August 1, 2025
Cornell Law School Is Hiring a Transactional Clinician
Cornell is hiring a transactional clinician to be based in Ithaca in the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic and the Blassberg-Rice Center for Entrepreneurship Law.
The appointment will be to the long-term, presumptively renewable, contract track for permanent clinical faculty at Cornell Law School, with voting rights and academic leave rights consistent with the other permanent clinicians.
The full job posting is linked here.
The application deadline is September 30, but candidates are encouraged to apply early.
August 1, 2025 | Permalink | No Comments
July 4, 2025
Mamdani and Affordable Housing Development
CNN quoted me in Zohran Mamdani Has Big Housing Plans. Here’s What Stands in The Way. It reads, in part,
Mamdani’s rent freeze plan could undermine his goal of building 200,000 publicly subsidized, rent-stabilized, permanently affordable homes over the next decade for low-income households and seniors.
That’s because the private sector may be dissuaded from participating if these buildings don’t include market-rate housing. The private sector has a “very important role” to play in building housing, Mamdani has said.
“A rent freeze will change how a conversion might pay off for the developer,” said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who served on the Rent Guidelines Board under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
And to be permanently affordable for extremely low-income renters, it will require deeper government subsidies than Mamdani has pledged, experts say. Previous New York City mayors have attempted to produce housing for a wide range of incomes to help offset higher subsidies for deeply-affordable units.
“It’s in the right direction to focus on people with the greatest affordability challenges,” said Alex Schwartz, an urban policy professor at The New School and a current member of the Rent Guidelines Board. “It’s important to recognize that the capital dollars won’t go as far in terms of total numbers of units if they only go toward people with extremely low incomes.”
Mamdani wants the city to borrow $70 billion to build affordable housing over the next decade, on top of the roughly $25 billion it already plans to invest.
That’s no easy task – he will need state approval since the plan would exceed the city’s debt limit by around $30 billion, as well as the New York City Council’s approval of zoning reforms that would make it easier to build.
“This would be a significant increase in city capital to produce deeply affordable housing,” said Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York City Housing Conference, a non-profit affordable housing policy and advocacy organization. “It’s not something he can just implement on his own. It will take a political coalition to make this happen.”
July 4, 2025 | Permalink | No Comments
June 30, 2025
Rent Freezes in NYC

Zohran Mamdani, Democratic Nominee for Mayor of NYC
The New York Times quoted me in Free Buses and Billions in New Taxes. Can Mamdani Achieve His Plans? It reads, in part,
A major pillar of Mr. Mamdani’s economic plan is housing: He wants to build 200,000 units of affordable housing and freeze rent on the city’s nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments.
But to build, he has said the city will have to borrow $70 billion, exceeding its debt limit by some $30 billion. Going over the limit would require state approval.
Freezing rent, on the other hand, is relatively straightforward and has precedent. But there are consequences.
Mayors cannot freeze rent on their own, but they do appoint the nine members on the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets rents on the city’s rent-stabilized units.
David Reiss, who served on the board under Mr. de Blasio, said that before it voted, members generally considered the overall state of housing in the city, including affordability, landlord expenses and economic conditions.
He said that members could decide that affordability was the most important factor and vote to freeze rents, as they did in 2015, 2016 and 2020.
“A rent freeze would meet the needs of a lot of people who are having a hard time keeping up with their rent,” Mr. Reiss said, “but it’s an unsustainable operation.”
Landlords, including those whose buildings have a large majority of rent-stabilized units, are increasingly saying that they are not collecting enough rent to maintain units.
“Are we going to be pushing a distinct portion of the housing market into great distress because their expenses are outstripping their income?” Mr. Reiss said.
June 30, 2025 | Permalink | No Comments
May 30, 2025
Fannie, Freddie and Trump

FHFA Director Bill Pulte
Central Banking quoted me in Fannie, Freddie . . . and Donald. It reads, in part,
IIn a client note on May 13, investment management firm Pimco said any privatisation of Fannie and Freddie would be a solution in search of a problem.
“If the GSEs are released but the government remains accountable to come to their rescue, wouldn’t taxpayers ultimately be the biggest loser, once again, by seeing GSE gains privatised but losses socialised?” it said, adding: “Don’t fix what’s not broken.”
David Reiss, professor at Cornell Law School, says Pimco’s view reflects the fact that the mortgage market has been functioning “pretty smoothly” since Fannie and Freddie were nationalised. According to this viewpoint, there is “no need to release them from conservatorship”.
However, Reiss says he does not like to see so much power and influence concentrated in the GSEs, and he believes the private sector would do a better job of evaluating credit risk.
“Some people – mostly investors in Fannie and Freddie securities – think [privatisation] is the right thing to do because the conservatorships were supposed to be temporary and the companies should be returned to private control and investors should be able to get some kind of return on their investments,” he says.
Reiss adds that some members of the Trump administration think privatisation would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that could be used to help pay down the national debt, offset tax cuts and seed a sovereign wealth fund.
Joe Tracy, senior fellow with think-tank the American Enterprise Institute and a former official with the Federal Reserve banks of New York and Dallas, agrees with Reiss. “The problem is that they are in conservatorship limbo, so the government has effectively nationalised a large segment of mortgage finance,” he says. “This should be carried out by the private sector.”
* * *
Lawrence White, professor at New York University and co-author of Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance, says the GSEs are unlikely to become boring unless they are broken down. He believes that if Fannie and Freddie are privatised in their current form, each enterprise will be likely to pose a systemic risk from a financial stability perspective.
“The implication is that their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency [FHFAI, will need to have strong powers of examination and supervision and will need to impose substantial, risk-adjusted capital requirements,” he says.
“It is unclear whether there will be implications for the Fed as lender of last resort, since the Fed’s lending function is currently limited to banks.”
Reiss agrees that the two lenders are systemically important. If they “had to significantly scale back their lending, it would likely cause a crisis in the financial markets”, he says. “If that crisis were not quickly addressed it would cause a crisis in the real economy as well, freezing up credit for new construction and resales.”
Given that the two GSEs issue more than 70% of the outstanding $9 trillion of mortgage-backed securities in the US and, if privatised, would be two of the country’s largest publicly traded companies, the financial stability risks are clear, he says.
Reiss adds that if the privatisations were poorly planned, and if this were priced in by the markets, it would lead to “higher mortgage rates, with all of the knock-on effects that would have”. This, he says, would “increase the magnitude of a financial crisis if the two companies were to report poor financial results down the line”
Reiss’s interpretation of the Fed’s role is different to that of White, and he believes history may end up repeating itself. He says that although the FHFA is Fannie and Freddie’s primary regulator, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 requires the Fed to be consulted about any federal government processes related to the companies.
“The Fed may also co-ordinate with other parts of the federal government in responding to a financial crisis, such as purchasing Fannie and Freddie securities, as they did during the financial crisis of 2007-08,” he says. “One could well imagine the Fed playing a similar role in future crises involving Fannie and Freddie.
May 30, 2025 | Permalink | No Comments