Steven Malanga
Obsessive Housing Disorder
Nearly a century of Washington’s efforts to promote homeownership has produced one calamity after another. Time to stop.

Lax lending standards encouraged by the government contributed to our current foreclosure crisis.
In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article charging that the Bush administration’s housing policies had “stoked” the foreclosure crisis—and thus the financial meltdown. By pushing for lax lending standards, encouraging government enterprises to make mortgages more available, and leaning on private lenders to come up with innovative ways to lend to ever more Americans—using “the mighty muscle of the federal government,” as the president himself put it—Bush had lured millions of people into bad mortgages that they ultimately couldn’t afford, the Times said.
Yet almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and often with calamitous results. The Times’s analysis exemplified our collective amnesia about Washington’s repeated attempts to expand homeownership and the disasters they’ve caused. we clean them up and then—as if under some strange compulsion—set in motion the mechanisms of the next housing catastrophe.