"Federal Housing Administration mortgages -- the affordable path to homeownership for many first-time buyers, minorities and low-income Americans -- now have the highest delinquency rate in at least four decades."
FHA Mortgage Delinquencies Reach a Record, Led by New Jersey

Bloomberg
By Prashant Gopal [Aug 17, 2020]
The share of late FHA loans rose to almost 16% in the second quarter, up from about 9.7% in the previous three months and the highest level in records dating back to 1979, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Monday. The delinquency rate for conventional loans, by comparison, was 6.7%.

Millions of Americans stopped paying their mortgages after losing jobs in the coronavirus crisis. Those on the lower end of the income scale are most likely to have FHA loans, which allow borrowers with shaky credit to buy homes with small down payments.

For now, most of them are protected from foreclosure by the federal forbearance program, in which borrowers with pandemic-related hardships can delay payments for as much as a year without penalty. As of Aug. 9, about 3.6 million homeowners were in forbearance, representing 7.2% of loans, the MBA said in a separate report. The share has decreased for nine straight weeks.
Homing In: Musings on Poverty and Homeownership
We just started a podcast!

Check it out, here!

On our most recent episode, we interviewed Robert Apodaca, who has over 40 years of experience with housing legislation and the nonprofit sector.

Tune in to learn more about what it means to start a nonprofit, the complexities of California housing legislation, and the history of California Community Builders!
Trump Isn’t the First President to Neglect Fair Housing
A lack of federal enforcement means most U.S. states and localities have failed to take meaningful steps to “affirmatively further fair housing.” 

Bloomberg
By Craig Gurian [Aug 20, 2020]
The recent rule from U.S. President Donald Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development dramatically waters down the obligation of states and localities receiving federal funds intended to “affirmatively further fair housing.”

Formally published in the Federal Register on Friday, the HUD rule says grant recipients need not take any action to remove segregation-perpetuating barriers to fair housing choice such as exclusionary zoning. As long as they say they have done something — like provide “safe and decent housing” — HUD will treat them as compliant. Even the term “segregation” — let alone the requirement to do anything about it — has been scrubbed from the rule altogether.

The president has left no doubt what he is about: trying to stoke fear of racial change by pretending that the Obama-era rule — one that his administration had already suspended — was destroying the well-being of suburban communities. Suburbanites, Trump tweeted, need to be protected from low-income housing and crime that the earlier rule had invited in. Certainly, both his new rule and his rhetoric must be condemned, just as it was necessary to fight back in 1963 against George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation forever” ideology of unvarnished white supremacy. But even when Trump is deservedly shown the door in November, enormous challenges will remain in tackling the ongoing scourge of residential racial segregation. 

As the article unfortunately states, "no presidential administration (including the Obama administration) ever had the political courage to provide a robust, non-defensive explanation for why affirmative steps are needed to eliminate barriers to fair housing."

Action must be taken to undo the residential segregation that has plagued America for far too long.
Powerful video that echoes a lot of our sentiments - check it out!
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