The Homeowners Refinancing Act

President Roosevelt passed the Homeowners’ Refinancing Act (or Homeowners’ Loan Act) on June 13, 1933 with the intention of assisting homeowners defaulting on their mortgages. I learned from The Living New Deal all about the background and effects of this law.

They explain that since the market crash of 1929 the issue of home loan defaults had become huge, especially because of the amount of large loans taken out immediately before during the Roaring Twenties. Roosevelt hoped that getting homeowners in a position to pay off their mortgages would help more that just the owners; he saw its potential to generate increased revenue for the banks they lent from, help local governments bring in additional funds from property taxes, and provide jobs through the revival of the dying construction industry.

   In order to carry this out, the Homeowners’ Refinancing Act established the Homeowners’ Refinancing Corporation. The group bought up homeowners’ debts and then gave them new loans that were much lower interest rates to be paid over much longer periods of time. To balance this in the short term and tackle another issue, they gave bonds to many lenders. The general consensus at the time was that this policy would fail and end up putting the Federal Government in even more debt, but when the organization closed in 1951 after making over three billion dollars of loans and saving tens of thousands of homeowners, it reported a “slight profit” and was hailed as a resounding success.


“Home Owners’ Loan Act (1933)”, Living New Deal, The Living New Deal, n.d., livingnewdeal.org/glossary/home-owners-loan-act-1933

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emily Routbort Mr. Roddy GPHC R 20 September 2018 Social Sustainability Addressing social sustainability is a challenge for many places in the world. Social sustainability works to reduce factors that negatively affect human social well being (p. 61 in the reading). Some examples of social sustainability issues are corruption, unfit healthcare and education, disempowerment of women, and social inequality. These problems should be dealt with after fulfilling basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and rest. From another standpoint, you might find to achieve economic and environmental sustainability, you must achieve social sustainability before other proceeding to solve economic and environmental issues. My reasoning for this is because you should have a strong established base that you can work off of (where everyone is working in harmony) so we can then proceed to work on other issues. In most of the world though, this is not the case (considering that you place s...
Read more

Zoey Weinstein Sustainability Blog

Zoey Weinstein Mr. Roddy Global Politics 9/19/2018 Sustainability Blog One of the major issues concerning women in America and all over the world today and for the past 88 years is the wage gap or gender pay gap. On average, nationally, women earn approximately 78 cents to the man’s dollar. The wage gap impacts women different ethnic backgrounds even more. According to the huffington post, Latina women earn 56% of what a white man makes and black women earn 64%. The first and most impactful thing the United States needs to do is pass equal pay legislation in all 50 states. Many states have enforced the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), an amendment that ensures that nobody faces discrimination based in their sex, especially in the workplace. This past May, Illinois became the 37th state to ratify this amendment. The first clause of the ERA is “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” This amendm...
Read more

Tackling Environmental Sustainability in my Imagined Country

Image
As the president of any given nation focusing on environmental sustainability, my main concerns would be the conservation of biodiversity, the effects of Climate Change, and the reduction of fossil fuels. One way of increasing the biodiversity in many countries, with the exception of areas whose climate could not support heavy vegetation, is through the commission and propagation of food forests. A food forest as defined by the Beacon Food Forest Permaculture Project is “a gardening technique or land management system, which mimics a woodland ecosystem by substituting edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals. Fruit and nut trees make up the upper level, while berry shrubs, edible perennials and annuals make up the lower levels ( “Beacon Food Forest Permaculture Project” ).” This can also be seen in the diagrams below: Through this model of creating functional green spaces, and or partially replacing the nations current agricultural systems with this method of cultiv...
Read more