Housing

For lower-income households, the barriers to homeownership can seem insurmountable. Lending programs can help address the lack of traditional financing available to buyers who are often left out of homeownership—those who need a small-dollar mortgage.

Prominent rent growth indices often give strikingly different measurements of rent inflation. We create new indices from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) rent microdata using a repeat-rent index methodology and show that this discrepancy is almost entirely explained by differences in rent growth for new tenants relative to the average rent growth for all tenants. Rent inflation for new tenants leads the official BLS rent inflation by four quarters. As rent is the largest component of the consumer price index, this has implications for our understanding of aggregate inflation dynamics and guiding monetary policy.

Several years ago, the Cleveland Fed examined data for seven large urban counties in our region.  At that time, we looked at how these counties performed post-Great Recession. In this report, we revisit those seven counties and examine how they performed during the COVID-19 pandemic and in an environment of record-low interest rates.

Temporary policies put in place to protect renters are beginning to expire. To understand how the crisis is affecting evictions, our researchers measured eviction filing activity in 44 cities and counties across the nation.

When the coronavirus pandemic began, many feared the housing market would collapse as it did in the mid-2000s. Instead, the industry has struggled to keep up with an influx of demand for homes, leading to rapidly rising prices. What’s next for residential real estate and construction?

Access to schools and job-referral networks in neighborhoods with a high socioeconomic status could be a pathway to economic mobility for Black Americans. Yet, even with the same household income or wealth, Black and white Americans often live in separate neighborhoods, with Black neighborhoods poorer than white ones.

Home prices are rising, pricing out many potential homebuyers. This alternative homeownership model keeps homes affordable for lower-income buyers and increasingly for buyers of color.

Hear from a renter, a landlord, a Housing Court judge, and a Legal Aid attorney in Cleveland about the difficulties of the pandemic and solutions that show promise for times of crisis and times of relative stability in our new story.

Think you don’t have the resources to increase equity and inclusion? Maybe you already have what you need. Toledo’s approach makes use of financial resources and partnerships already in place.

The Community Reinvestment Act is up for its first significant revision in 25 years. It’s important we optimize this tool to address systemic disinvestment in lower-income and minority communities.

The US housing boom of the early 2000s featured a substantial increase in subprime debt, but some evidence points away from this being the primary driver of the housing crisis that followed.

To support those banks, businesses, and municipalities that want to borrow money by issuing commercial paper, the Fed will purchase certain types of commercial paper from eligible issuers until March 17, 2021.

During the 2000s housing bust, Cleveland’s Slavic Village was dubbed “ground zero of the foreclosure crisis” by the national media. Despite this, during the preceding housing boom Cleveland had stable house price growth and relatively low mortgage debt growth, a stark contrast to circumstances in areas such as California that had exceptionally high house price and mortgage debt growth. What explains the relatively minor housing boom and perceived sharp downturn in Cleveland? In this Commentary I show that while subprime debt was a prominent source of debt in Cleveland and especially in its Slavic Village neighborhood during the 2000s, it is difficult to peg subprime debt as playing a causal role in the subsequent foreclosure crisis.