Obsessive Housing Disorder:Nearly a century of Washington’s efforts to promote homeownership has produced one calamity after another

City Journal reports:

There was never any shortage of evidence that the new loans were much riskier than conventional mortgages. In October 1994, Fannie Mae head James Johnson had reminded a banking convention that mortgages with small down payments had a much higher risk of defaulting. (A Duff & Phelps study found that they were nearly three times more likely to default than conventional mortgages.) Yet the very next month, Fannie Mae said that it expected to back loans to low-income home buyers with a 97 percent loan-to-value ratio—that is, loans in which the buyer puts down just 3 percent—as part of a commitment, made earlier that year to Congress, to purchase $1 trillion in affordable-housing mortgages by the end of the nineties. According to Edward Pinto, who served as the company’s chief credit officer, the program was the result of political pressure on Fannie Mae trumping lending standards.

This article is a long history of government meddling in housing.Another truly great article from Steven Malanga.