Pursuing the American Dream: Homeownership and the Role of Federal Housing Policy

Homeownership has always been a strong component of housing and housing policy in the United States. Owning a home is considered an important social and economic indicator, as well as a symbol of having a stake in society and contributing to the stability to the community. The system for producing housing units suitable for homeownership, and for financing home mortgages, has changed dramatically in recent decades. Technology and innovations have increased speed, efficiency and volume, resulting in more families finding mortgage financing than ever before and new homes being produced in record numbers. While homeownership rates are near all-time highs, particular demographic and economic populations, as well as distressed areas, lag behind. Despite greater access to mortgage credit for most families and communities, increased risks, and higher costs of credit, are being shouldered by consumers.This paper attempts to provide an overview of U.S. housing policies related to homeownership, an analysis of the barriers to homeownership, and background on pressing federal policies, programs, and regulations that could be refined to better support homeownership. As the Millennial Housing Commission considers recommendations regarding federal homeownership policy, several issues are paramount:1. What more can the federal government do to encourage and support homeownership?2. What can the federal government do to encourage innovations in the mortgage market, while adequately protecting consumers?3. What can the federal government do to help ensure that mortgage borrowers understand the rights and responsibilities of homeownership and are prepared to assume them?4. What can the federal government do to encourage the production and preservation of homes affordable to those with lower-incomes?Buying a home is typically the largest and most complicated financial commitment most households ever make. Would-be first-time buyers face many barriers to qualify for a conventionally-priced mortgage, including an inability to afford monthly payments, lacking sufficient savings for a downpayment and closing costs, having high debts or an unstable income. Even if they qualify, potential buyers may be hampered by a lack of affordable homes in a desirable area, or even information on how to buy a home or negotiate the best deal. Veiled or overt discriminatory practices still employed by some in the real estate and financial industries also conspire against some potential homebuyers. In combination, these hurdles, especially among low-income and minority populations, keep homeownership, and its ancillary social and economic benefits, out of reach.Policy makers and practitioners should understand the risks and implications of expanding homeownership to lower-income families. Unlike in the rental housing market, individual families must be able to successfully maintain their homes and their mortgages. Individual households need to have the capacity to stay current on their loans and to undertake needed repairs and upkeep. When families fail at homeownership, entire neighborhoods can be affected in addition to the substantial losses individual households must endure. To the extent that expanding homeownership to low- and very-low income people is a priority, correlated issues of access banking services, personal financial management and education policy must be considered.Based on interviews with leading practitioners, focus groups and other research, a series of policy changes are explored. Generally, policy prescriptions can be grouped into three categories:1.) Expanding the reach of mortgage markets for sustainable homeownership;2.) Educating and protecting consumers engaged in mortgage and home equity markets; and3.) Producing and preserving units suitable for affordable homeownership

A New Statistical Parser Based on Bigram Lexical Dependencies

This paper describes a new statistical parser which is based on probabilities of dependencies between head-words in the parse tree. Standard bigram probability estimation techniques are extended to calculate probabilities of dependencies between pairs of words. Tests using Wall Street Journal data show that the method performs at least as well as SPATTER (Magerman 95, Jelinek et al 94), which has the best published results for a statistical parser on this task. The simplicity of the approach means the model trains on 40,000 sentences in under 15 minutes. With a beam search strategy parsing speed can be improved to over 200 sentences a minute with negligible loss in accuracy.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL 96. Uuencoded gz-compressed postscript file created by csh script uufile

Three Generative, Lexicalised Models for Statistical Parsing

In this paper we first propose a new statistical parsing model, which is a generative model of lexicalised context-free grammar. We then extend the model to include a probabilistic treatment of both subcategorisation and wh-movement. Results on Wall Street Journal text show that the parser performs at 88.1/87.5% constituent precision/recall, an average improvement of 2.3% over (Collins 96).Comment: 8 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL/EACL 97

Ab initio lattice dynamics of nonconducting crystals by systematic fragmentation

A systematic method for approximating the ab initio electronic energy of crystal lattices has been improved by the incorporation of long range electrostatic and dispersion interactions. The effect of these long range interactions on the optimization of the crystal structure is reported. The harmonic lattice dynamics have been evaluated to give phonon frequencies and neutron scattering intensities. Exemplary results are reported for diamond, silicon, and α-quartz using Hartree-Fock, Möller-Plesset perturbation, and coupled-cluster levels of ab initio theory

Molecular potential energy surfaces constructed from interpolation of systematic fragment surfaces

A systematic method for approximating the ab initio electronic energy of molecules from the energies of molecular fragments has previously been presented. Here it is shown that this approach provides a feasible, systematic method for constructing a global molecular potential energy surface (PES) for reactions of a moderate-sized molecule from the corresponding surfaces for small molecular fragments. The method is demonstrated by construction of PESs for the reactions of a hydrogen atom with propane and n-pentane

\u3cem\u3eWillson v. Black-Bird Creek Marsh Co.\u3c/em\u3e, 25 U.S. 245 (1829): An Early Test of the Dormant Commerce Clause

In 1822, Delaware authorized the Blackbird Creek Marsh Company to bank and drain the Blackbird Creek in New Castle County. Subsequently, Thompson Wilson and others destroyed the structure built by the marsh company. The marsh company subsequently sued Mr. Wilson for the damage to its property. The parties eventually appealed their dispute to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court held that Delaware’s authorization to bank and dam the creek did not conflict with the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate commerce between the several states. Ultimately, the Court decided Willson in a manner inconsistent with its earlier decision in Gibbons v. Ogden and subsequent decisions regarding navigation of U.S. waters. Additionally, Mr. Wilson likely chose not to bring a Fifth Amendment takings claim due to the lack of legal support for such a claim at the time