Home mortgage interest rates are going up, and home sales rates and even prices are going down. 

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Price Fishback, of Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, about America's history of real estate booms and busts and the history of home loans. 

Of course, we can't talk about homes and home mortgages without getting into the history of governments' involvement. As it turns out, the U.S. government has been involved in U.S. real estate since the very beginning. 

As the Great Depression wreaked havoc on our economy, causing a huge number of farm and family home foreclosures, the US government got involved in regulating, buying and backstopping mortgages. Of course, we are all familiar with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two agencies were supposedly not government programs and were supposedly not backed by the U.S. government. The trouble was, no one believed it. Americans associated these corporations with the US government, and rightfully so! As evidence, both corporations had to bend to popular demand and Congressional pressure, by both parties, to extend their lending policy from high-quality loans to include lower-quality loans that carried significant risk. Well, we know what happened eventually, because all lived through the Great Recession, to which the subprime loan crisis was significantly the cause. 

In the Perspective segment of our conversation, Dr. Fishback talked about housing segregation. For more than a century, Black home ownership has consistently been about 20% below White home ownership. Many blame the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC), for institutionalizing housing segregation in America by creating maps that highlighted neighborhoods' racial and ethnic compositions. I had heard the term redlining and brought it up as well. Dr. Fishback is conducting an extensive and ongoing research on this topic. He believes that the history of HOLC, which is quite controversial, is misunderstood and he explained why. 

Below, are links to other episodes about the U.S. economy: 

S2E26: A Strong U.S. Dollar, Dr. Eichengreen

S2E11: Inflation, Dr. White

S1E18: Fed's History, Mr. Lowenstein

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

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