A History of the FHA Mortgage Program

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Blog Update Announcement List. Thanks for visiting!

George W. Bush today announced that HUD’s Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will help an estimated 240,000 families avoid foreclosure by enhancing its refinancing program effective immediately. Under the new FHASecure plan, FHA will allow families with strong credit histories who had been making timely mortgage payments before their loans reset-but are now in default-to qualify for refinancing.”

The remainder of the press release on this subject can be found on HUD’s website here.

Since most people are unaware of the FHA insurance program and what it does, now would be a good time to take a look at the history of FHA.

HUD.gov does a good job of detailing the history of FHA:

Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934. The FHA became a part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office of Housing in 1965.

When the FHA was created, the housing industry was flat on its back:

* Two million construction workers had lost their jobs.

* Terms were difficult to meet for homebuyers seeking mortgages.

* Mortgage loan terms were limited to 50 percent of the property’s market value, with a repayment schedule spread over three to five years and ending with a balloon payment.

* America was primarily a nation of renters. Only four in 10 households owned homes.

During the 1940s, FHA programs helped finance military housing and homes for returning veterans and their families after the war.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the FHA helped to spark the production of millions of units of privately-owned apartments for elderly, handicapped and lower income Americans. When soaring inflation and energy costs threatened the survival of thousands of private apartment buildings in the 1970s, FHA’s emergency financing kept cash-strapped properties afloat.

The FHA moved in to steady falling home prices and made it possible for potential homebuyers to get the financing they needed when recession prompted private mortgage insurers to pull out of oil producing states in the 1980s.

By 2001, the nation’s homeownership rate had soared to an all time high of 68.1 percent as of the third quarter that year.

The FHA and HUD have insured over 34 million home mortgages and 47,205 multifamily project mortgages since 1934. FHA currently has 4.8 million insured single family mortgages and 13,000 insured multifamily projects in its portfolio.

In the more than 60 years since the FHA was created, much has changed and Americans are now arguably the best housed people in the world. HUD has helped greatly with that success.

We”ll go into more detail later about how the FHA insurance program works today. With the real estate market showing signs of market forces similar to those which brought about FHA’s creation, now would be a great time to explore in more detail how the program operates.