Search Results
Speech
Observations on housing, lending, and foreclosure prevention.
Presented by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, at the Citizens? Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA) 41st Annual Dinner and Meeting, Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, October 16, 2008
Journal Article
What do the neighbors think?: assessing the community impact of neighborhood stabilization efforts
In the wake of the mortgage crisis, neighborhood stabilization efforts have been launched to allay some of the "secondary effects of the mortgage crisis?the economic and social impacts on properties, neighborhoods, and communities." One example of this kind of effort is the federally funded Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), which provided several million dollars to the City of Boston in order to acquire, rehabilitate, and resell abandoned, foreclosed homes in high-foreclosure neighborhoods. The author discusses preliminary findings from ongoing research exploring the effect of ...
Working Paper
Subprime outcomes: risky mortgages, homeownership experiences, and foreclosures
This paper provides the first rigorous assessment of the homeownership experiences of subprime borrowers. We consider homeowners who used subprime mortgages to buy their homes, and estimate how often these borrowers end up in foreclosure. In order to evaluate these issues, we analyze homeownership experiences in Massachusetts over the 1989?2007 period using a competing risks, proportional hazard framework. We present two main findings. First, homeownerships that begin with a subprime purchase mortgage end up in foreclosure almost 20 percent of the time, or more than 6 times as often as ...
Foreclosures, house-price changes, and subprime mortgages in Massachusetts cities and towns
This module shows: The changing patterns in foreclosure rates and subprime mortgage originations across Massachusetts cities and towns over time; How movements in these rates compare with movements in house prices for any user-selected city or town; The association between foreclosure rates and median income in these cities and towns.
Discussion Paper
The role of proximity in foreclosure externalities: evidence from condominiums
We explore several different explanations of the effect of foreclosures on neighboring properties using a dataset of transactions in Boston, for which we have rich data on the size and location of condominium associations. There is compelling evidence against a supply effect?nearby condo foreclosures in different associations, and even those within the same association but at different physical addresses, have little impact on condo sale prices. However, condos transact at average discounts of 2.4 percent when a foreclosure shares the same physical address. We view the results as indicating ...
Journal Article
Tackling foreclosure
With foreclosure rates rising nationwide, public officials, financial institutions, and community organizations are launching prevention programs and educating housing counselors and attorneys on the issue.
Discussion Paper
Receivership : a coordinated strategy to stabilize troubled properties
With the impact of municipal debt burdens, coupled with the effects of declining real estate prices and the US financial crisis, municipalities are looking for novel and cost-effective approaches to address abandoned, blighted and/or foreclosed properties that threaten the quality of life of their communities. Receivership, the use of statutory power to seize buildings and place properties under control of a judicially supervised 'receiver', can be an effective tool to tackle the problem of troubled properties which repeatedly violate safety and sanitary codes. Despite its potential, ...
Discussion Paper
A profile of the mortgage crisis in a low-and-moderate-income community
This paper assesses the impact of the mortgage crisis on Chelsea, Massachusetts, a low-and-moderate-income community of 35,000 adjacent to Boston. After years of rapid growth, house prices started falling in 2005. According to our repeat-sales indices, by the end of 2009 prices had fallen by as much as 50 percent from their peak. Foreclosures have soared and lenders have repossessed or allowed short sales on more than 330 homes, resulting in a forced exit of at least one in 30 of the town's households. A large fraction of the foreclosed properties were two- or three-family homes, so the ...
Journal Article
Massachusetts’ efforts to address foreclosed properties
Massachusetts has been ahead of the curve in combating neighborhood deterioration as real-estate-owned (lender-owned) foreclosed properties increase. Affordable housing developers, community groups, municipal and state officials, and nonprofits have created a Foreclosed Property Task Force and an online database that is accessible by all the partners. The database is already improving decision making about where resources would have the most impact.
Journal Article
New ideas for old REOs: a disposition framework for marketing REOs for rental properties
The unprecedented accumulation of foreclosed properties in recent years has presented a challenge to communities, banks, and policymakers. This article outlines a potential disposition framework for government-sponsored and private enterprises to identify which foreclosed properties would be most appropriate for rental and which would remain most appropriate for homeownership. This disposition framework is then applied to the existing stock of foreclosed properties in Massachusetts, and the authors explore the possible utility of this analytic technique as a policy tool.