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June 19, 2007
Better Deeds
Over the past several years, America's best run non-profit housing organizations have dramatically outperformed the subprime lenders in serving financially-strapped folks seeking to buy or refinance a home. Many of these stellar performers, though, struggle from year to year to ensure they have the financial wherewithal to continue their efforts -- and few, if any, have been rewarded with the capital to expand. There's no real reason -- other than the always potent cocktail of ignorance and greed -- that capital markets cannot work with nonprofit housing organizations. The fact that otherwise sophisticated folks do a double take at this suggestion merely confirms the extraordinary level of self-interest and distorted language that now pervade our culture. Remember this: mortgages are forms of debt. Not equity. Non-profit lenders can produce debt instruments just like for profit lenders. What happens to those debt instruments down the road -- that is, how they get converted into equity like forms -- is not limited or constrained by the tax status of the initial lender. As I explain further in Slate, however, the quality of the mortgage evidently is affected by the tax status of the lender. America's nonprofits produce much better deeds than the the subprime lenders. Much better. Delinquency rates for the nonprofits run between 1 in 20 to 1 in 50. For the subprimes? 1 in 5 and rising.
