Finally, someone is catching on to Rick Santorum’s housing contradictions.
Almost three weeks after my blog pointing out Santorum’s inconsistencies on housing policy, it finally entered into the campaign. On Tuesday, Ron Paul posted an article called “How Santorum Helped Fuel The Housing Bubble” on his campaign site, ramrodding Santorum for supporting non-profit organizations that inflated the problem of faulty mortgages.
The blog mentions two Santorum supported non-profits: The Nehemiah Project, a Sacramento faith-based non-profit that offers down payment assistance and AmeriDream, which as far as I can tell did just about the same thing.
These two non-profits helped set up 392,000 mortgages worth $54 billion. These loans often required no down payment, and were triple the default rate of other FHA loans. Clearly a risky model for the economy, but one that Santorum supported wholeheartedly.
In fact, as the article points out, he worked with Senator Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats to “protect the Nehemiah Project from oversight from the IRS and HUD,” and wrote about the non-profit positively in his 2005 book “It Takes a Family.”
It seems that Santorum just hasn’t come to grips with the reality of the housing situation, or that his version of “compassionate conservatism” that dictated everyone should own a home helped cause it.
You only have to read my Feb. 8 blog to find dozens more examples of Rick Santorum speaking openly about how people who couldn’t qualify for mortgages should have a shot at taking one out anyway. Or for examples of how many great things Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do for America’s disadvantaged.
Yet now, Santorum backtracks on all of this and talks about how he predicted the housing crisis with a letter that foretold of a housing bubble, bashing the mortgage giants and those that gave out the subprime loans he pushed so hard. Well, it should be easy to predict a bubble that you helped cause.
I asked two of Santorum’s spokespersons for comment, but just like my last blog, they failed to respond.
Perhaps now that Ron Paul has caught onto Santorum’s charade, housing will actually become part of the GOP’s discussion and the Santorum campaign will be forced to deal with what could be Santorum’s biggest political contradiction.
jhuseman@housingwire.com
@JessicaHuseman
