A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Transforming America’s Housing Policy

The following related resources provide background information on topics that the conference speakers will address on each panel.

Panel 1: Connecting the Dots Between Housing, Transportation, Energy and the Environment

• Panelist Ed Glaeser and Matthew Kahn look at the "greenest" cities and compare the sustainability of different cities and suburbs
• The T4America Campaign, which panelist Shelley Poticha helped launch, presents on how to connect transportation policy with housing development near transit stations
• Panelist Bruce Katz has spearheaded the Brookings Institution’s Blueprint for American Prosperity which links economic, environment and equity goals
• Author Danielle Arigoni makes the connection between affordable housing and smart growth
• Governor Schwarzeneggar signs sweeping legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through smarter land-use patterns

Panel 2: From Front Yards to Schoolyards: Linking Housing Policy and School Reform

• Lead paper author Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel have used quantitative methods to evaluate a variety of changes within the New York City school system

Panel 3: Where Do We Go From Here?: The Future of Fannie and Freddie

• Invited panelist George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, offers a number of concrete suggestions for restructuring the American mortgage finance systemPanelist Dwight Jaffee has written on how to apply lessons from the subprime mortgage crisis to the regulation of subprime lending
• Panelist Robert Van Order has analyzed the structure of debt securitization in the context of community economic development loans and home loans
• Panelist Peter Engberg Jensen, chairman for the Association of Danish Mortgage Banks and Group Chief Executive of Nykredit, has written on the notable features of the Danish mortgage finance system

Panel 4: Reclaiming the Promise of Homeownership: New Models to Help First-Time Homebuyers Achieve Stability and Build Wealth

• Panelist Robert Shiller’s new book, The Subprime Solution, proposes the “continuous workout” mortgage as a way to create more stable homeownership models and avoid foreclosure
• Panelist Christopher Joye has successfully launched Australia and the world’s most ambitious initiative to use shared-equity mortgages to help make homeownership more accessible to first time buyers without creating the financial strain of many subprime mortgages
• Panelist Eric Stein of Self-Help has worked to create the first secondary market in lease-purchase loans, another route to homeownership for those shut out of the market by the current credit crunch

Panel 5: Affordable Rental Housing Programs: Building Real Opportunities for Families

• Panelist Jill Khadduri and Charles Wilkins took on the question of how to prioritize scarce federal rental funds in this paper for the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
• The previous paper was completed as part of a 2007 symposium on Revisiting Rental Housing with papers available here
• Panelist Xavier de Souza Briggs and Margery Austin Turner reviewed the Clinton Administration’s Moving to Opportunity program’s successes and shortfalls to provide guidance for future design of similar initiatives
• Panelist Carol Galante leads BRIDGE Housing, one of the nation’s most prolific and innovative developers of affordable rental housing, especially successful in high-cost California markets