This paper assesses the ability of local housing ordinances to prevent neighborhood destabilization. We evaluate the degree to which vacancy registrations and point-of-sale inspection requirements influenced housing market outcomes following the housing crisis. With comprehensive real property...

Old laws and complex, innovative finance do not make good partners, particularly in the area of consumer law. Today, tremendous uncertainty exists about the extent to which consumers might have claims against arrangers and investment trusts based on misdeeds at the origination of their loans....

In 2009, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which contains Cleveland and 58 other municipalities, created the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation. This land bank was established to acquire low-value properties, mitigate blighted housing, help stabilize neighborhoods, and slow the decline of...

This essay attempts to catalog and describe the various dimensions to regulating home mortgages. We do not discuss specific lending practices, loan terms, or legal prohibitions, but rather the major issues that policy-makers should consider when framing a system to protect consumers who take out...

Much attention has been paid to the significant underfunding of many state and local employee pension plans, as well as efforts by states and cities to alleviate that underfunding by modifying the benefits provided to workers. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the systemic causes...

In this empirical analysis, we estimate the impact of vacancy, neglect associated with material property-tax delinquency, and foreclosures on the value of neighboring homes using parcel level observations. Numerous studies have estimated the impact of foreclosures on neighboring properties, and...

The future of housing finance is in a state of flux. In February 2011, the Obama Administration released a proposal outlining three plans for the future of housing finance. In all three plans, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will be phased out over a period of years and replaced with a private...

During the past forty years, the simultaneous, symbiotic growth of financial innovation, disintermediation and deregulation has created an environment with extremely complex, opaque investment instruments. That system has now collapsed. At the very center of the crisis are a small group of...

Modern land banks hold great promise as a dynamic community development tool that can help shrinking cities and local nonprofits overcome the two biggest challenges they face when trying to acquire REO property: interest in only a small number of properties and a lack of funding for acquisition....