In August 2002 Fannie Mae
announced a five-year, $23 billion investment plan for
the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex called ?the American
Dream Commitment.? Fannie Mae promised it would
provide affordable homeownership and rental
opportunities for more than 230,000 area families.
Fannie Mae made this commitment in order to comply with the Congressional mandate declaring that Fannie Mae and other GSEs have an ?affirmative obligation to facilitate the financing of affordable housing for low and moderate-income families? and that they must ?lead the industry in making mortgage credit available for low- and moderate-income families.?
The Fannie Mae announcement garnered enormous publicity. When a reporter from the Dallas Morning News asked TxLIHIS if Fannie Mae’s similar past committments had actually produced the promised results we had to confess that we were not sure. We decided to look into it.
We discovered that there was no independent evaluation of Fannie Mae’s lending record to minority homebuyers in Texas. So, we decided to conduct the research ourselves. Over the next year, we studied the impact of Fannie Mae on the single-family home loan market for minorities and underserved communities in Dallas and Fort Worth.
Our research results, which are summarized here, were surprising. Far from being a leader in serving minorities and low and moderate income borrowers, we found that the majority of the single family mortgage loans Fannie Mae purchased are directed at White and upper income families.
While we do not believe, as some have suggested, that Fannie Mae should be abolished, we do think it should be reformed in order to better serve the minority and low-income borrowers it is mandated to assist.
The summary of the report is available. The complete report with color maps and charts is available for download as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file (acrobat viewer required) and, if you have a high speed internet connection, you can watch a 15 minute video summary of the report (Quicktime required).