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On July 30, 2008, President Bush signed into law H.R. 3221, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. Among the many changes this bill made that are intended to assist in the recovery of the housing sector, one provision is likely to have the opposite effect. Section 2113 of the bill terminates a practice known as Seller Financed Downpayment Assistance (SF DPA) for FHA-insured mortgages effective October 1, 2008. Critics of SF DPA have claimed that this assistance greatly raises a borrower’s probability of default. This paper evaluates the prior economic evidence and provides a new analysis using recent FHA data.
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