In the City Journal, Steven Malanga has the best history of the government’s destructive attempts to promote home ownership I’ve read, starting with Herbert Hoover in 1922 and continuing through the current efforts to keep home prices from dropping to market-clearing prices.
He covers a lot that I hadn’t known much about from the 1920s through the 1960s.
When Malanga moves to the 1980s and 1990s, he moves onto more familiar ground:
The next stop on the road to 2008 was a fateful campaign to lower lending criteria, which, the housing advocates argued, were racist and had to change. The campaign began in 1986, when the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) threatened to oppose an acquisition by a southern bank, Louisiana Bancshares, until it agreed to new
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