What Do (U.S.) Housers Do Now?

It’s been a long three decades months.

I’ve been involved in the affordable housing and community development arena—as practitioner, advocate, or scholar—for over three decades. The last three months have been as destructive and demoralizing as I can remember. I was in college when David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, was taking an axe to the HUD budget, so I cannot really speak directly to that crisis. But this crisis is so fundamentally different than others in my professional lifetime, because it runs to the core of our political system and presents such fundamental challenges as to what we should do—and should not do—in the face of this new authoritarianism.

I was involved in community development and housing, and related research, during other urban and housing crises from the 1990s through to recent years. In the early 1990s, it was the continuing loss of factories and jobs from places like the west and northwest sides of Chicago, where I worked for a community development corporation trying to save some of those jobs. Then, at the Woodstock Institute in Chicago, I documented the “first” subprime boom of the 1990s, and the resulting now-almost-forgotten foreclosure crisis of the late 1990s, in which subprime refinance loans wreaked havoc in working class and mostly nonwhite neighborhoods in older industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, but also in places like Atlanta and Memphis. And then, as I continued to work on housing issues after becoming a full-time academic in the early 2000s, I saw the resurgence of subprime lenders, coming back more fiercely and with the assistance of the federal government, which preempted state and local efforts to rein them in after the late1990s crisis. I had worked with advocates in Chicago and around the country to put some of those regulations in place, especially in Illinois.

I moved to Atlanta in 2005, a city that was about to be hard hit by the larger, second subprime foreclosure boom and bust. Soon after arriving, I began tracking the rise in subprime lending and then the resulting foreclosures in Black neighborhoods in the city. The crisis soon spread beyond the city limits, hitting many Black suburbs particularly hard.

The story of foreclosures in Atlanta in the 2000s and the 2010s was one of Black homeowners and neighborhoods being hit disproportionately hard on the way down and then being largely left out of the “recovery” of home values that began in 2012 because lower-wealth households had such difficulty buying homes. As I describe in my 2022 book, Red Hot City, metro Atlanta had become the private equity industry’s number one “strike zone” for sweeping in and purchasing tens of thousands of foreclosed homes starting in 2012, when prices had hit their bottom, although smaller investors had started well before that. These were homes that had often been owned by Black families, who were disproportionately targeted by high-cost and often predatory subprime lenders. A metro that had among the largest number of Black homeowners in the country had now become the number one metro for large, private equity buyers of foreclosed homes, resulting in a massive shift in wealth from Black families to such firms, as well as to smaller investors.

As the housing market “recovered” from the mortgage crisis, rents and housing prices began to grow…and grow some more. Hot market cities—not just on the coasts but also in many Sunbelt metros like Atlanta—began to see a new wave of gentrification and displacement, what some scholars have called the “fifth wave.”

As these crises occurred, the federal government was sometimes helpful, but also sometimes less so. After the first subprime boom and bust of the late 1990s, for example, the federal government (via HUD, the Department of Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board) held hearings around the country to hear from affected communities. Staff at these agencies proposed policy recommendations to prevent a recurrence of another foreclosure crisis. Obviously, that didn’t work (most of the policy recommendations—some of them quite good—were never adopted), but at least there were serious efforts made. At least some agency staff, including some high-level officials like former Fed Governor Ned Gramlich, tried to get some regulations adopted. On the other hand, in the early 2000s, the federal government, and especially the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of national banks, went out of its way to preempt the efforts of some states that had passed laws to regulate subprime lenders. It took a substantially larger foreclosure crisis, one that precipitated the global financial meltdown of 2008, to bring about meaningful federal action. And while some serious gaps remain, the mortgage lending regulations put in place by the 2010 Dodd Frank Act, are far superior to the earlier “disclosure-only” regime that allowed predatory and reckless subprime lending to bring the economy crashing down.

What is happening now to the federal government, under the current administration, is, of course, far broader and deeper than any discussion of housing and housing policy can or should address. It goes well beyond a lack of agreement on goals and methods for helping less advantaged folks attain housing affordability and stability, as often happened during the first Trump Administration. It now goes to the heart of democratic and constitutional governance, and folks who specialize in writing about and litigating such fundamental issues have commented on it widely. Suffice it to say, there is a clear attempt to move the country towards a permanent authoritarian regime. This new authoritarianism involves undermining the appropriation decisions made by Congress through illegal impoundments, breaking contracts, targeting the speech and equity-seeking actions of particular firms and organizations, and even threatening the personal safety and freedom of individuals, especially those who are not citizens, many of whom may be in dire need of stable and affordable housing.

The overarching question that I want to raise is this: How should housers—including practitioners, researchers, and scholars—respond to such tumult, autocracy, and hostility? I won’t attempt to provide a response to this question here. Rather, my aim is to raise this question, to spur readers to think about it, as well as a number of related ones. Of course, each particular challenge will have a different context. Are you in a red or blue state? Does your organization work with undocumented households? Do you work with non-citizens? But some of the key, subsidiary questions that many housers might face include:

How might housers continue to do their work in spite of an administration that puts forward sometimes illegal and often unethical policies that can run counter to their organization’s mission and/or their personal ethics?

What will be the implications of not complying with an Administration edict or regulation? What will be the implications of complying?

Does not complying threaten the very existence of an organization? Does not complying threaten the welfare of those on whose behalf the organization works? Perhaps more importantly, does compliance threaten their welfare?

Are we prioritizing the maintenance of the organization or the welfare of our constituents and clients?

Can other, non-federal resources be found to fulfill a mission? Can we build a stronger, renewed coalition of state, local, and philanthropic organizations to provide such resources? Can we build new models of funding and financing that are less reliant on federal resources, especially those most vulnerable to executive interference?

I certainly understand that I am writing from a position of privilege, as my job does not currently depend on complying with any specific federal mandate or order. I am nearing retirement from my red-state public university, so seeking or retaining federal funds is not on my to-do list. However, this privilege allows me to raise these difficult questions as food for thought. I have no agenda in doing so other than challenging people to think about perhaps drawing some boundaries about what they, or their organizations, are willing to do, and not willing to do, in the face of this oppressive and dangerous new environment. And to perhaps stimulate some thought about how individuals and organizations can work to—or are already working to—stay true to their mission in such an environment. I would appreciate any feedback that you might have on these questions. You can email me at [email protected] or message me on Linked-In if you prefer.