September 17, 2014
The Post ran a piece today discussing the agenda of Julian Castro, the new secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary. At one point the piece discusses affordable housing. It then refers to the Johnson-Crapo bill for privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This bill has a provision for a fund that would support affordable housing.
It would have been worth noting the size of the fund. It would get its revenue from a 0.1 percent tax on mortgages issued through the system. If an average of $1.5 trillion a year in mortgages are issued, this tax would raise $1.5 billion annually.
If it costs $150,000 to build an average unit of affordable housing, this fund will be able to support construction of roughly 10,000 units a year, an amount equal to roughly 0.007 percent of the housing stock. Alternatively, if this money was used to subsidize rent, it would provide a subsidy of $1,500 a year ($125 a month) to 1 million households.
Both of these routes may be very helpful to the people who benefit, but they are not of a scale necessary to ensure affordable housing to low and moderate income families. It is worth noting in this respect that there is no dispute that the Johnson-Crapo bill proposal would raise the cost of mortgages. The range of estimates are in the neighborhood of 0.5 percentage points to over 2.0 percentage points.
If we assume that the actual impact is close to a 0.5 percentage point increase, this would imply that a family with a $200,000 mortgage would pay an extra $1,000 a year in interest due to Johnson-Crapo. This is likely to have far more impact in making housing less affordable than the subsidies funded through the bill’s tax to promote affordable housing.
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