By Bill Kelly

March 31, 2012

How can housing policy be responsive to today’s urgent needs (e.g., foreclosures, a sluggish housing market, affordability, etc.) and simultaneously address long-term trends (e.g., an aging population, growth of younger households)?

View the full forum here.

Treating this as a question about where the commission should devote its energy and resources, I recommend that it focus not on the immediate issues but on longer term issues, including demographic drivers and their consequences for housing demand and public support. At the same time, the commission's bipartisan composition creates a rare opportunity not just to study the very long-term, but to develop recommendations on which Congress, the administration, and the other key players can begin to act in the next few years. Many aspects of our current system are bent or broken and this is a unique opportunity to design solutions.

By David Smith

March 31, 2012

How can housing policy be responsive to today’s urgent needs (e.g., foreclosures, a sluggish housing market, affordability, etc.) and simultaneously address long-term trends (e.g., an aging population, growth of younger households)?

View the full forum here.

Because markets move infinitely faster than governments do, an effective 'policy' cannot be a monolith; it is the outcome of ecosystem resulting from multiple different programs, actors, and resource types that are constantly combining in myriad ways. For such an ecosystem to be robust, and therefore responsive, programs and resources should be introduced into the ecosystem only according to two principles:

1. Make the past pay its own cleanup bills.

At the end of Trading Places, freewheeling commodities speculators Randolph and Mortimer Duke, having bet heavily against orange future, are told that, by the rules of the very exchange they founded, "all accounts must be settled at the end of the day." Though it shocked the Dukes, it is an ultimately sound principle – because markets can rebound and reactivate only when they have cleared, and the sooner they are cleared the better.

By Jeffrey Lubell

March 31, 2012

How can housing policy be responsive to today’s urgent needs (e.g., foreclosures, a sluggish housing market, affordability, etc.) and simultaneously address long-term trends (e.g., an aging population, growth of younger households)?

View the full forum here.

Like many other policy domains, housing policy focuses far too much on the past and far too little on the future. The federal housing programs now in place all play an essential role in helping low-income families afford the costs of housing. But that does not mean they are perfect in all respects and incapable of being improved. Here are three paradigm shifts we need to make to prepare for the future:

Evaluation. To better address both present and future needs, the field vitally needs stronger systems for building knowledge about what works and what doesn’t under different circumstances. We need to shift to a culture where we constantly evaluate the effectiveness of current practice, identify future needs more clearly and explicitly, and share information with one another about how to design and refine policies to meet both current and future needs. The results would be used both to inform local practice and to identify policy changes needed at the federal level to strengthen programs and allow us to serve more people at lower per-unit costs.

By Kent Watkins

March 31, 2012

How can housing policy be responsive to today’s urgent needs (e.g., foreclosures, a sluggish housing market, affordability, etc.) and simultaneously address long-term trends (e.g., an aging population, growth of younger households)?

View the full forum here.

There are urgent needs, but there are many forces trying address them - public interest groups, for-profit entities, Congressmen, lobbyists, mayors, constituents, bankers, Federal Reservists, White House staff, presidential and other candidates, the media, academicians, BPC’s Housing Commission should not deal with the low-hanging fruit - homeowners with under-water mortgages, the elderly and others getting no savings interest, the homeless who need shelter, and the jobless. Instead it should pose real policy questions - the BIG picture, the next 10 to 40 year verities, the new paradigms - thus removing itself from the current past while understanding its lessons.