The Housing Meltdown:

Spill-Overs and Strategies for Families, Neighborhoods, and Governments

An Urban Institute 40th Anniversary Roundtable

Audio Recording

Until recently, rising house values and easy access to mortgage credit expanded homeownership, increased wealth, revitalized neighborhoods, and fueled renewed prosperity in many U.S. cities. But now sharply declining house prices and the expiration of teaser mortgage interest rates are devastating some families, neighborhoods, and cities. Neighborhoods experiencing waves of foreclosures are threatened with abrupt declines in property values, long-term vacancies, disinvestment, abandonment, and distress. And the fiscal fortunes of cities that rely heavily on property tax revenues could erode.

The Urban Institute convened a policy roundtable of some thirty practitioners, experts, advocates, and policymakers with diverse perspectives to explore these spill-over effects, their variation across regions and communities, and promising strategies for tackling them. Roundtable participants included members of Congress, senior Congressional and administration staff, state and local government officials, nonprofit and business leaders, and press.

This event, the first in a series of roundtables marking the Urban Institute's 40th year, was dedicated to the late Ned Gramlich. It was moderated by Margery Austin Turner, director of the Urban Institute's Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities and Kim Rueben, senior researcher in the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, offered welcoming remarks.