Fannie Mae Expands Equitable Housing Finance Plan
Innovations build on multi-year effort to drive equity in the housing industry
Fannie Mae released its annual update to the 2022-2024 Equitable Housing Finance Plan. This plan is focused on knocking down barriers faced by underserved communities and further driving our mission of facilitating equitable and sustainable access to homeownership and quality affordable rental housing across America in a safe and sound manner.
Fannie Mae’s Equitable Housing Finance Plan focuses on two objectives that address common obstacles faced by many Black and Latino renters and homeowners:
- Reducing up-front rental and homeownership costs and eliminating outdated barriers related to insufficient credit to directly drive meaningful and measurable improvements in housing access and stability, and
- Improving the chances for long-term success for underserved borrowers and renters by focusing on education and counseling, successfully navigating the mortgage process, and housing stability.
The Equitable Housing Finance Plan for 2023 includes 25 separate actions that advance these objectives. These actions include:
- Developing and expanding new ways to help first-time homebuyers, such as down payment assistance programs, mortgage underwriting innovations, and special purpose credit programs.
- Supporting five 2022 Innovation Challenge winners who are building local solutions to increase affordable housing supply and assist people with credit and housing access.
- Using Fannie Mae’s role in the secondary mortgage market to expand access for underserved borrowers through its mortgage-backed securities activities.
- Expanding financial and housing counseling and consumer education to empower more people to both achieve and maintain housing stability.
“Since the launch of our Plan in 2022, we have made considerable progress in identifying meaningful ways to address historical challenges faced by underserved communities, particularly for Black and Latino people,” said Katrina Jones, Vice President of Racial Equity Strategy & Impact. “When you add the present-day challenges of inadequate affordable housing supply and high housing costs, overcoming barriers to housing can seem harder than ever. But we are committed to making a fundamentally fairer and more equitable future for housing.”
The plan is rooted in Fannie Mae’s Consumer Housing Journey, an evidence-based, consumer-centric framework for understanding housing barriers at each stage of a consumer’s life, particularly Black and Latino consumers. The Consumer Housing Journey has been an essential tool to help Fannie Mae prioritize its equity initiatives and has helped our partners in the housing and mortgage finance industry build on their own initiatives as well.
Details on the new actions and initiatives Fannie Mae incorporated into the Plan’s update are outlined in Katrina Jones’ Perspectives blog.
Additional resources are available to learn more about Fannie Mae’s updated Equitable Housing Finance Plan.
SOURCE Fannie Mae
