FHA Multifamily Loan Limit Adjustment Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. WEINER. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey and my good friend from California, who has done an excellent job in explaining the bill. Let me just make a couple of general points that my colleagues can understand.

You know, unlike a lot of the housing market, FHA loans have actually performed remarkably well. Some people may look to the floor today and say, Why would you want to do anything to expand lending when we have already seen some of the problems that we've had? Well, frankly, FHA only has a serious delinquency rate of about .3 percent, compared to nearly 8 percent in the rest of the marketplace.

But to understand how FHA has worked so well, what they essentially do is take people who are essentially developing rental housing. They say, You're having trouble getting credit elsewhere, like it was when they were created after the Great Depression. We'll go ahead and provide you credit to provide rental housing that you can rent to middle-class residents all around the country.

Unfortunately, what was never truly acknowledged by the program until now is that some parts of the country have rental housing that doesn't go side-to-side, but goes north and south, up and down. Congressman Miller has instances like that. I know I do in New York City.

By definition, elevator buildings, combined with the fact that they are in big cities, make them more expensive. And so what we're saying here is, let's make sure the program keeps up with the real demand that we have for housing.

Now it is imperative that we do this because, despite the best efforts of this Congress and the President, the banks are simply not doing what we wanted them to do, which is extend more credit so people who have good enough credit can go ahead and find apartments that they can rent, homes that they can buy.

FHA is going to, under this piece of legislation--and I thank my colleague from New Jersey for quarterbacking it--is going to have the opportunity now to change their standards to reflect the way different things are regionally.

I should say to all of my colleagues, if you're doing things to perfect farm programs, just because they don't benefit me in New York City doesn't mean I don't support them. This is a way to make housing programs reflect what truly is going on in the marketplace.

Let me make one other point about this. It is true what my colleague says about Guam and Alaska and Hawaii. They're high-cost areas for different reasons. They're high-cost areas because getting building supplies to Guam, getting building supplies to Alaska and Hawaii, those are expensive.

One of the things that makes housing expensive in areas like New York City is that you have got to install elevators in any building that's north of six stories. And if you wind up getting into that place, you wind up adding a great deal to the amount per square foot that is required to do the building.

Nothing, I should say to my colleagues, does anything here to put taxpayers in any more jeopardy. The FHA program is entirely self-funded. It's the premiums that are collected from people who benefit from the program. All we're doing now is stopping what is a bottleneck in the program that has said we've got a lot of moribund programs--which is a word my assistant, Mr. Beckelman, who has developed this legislation, coined--these moribund programs that are ready to go but simply can't get the financing.

So this House will be doing what desperately needs to be done. I thank the chairman of the Financial Services Committee for quarterbacking it and for getting it--tailbacking it; you quarterbacked, he tailbacked it--and for Mr. Miller of California, who has helped see the importance of this, and want to thank him for the great work he has done.

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