Talk:Federal Housing Administration

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[edit] Broken links

The links are broken.--Jerryseinfeld 00:01, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC) The current links to "The FHA" actually point to a private, for-profit entity!

The article neglects to mention the FHA's practice of by refusing loans to people living in "declining" neighboorhoods. This "qualification" actually disqualified every African American from receiving loans. Meanwhile, 100 billion dollars were transfered to whites, thus enabling the creation of a white middle class. -Then write about it.

Why does someone keep changing the link from FHA's website to a private sector company's website? User:vnnc_vnnc

[edit] removal of Rethinking the COLOR Line Statement

I removed the following text, which was placed in the middle of the see also/links area, not in the actual article text.

Some of the most long term damaging effects of the American gap between resources available to whites, and those available to "aggrieved racial communities", have come from the FHA, by "Codified" policies of the FHA promoting racial discrimination. Following World War II, the FHA along with other private investors started withdrawing funds from inner-city neighborhoods, and funding mainly the growth and development of white, segregated, suburbs. FHA appraisers continually denied fedarally supported funds to Boyle Heights, in Los Angeles, simply because it was a racially mixed "melting pot area literally combed with diverse and subversive racial elements."
Rethinking the COLOR Line, 3rd Edition. Gallagher.

If this statement refelects a legitimite concern expressed with the agency/programs then it should be cleaned up to have a NPOV, and re-added in the proper section. kenj0418 17:16, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More on the race question

For anyone interested in the racial controversy, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier or one of several other informative histories (Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, etc.). The original entry here for FHA is misleading, at best! Historians and policy analysts who work on this subject disagree very strongly with the general claims made in the main entry, above.


There is an interesting op-ed piece on the NY Times web site, Dec-26-2007 by Louis Hyman who teaches history at Harvard entitled "The Orginal Subprime Crisis": http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/opinion/26hyman.html

Discussing the National Housing Act of 1968 (which is why I am at this article trying to get a different perspective), the author writes:

  • By 1971, Congressional and press investigations found the program riddled with fraud. Section 235 accelerated existing white flight by providing poor African-Americans with money to buy out their anxious white neighbors, who in turn accepted below-market prices for their houses. Real estate agents frightened white homeowners with visions of all-black neighborhoods financed by government money, and then pocketed the proceeds from the resulting high home turnover.

Basically the author is claiming that the Housing Act of 1968 was a government program aimed at making the urban poor home owners but became instead a government program for people in the real estate business to make a lot of money through housing resales. Since the mortagages were government backed US tax payers were left with the bill. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.144.162.105 (talk) 15:30, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rewording unsourced inflammatory language

From "Conversely, HUD has recently approached Congress to make up a $143,000,000 budget shortfall stemming from the FHA program. This is the first time in three decades HUD has made this request. Even though FHA is statutorily required to be budget neutral, the FHA program has been so grossly mismanaged, that coming off the heels of the largest real estate boom in America's history, they are now asking for the taxpayer's to bail them out. If no changes are made to the FHA program, the GAO is projecting taxpayer funded subsidies of half a billion dollars over the next three years."

to

"Conversely, HUD has recently approached Congress to make up a $143,000,000 budget shortfall stemming from the FHA program. This is the first time in three decades HUD has made this request. Even though FHA is statutorily required to be budget neutral, the GAO is projecting taxpayer funded subsidies of half a billion dollars over the next three years, if no changes are made to the FHA program." Wportre 12:33, 31 August 2007 (UTC)