2021 HousingWire Rising Star Matt Jones, pictured above, is portrayed on the cover of the June HousingWire Magazine issue. He formerly served as senior counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and currently, he serves as senior counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.
Going into 2020, Matt Jones thought it was going to be a relatively slow year legislatively. It was an election year, and typically, everyone turns to politics and campaigning instead of legislation.
“Boy was I wrong,” Jones said, who served as senior counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs at the time.
“It turned into, by far, the most consequential year of the four that I spent on the Hill,” he said. As the reports on the coronavirus started to come out in January and February of last year, it didn’t take long for the questions to start flooding in on how Congress would respond.
And for housing in particular, some of the biggest questions that Jones recalls were, “What happens to the people who can’t pay their rent or mortgage?” and “How are mortgage servicer’s who collect the monthly payments and advance them to investors going to stay in business when they’re suddenly not collecting payments?”
Those were massive, economy-wide problems that needed to be immediately addressed, he said.
In the run-up to the announcement of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, which was the government’s response to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones served as senior counsel to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.
Looking back on that period, the CARES Act was signed into law by former President Donald Trump on March 27, 2020, and in the five or six days leading up to it becoming law, Jones could be found almost 22 of the 24 hours in a day at the office.
This would turn out to be the week that Jones said he is probably most proud of in his career. Jones was the principal drafter of the mortgage forbearance program enacted through the CARES Act, which reshaped the mortgage industry and enabled more than 4 million homeowners to hit the pause button on their mortgage in the midst of a global pandemic. Drafting Section 4022 of the act, he wrote the part that covered the nationwide foreclosure moratorium and the consumer’s right to request a forbearance.
And his role didn’t stop there. He followed this up by playing a key role in drafting the $25 billion emergency rental assistance program enacted this past December.
But it’s not simply Jones’ monumental role in creating housing relief during the COVID-19 pandemic that makes him a Rising Star, it’s his hard work, determination and impact in the housing finance industry even before that period, which earned him the title.
Shortly after getting his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, Jones got involved in the mortgage business, which included working as a loan officer for a couple years at Amerifirst Home Mortgage, among other roles at the company. From there, he went to law school at Georgetown University, which brought him out to D.C. and eventually landed him an opportunity at the Mortgage Bankers Association on the residential policy team.
“At that point, I had no expectation or goal of becoming a Hill staffer. It actually was not something that I was planning on doing or wanted to do,” he said.
But following the 2016 election, Jones said that someone reached out and said that they were looking for someone to work on the Senate Banking Committee who knew housing and knew mortgage.
“Since that happened, I’ve never looked back, and it’s been a blast,” he said. When he’s not in the thick of drafting legislation, Jones spends most of his free time with his wife and four-year-old daughter, who, given the impact of the pandemic, doesn’t remember a world where her dad’s not home all the time.
And as busy as D.C. has been, Jones said that he and his daughter have the same ritual every night where he helps get her ready for bed.
“It’s just kind of a reminder about my priorities in life. Because certainly, my job is a big, time-consuming aspect of my life, but every night, I never forget about those rituals with my daughter, and it kind of puts in perspective what’s really important,” he said.
Flash forward to 2021, more than a year into the pandemic and a new administration, Jones now serves as senior counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, following Sen. Crapo when he moved to the committee.
Still tapping into his expertise on housing finance, he serves on the tax team where he works on anything that deals with housing, such as the mortgage interest deduction, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, opportunity zone implementation and more. From his work on the CARES Act to the tremendous amount of time he spent on GSE reform, Jones exemplifies what it means to be a Rising Star. And he is still just getting started when it comes to his impact in the industry.
“I want to continue to be involved in the housing world,” Jones said. “I enjoy it a whole lot and enjoy the people I’ve gotten to work with. There have been some really cool people I’ve gotten to know, and want to continue to be involved in this space and keep having fun in it.”
To see the HousingWire June Magazine, click here.
To view the full list of HousingWire 2021 Rising Stars, click here.
