Pension funds that provide a secure retirement for workers around the country have the potential to help alleviate the nation’s housing crisis by investing directly in efforts to ease the terrible shortage of homes, according to a new report, Investing for the Common Good: How Workers’ Pensions Can Help Solve the Housing Crisis.
Does paying a $20 “convenience fee” each month on top of your rent just to pay your rent sound reasonable to you? What about paying your landlord a “January fee” just because it happens to be January? Or paying an extra $40 a month for a mandatory “valet trash service” you never wanted in the first place? As unfair and infuriating as these scenarios may seem, paying outrageous, indefensible junk fees is an increasingly common reality for renters in this country.
On Friday, the U. S. Department of Justice took on Wall Street landlords and increasingly unaffordable rents by filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, accusing the private-equity-owned firm of facilitating price fixing among the country’s largest corporate landlords. Joined by eight state attorneys general, the lawsuit details how RealPage’s rent-setting software uses private information to raise rents – and, by extension, landlord profits – well beyond what is fair to the general public.
On December 6, 2023, Senior Policy Counsel Caroline Nagy spoke on a panel about rising insurance costs for affordable housing at the New York Housing Conference. Panelists discussed how the limited availability and increasing prices for property and casualty insurance is making it increasingly difficult
The Language Access Task Force of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) submits the following comments in strong support of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Fair Lending Oversight and Equitable Housing Finance.
“We have to think much more deeply as a society about how we view housing and whose interests are worth protecting the most,” [Caroline] Nagy, [senior policy analyst at AFR] said. “Looking at our tax and finance policy and seeing that we’re incentivizing the exact opposite is a very difficult, problematic place to be in.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Americans for Financial Reform, the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, Consumer Action, National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (National CAPACD), the National Consumer Law Center, the National Fair Housing Alliance, National Housing Resource Center, and UnidosUS celebrate today’s decision by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises), that will require lenders selling loans to the Enterprises to collect information on borrowers’ preferred language, as well as any housing counseling services they’ve used.
WASHINGTON – Today, National Consumer Law Center, Americans for Financial Reform, Consumer Action, Empire Justice Center, National Community Stabilization Trust, National Fair Housing Alliance, UnidosUS, and National CAPACD applauded the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) announcement that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will make it mandatory for lenders to use the Supplementary Consumer Information Form (SCIF) during the loan application process.
AFR joined a letter urging Congress to include strong investments in housing in any future budget reconciliation bill.
AFR joined a letter urging Congressional leaders to make sure that policies across the housing continuum are comprehensively included in the Budget Reconciliation Bill, especially those with a strong focus on affordable homeownership.