Comment Detail

Comment

I write as a professor of history and public policy, and former urban planner to urge FHFA to make tenant protections an essential condition of housing loans. Federal mortgage lending is the historic source of devastating, deep, multigenerational inequality and racism. The terrible underlying logic of redlining was that it was good fiscal policy to lend money to housing that deepened racism. But the role of government is to improve our shared conditions, not to go along with the incredible injustices we've inherited. Inflated rent -- especially in a time of low paying jobs -- is destroying lives and families. High rent, evictions, and landlord abuses are making cities places of constant work and no human development. They are deepening the huge gulf between corporate wealth and community poverty. Where the state invests in housing, it *must* be for the public good.