Glenn School partners with Ohio Housing Finance Agency on research
Since the high-profile collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry, housing issues have been under scrutiny by policymakers and media nationwide. At the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, assistant professor Stephanie Moulton’s years of work in affordable housing programs have placed her at the forefront of housing policy research in Ohio.
Since July, Moulton has been working with the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) to coordinate research efforts for its new Office of Affordable Housing Research.
“It’s a really awesome partnership,” she said of the office, which hired its first executive director in December.
The new office will provide OHFA with research-based support for its policy decisions, as well as manage and analyze significant amounts of housing data the agency already has on hand. The research it produces also will contribute to scholarly literature on housing policy and serve as a model for data-driven policymaking for other states.
Office director Holly Beard and Moulton are compiling an agenda of research topics that will help OHFA adjust its programs to the needs of homebuyers across the state. They are talking with stakeholders, academics and other agencies not only to identify policy questions worth examining, but also to carry out those examinations.
“We’re working to pull in other researchers across Ohio State and other universities in Ohio, and potentially outside Ohio,” Moulton said.
The research office already has at least one additional Glenn School contributor. Doctoral student Roy Heidelberg, who has studied housing issues in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, will help examine questions about minority homeownership in Ohio.
Moulton said access to affordable housing programs by minority, vulnerable and special-needs populations will be a major theme of the new research office’s work, and it is especially salient because minority groups were disproportionately targeted by sub-prime and other high-cost lending programs.
Currently, there are “huge gaps in homeownership rates” between minority and nonminority populations, she said. But by better understanding how minorities learn about and participate in affordable housing programs, OHFA can improve its outreach efforts to those individuals.
The office also will draw on Moulton’s expertise in affordable homeownership policies such as mortgage revenue bond programs, which allow state housing agencies to subsidize lower mortgage rates or payment assistance for lower-income homebuyers. Several of her reports already appear on the office’s Web site.
Other probable topics for research include tracking trends in home values across the state, measuring the effect of down-payment assistance programs on mortgage delinquency, and comparing the communities occupied by families before and after taking advantage of affordable housing resources.
With the abundance of research questions and the open-ended nature of her partnership with OHFA, Moulton said the Glenn School’s involvement with the research office could continue for a while.
“There’s no end date with this,” she said.
