Word: renting
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...Department of Culture could hire administrative staffers and full-time workers in addition to putting the unemployed of the arts sector back on their feet and working for a common purpose. Some might argue that financing artists should be low on our priority totem pole. But artists are taxpayers, rent-payers, and consumers—just like everyone else. This country has 100,000 nonprofit arts groups, which employ some six million people and contribute $167 billion to the economy per year. Of course, in the long term we could use more engineers and science teachers, but right...
What if people who lost their homes to foreclosure could rent them back from the lenders that repossessed them? That idea, which has lingered on the outskirts of the housing-crisis debate, got a boost last week when the federal housing agency Fannie Mae said it would start offering leases of up to 12 months when other avenues to keeping families in their homes, like loan modification, dead-end. "It's a big step forward," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a longtime proponent of rent-back programs...
...first blush, the notion seems like a win-win-win. Former homeowners get to stay in their houses; even if a mortgage payment isn't affordable, market rent may be. Neighborhoods ostensibly benefit too, since it's safer - and better for property prices - when blocks aren't full of foreclosure-related vacancies. And lenders? Turning properties into rentals until the market rebounds may sound like an appealing alternative to selling assets at cut-rate prices. "This is another tool to use, and it doesn't cost the government anything," says Representative Gary Miller of California, who has sponsored a bill...
...first, including loan modification and trying to sell the house for less than it's worth. Only people who exhaust other options and are eligible for a deed in lieu of foreclosure - a process of handing over the deed in exchange for loan forgiveness - will have the option to rent. In the first nine months of 2009, Fannie Mae executed just under 2,000 deed-in-lieu transactions - the pool from which renters will come. Freddie Mac, another federal housing agency, has been offering leases to former owners on a month-to-month basis since March but hasn't said...
...none of that means rent-backs won't eventually take off. There are plenty of examples in the recent past of housing policies starting at the federal housing agencies and later expanding industry-wide thanks to strong-arming from some combination of the Obama Administration and Congress. Loan modifications are the quintessential example. Perhaps one more relevant bit here is the law that was passed earlier this year requiring banks that repossess houses to honor the terms of existing leases (i.e., to not immediately kick out any existing renters). Fannie Mae already had such a policy in place. Over...