March 8, 2018
Sustainable Housing for FHA Borrowers
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Donghoon Lee and Joseph Tracy of the NY Fed have posted a staff report, Long-Term Outcomes of FHA First-Time Homebuyers. It opens,
The Commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), David Stevens, in remarks delivered on December 12, 2009, defined the purpose of the FHA as follows. “As a mission-driven organization, FHA’s goal is to provide sustainable homeownership options for qualified borrowers.” These remarks followed a remarkable increase in the scope of the FHA mortgage insurance program in response to the financial crisis and housing bust. This comment by Commissioner Stevens is important in that it clarifies a goal of the FHA program. However, this clarity was not followed up by the FHA with a definition of “sustainable homeownership.” Nor was there any documented attempt by the FHA to develop metrics to track their progress toward this objective, or a commitment by the FHA to make this information available to the public in the future.
Program evaluation is an integral part of any effective program—government or private. We illustrate in this paper that advances in data availability offer the opportunity for the FHA to both define what it means by sustainable homeownership and to measure its progress against this definition. We believe that it would be beneficial for the FHA to be transparent in this effort and to report on not only its definition and metrics, but also on its progress on an annual basis. Improved tracking of long-term outcomes of FHA borrowers will better help inform the FHA on program design. This should lead to improved outcomes over time and enhanced public support.
We focus our analysis on first-time homebuyers who are an important market segment for the FHA. The mission of sustainable homeownership is particularly relevant for these new homeowners. The benefits of a government mortgage insurance program that helps to facilitate the transition from renting to owning rests importantly on the success of these new borrowers in remaining homeowners in the future. However, to date, the FHA has not systematically tracked the progress of its first-time homebuyers after they pay off their credit risk to the FHA. We use the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) data to do this analysis starting with the 2002 cohort of FHA first-time homebuyers. (1, footnotes omitted)
This is inarguably right. The FHA should set forth performance metrics and provide annual progress reports for them. For too long, the FHA has cherry-picked metrics without providing a holistic perspective on its performance. The authors conclude,
A stated mission of the FHA mortgage insurance program is to support sustainable homeownership. An examination of the history of the FHA program illustrates a strong initial focus on sustainability, but legislated changes in the 1950s and early 1960s shifted the focus to affordability. If sustainability remains an important goal for the FHA, then it would be desirable for the FHA to define what they mean by sustainability and to track their performance over time. Only by being transparent and holding themselves accountable can the FHA improve on this objective over time. (14)
Amen to that.
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