Confronting Urban Crisis and Opportunity in the 1990s: An Insiders’ View on How Fannie Mae’s Housing Research Helped Reset Policy and Remade Cities

Abstract

In response to the urban crisis of the early 1990s, the government-sponsored enterprise known as Fannie Mae used what would become the Annual Housing Conference (AHC) to influence urban and housing policy. This article traces the history of the AHC in relation to Housing Policy Debate as part of a concerted effort of Fannie Mae to invest in and upgrade the quality of urban and housing policy research during the 1990s. The impact of these conferences on the policy community in universities, Washington DC, the states, and indeed the world is analyzed by highlighting some of work that came out of the more influential conferences including the 1991 Homeless Conference, the 1994 Access to Opportunity Conference, and the 1997 Social Capital Conference. The article is concluded with an appraisal of the AHC’s legacy.

Keywords:

• Fannie Mae
• Annual Housing Conference
• housing and urban policy
• 1990s
• housing research
• urban crisis

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from the highly useful comments of some of our former colleagues in the staff of Fannie Mae’s Office of Housing Research (OHR) in the corporation and the Fannie Mae Foundation, including James Carr, Stephen Hornburg, and Carol Bell. We thank them for kindly providing their recollections, additional material, and enhancements to the article.

Notes

1. From 1990 to 1995, the Annual Housing Conference (AHC) was produced by Fannie Mae’s Office of Housing Research; from 1996 to 2007, the AHC was arranged by the Fannie Mae Foundation (FMF).

2. An analysis of the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) website data shows that half the current accredited graduate programs in urban planning trace their origins to the 1960s and 1970s (37 of 75; see http://www.planningaccreditationboard.org/).

3. See Levine (1995, p. 18) for a discussion of the dual goals that Fannie Mae set for itself in the mid-to-late 1990s. Levine was senior vice president for Low and Moderate Income Housing at Fannie Mae during this time.

4. The difference in strategy between the two CEOs was that Maxwell was concerned with poverty, inequality and housing affordability, whereas Johnson went beyond just homeownership and rental affordability to include broader community development (interview with Jim Carr, April 2017).

5. Citations were not as much of an issue at first because Fannie Mae was not a typical academic venue. In fact, it took considerable effort to get the Journal recognized in standard academic indices. Housing Policy Debate now stands as one of the highest rated power-score titles among urban affairs journals.

6. Before Fannie Mae, Carr and Hornburg had worked for Florida’s senator Lawton Chiles, who was a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in the 1980s. Senator Chiles retired in 1989.

7. Both authors of this article worked in the OHR and were hired by Carr and Hornburg to manage the AHC and Housing Policy Debate. Much of the background in this section comes from an insider direct knowledge of how Fannie Mae operated and includes personal interpretations on the intentions behind its commitment to improve housing and urban policy research.

8. The OHR, although still a part of the Fannie Mae Corporation, consisted of two units: a policy group headed by Steve Hornburg and a finance group originally headed by Ellen Roche. At first, these units took turns in organizing, managing, and supporting the AHC, including the soliciting, choosing, and editing of the articles presented at the conferences. Eventually, most of the management was shifted to the policy group.

9. The OHR went through several iterations of name changes while it was at the FMF. For several years, the shop carried the title “Policy, Research, Evaluation and Training.” For simplicity, the OHR is referred to as “Housing Research” hereafter.

10. Figures for the Housing Research budgets come from personal documents and internal worksheets retained by Robert Lang. The budget numbers were also fact-checked with several ex-FMF employees who are acknowledged at the end of the article.

11. Although the Journal of Housing Research mainly published research related to economics, finance, and mortgages, there was some spillover between journals. Housing Policy Debate did publish economic articles, but only those that contributed to the development of policy implications.

12. These figures were checked with Carol Bell, who for many years was the publications editor and business manager on both journals.

13. For example, in 1999 the FMF split the location for the AHC with the first part held in Washington DC in September and the second part held at the ACSP Conference in Chicago, Illinois in November. That year the AHC was themed to the 50th anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949 (Fannie Mae Foundation, 1999).

14. The partnership with the ACSP was particularly important to Jim Carr, who wanted to expand the existing meager financial support for housing and community development research. As part of this support, Jim also wanted to create a research infrastructure for students as well as academics on an annual basis.

15. Robert Lang and Carol Bell tabulated the conference articles in the 1999 ACSP in Chicago and the 2000 ACSP in Atlanta, Georgia to derive that figure.

16. Fannie Mae’s partnerships were not just limited to academic organizations and domestic groups, but included advocacy, practitioners and nonprofit groups such as the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO). Fannie Mae also partnered with a few international groups in Canada and the United Kingdom, such as the Richard Rowntree Foundation in England.

17. These numbers are drawn from Robert Lang’s internal budget documents.

18. Danielsen (2015) details the history of the Rouse–Maxwell Commission and its influence on Fannie Mae and Housing Policy Debate.

19. Low Income Housing Tax Credit, Internal Revenue Code (IRC) §42. UL 26 IRC 42.

20. The call for an urban Marshall Plan by the National Urban League continued for a few years after this point, with no success (Fulwood, 1990; Holstrom, 1992, p. 1). Housing as a policy issue had enjoyed some measure of legislative success at the time, and many housing advocates were trying to build on this success in many policy forums at the time (for an overview of some of this legislative success, see Danielsen, 2015).

21. A similar assessment of this legislative spike in housing activity in particular can be found in Danielsen (2015).

22. The conference itself did not call for a domestic Marshall Plan; the theme was about preserving low-income housing opportunities.

23. Marshall’s speech outlines the basic provisions that would become the Marshall Plan.

24. This is a reference to the end of the Cold War and the destruction of the Berlin Wall, which was occurring at the time.

25. There was a call to use the so-called peace dividend in 1990 to meet the deepening urban crisis. The thinking was that because the Cold War was over, less federal dollars would need to be devoted to defense spending and the country could now focus on solving domestic policy problems with the resulting windfall (Knight & Loayza, 1996; Knight, Loayza, & Villanueva, 1996).

26. Fannie Mae’s Housing Research was so influential on HUD that, in 1994, then HUD Assistant Secretary for Policy, Development and Research, Michael Stegman, began HUD’s academic journal, Cityscape, based in part on the Housing Policy Debate format (see https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscape.html).

27. Anyone who still has hard copies of these early editions of the Journal can attest to the excessive number of pages. In later years, the journal standardized the total number of annual pages to be more in line with typical academic journals.

28. The AHC articles were not regularly published in the same quarter from year to year.

29. Steve Hornburg was specifically charged with directing and scoping out the conferences from 1990 to 1998. The themes of the first four conferences were developed from Steve’s extensive housing policy experience before working at Fannie Mae.

30. Robert Lang worked directly on this survey.

31. FMF staff have always referred to the 1997 AHC internally as the “Social Capital” conference.

32. By the time the first issue of Housing Policy Debate volume 9 was published a year later, the term social capital had come into frequent use in the housing policy community, partly as a result of this conference.