The results are in, and on Nov. 5, Americans officially rejected the high prices and spiraling costs that defined much of the Biden-Harris administration—including the least affordable housing market in U.S. history.
Rather than being chastened by the national shellacking he, his vice president, and his party received, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is pursuing an audacious move that could throw the housing market into disarray and put homeownership even further out of reach for middle-class Americans.
In a high-profile lawsuit filed last month, the DOJ is seeking to crack down on a case of alleged home-appraisal bias in Colorado, but the lawsuit could set a worrisome new precedent for the relationship between mortgage lenders and appraisers. The consequences could be sweeping, and they may weigh most heavily on the black homeowners and aspiring homeowners who the DOJ is ironically trying to protect with this lawsuit.
The DOJ is alleging that an appraiser, Maksym Mykhailyna, undervalued a black woman’s Denver home while she was applying for a refinance. Undervaluation typically results in a higher interest rate and a lower loan amount.
The Biden administration has made cracking down on this kind of alleged discrimination a focus, and Vice President Kamala Harris has led the White House’s efforts. Yet, the DOJ’s case hardly proves the appraiser undervalued the home. Even more importantly, the DOJ fails to show that unlawful racial bias skewed the appraisal results or that this singular incident is indicative of systemic discrimination permeating the appraisal industry.
These crackdowns over an illusory problem have been repeatedly and correctly criticized. The administration is fundamentally trying to expand the federal government’s role in housing with little understanding of how meddling with the appraisal process would ultimately affect prices and homebuyers.
The DOJ lawsuit and much of the Biden administration’s efforts on this issue are misguided. In this latest effort, the Justice Department is going beyond holding an allegedly prejudiced appraiser accountable. Along with Mykhailyna, the DOJ also names Rocket Mortgage, the lender with whom the homeowner was seeking a refinancing, as a co-defendant.
The DOJ’s decision to go after the mortgage lender for the actions of an appraiser in this case not only contradicts federal law, but also risks reversing years of housing industry reforms that keep home prices in check.
Setting precedent to hold lenders accountable for the actions of independent appraisers would reintroduce the conflicts of interest that helped inflate home prices and created a housing bubble in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. A repeat of those circumstances would make homes even more expensive and put homeownership even further out of reach for many Americans.
Passed in the wake of the 2008 crisis, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act explicitly bars mortgage lenders from influencing appraisers. The legislation established appraiser independence by mandating that lenders order appraisals through third-party companies called appraisal management companies. These companies are a critical degree of separation between lenders and appraisers that protect the housing industry from the conflicts of interest that led to the 2008 disaster. The DOJ’s efforts to punish the lender in the Colorado lawsuit threaten to erode the independence of appraisers.
Before 2008, there were no appraisal management companies, and appraisers were heavily dependent on the mortgage lenders that assigned them work. That conflict of interest led appraisers to overvalue homes in order to authorize bigger and more profitable loans for the mortgage lenders. That fueled the market bubble that eventually popped, tanking the global economy, nearly toppling the entire financial sector, and setting many American families back years.
If the Biden DOJ has its way, the U.S. could return to the pre-2008 housing industry. The potential for baseless lawsuits alleging undervaluation will incentivize both appraisers and lenders to overvalue properties—fueling yet more home price inflation and injecting more risk into the system.
Housing costs are already out of control. Minority communities across this country are disproportionately locked out of homeownership. Rather than pursuing splashy headlines for baseless lawsuits that would ultimately hurt Americans and further exacerbate prices, the government should be diminishing the footprint of the government-sponsored enterprises—namely, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—that have helped create a second housing bubble in the past 20 years.
The bottom line is that the DOJ’s misguided efforts here could wind up hurting all aspiring homeowners, including the very people of color who the Biden administration says that it is trying to stand up for.
Existing civil right laws already protect homeowners against racially biased appraisal practices. These laws should continue to be enforced. Regulators or legislators could task the appraisal management companies with keeping a more watchful eye over the appraisers and potential trends in their work. But the effort to burden the mortgage lenders with the responsibility of solving appraisal discrimination is not only misguided, it is deeply harmful to aspiring homeowners, the housing sector, and the financial industry.
The incoming Trump administration should immediately audit the Biden administration’s backward housing reforms and halt this lawsuit before it causes damage to the system. Woke, affirmative action policies are misguided and wind up hurting everyone. Voters want a return to simple, logic-driven policy, and this is one area to start with.
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