Bill Foster Quotes

Our economy isn't going to recover until the housing market finds its footing.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame.

What began as a subprime lending problem has spread to other, less risky mortgages and contributed to excess home inventories that have pushed down home prices for responsible homeowners.

People aren't as impressed by homes anymore after they saw how they collapsed in price with the financial crisis.

House prices just soared beyond - beyond reason in many places and they got financed in silly ways, and people lied about loans, all kinds of accesses entered into it. But that is what - that is the single biggest cause of why we're here.

The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control.

Home ownership was the fig leaf for the rise in subprime lending. But that was really about cash-out refinancings, not buying homes.

Indeed, the FHA was born out of the Great Depression, which was also caused in significant part by a foreclosure crisis. Mortgages in the early 1930s were mostly three- to five-year 'bullet' loans, which did not amortize and were due in full at maturity.

Housing works like a trampoline. When it is pushed down far enough and long enough, it will eventually snap upward very powerfully.

I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it's exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren't among them.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

Nationally, the share of mortgages that are underwater fell by about one-half between 2011 and 2014.

Millions of Americans were duped by the federal government and the Federal Reserve into buying homes they could not afford and failed to count the cost. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, they could not keep up the monthly mortgage payments and defaulted.

The Obama administration deserves credit for quickly ending the housing free fall. In particular, Obama empowered the Federal Housing Administration to ensure that households could find mortgages at low interest rates even during the worst phase of the financial panic.

Buying a home wouldn't make much sense if house prices were likely to decline further; no one wants to catch a falling knife.

It is time to move on. House prices won't rise and the economy won't fully engage until more distressed properties are resolved and put back into ordinary use.

We don't have to guess what Mitt Romney would have done if he were president. Because he told us. He said we should let foreclosures - and I quote - 'hit the bottom' so the market could - I quote - 'run its course.'

People should buy a house to live in, not as an investment. Property has become such a national obsession - it was the primary subject at dinner parties and how many television shows were dedicated to the market. It's not good for the economy.

Too-easy credit and millions of bad loans made during the U.S. housing bubble paved the way for the financial calamity and Great Recession that followed. Today, by contrast, credit is too tight. Mortgage loans are particularly hard to get, creating a problem for the housing market and the broader economy.

The housing market will get worse before it gets better.

We just went through the biggest housing bubble in history and now housing prices are starting to go up again. I don’t know what to make of that.

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures.

Houses were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them..