home Affordable program, minority groups continue to suffer ongoing discrimination and fair housing violations.

  • Stemming the Red Tide

    Greedy bankers, brokers, and investors abused their political power and forced millions of Americans to lose their homes. Now what can we do to solve the crisis?

  • Freedom for the Pike

    Book Review: Subprime Mortgages: America's Latest Boom and Bust, by Edward M. Gramlich.
    Urban Institute Press, 2007, 120 pp. $25.00 (hardcover).

  • Help Now, Not Later

    A real public-private partnership to assist homeowners in peril of foreclosure is achievable in short order, and there's no time to lose.

  • Demonstrators march outside the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2006 as the justices hear arguments on voluntary school desegregation programs in Seattle and Louisville.

    The Supreme Denial of Integration

    Despite the high court's recent blow to achieving classroom diversity, fair-housing practices can go a long way toward moving the country beyond racism.

  • From right, Senators John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama at a New Hampshire debate.

    Housing the Working Poor

    What big ideas should housing activists put forward to the next president and Congress? Assuming that a Democrat wins the White House and that the Democrats hold onto or even expand their majority in Congress, housing advocates have an opening to promote a progressive agenda. Are we ready?

  • Jonathan F. Fanton

    Building a Better Housing Policy

    Shelterforce editor Alice Chasan talks to Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, about an ambitious new project aimed at reframing the national conversation about why housing matters.

  • David C. Iglesias, former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, lost favor with GOP leaders when he declined to bring charges against ACORN for alleged voter-registration fraud.

    Mock the Vote

    Since the Justice Department axed nine U.S. attorneys, all eyes have been on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, but the scandal began with a GOP strategy to stifle grass-roots registration of poor minority voters.

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