Affordable Housing
As part of our public mission, Freddie Mac has a responsibility to provide financing that helps families buy or rent decent, affordable housing. In many of the nation's high-cost communities, lowering the cost to buy or rent a home has never been more important or needed.
In 2012, Freddie Mac provided affordable single-family financing for almost 755,000 low- and moderate-income families, including over 495,000 low-income families, and more than 141,000 very low-income families.
In 2012, Freddie Mac:
- Helped more than 98,000 homebuyers buy their first home.
- Financed over 420,000 mortgages for lower-income borrowers (at 80% or less of the area median income)
- Provided financing for approximately 11,000 families through federal public subsidy programs, including:
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs programs
- Federal Housing Administration programs
- U.S. Department of Agriculture's Guaranteed Rural Housing Program
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's rental housing assistance programs designed to promote affordable single-family and multifamily housing, including Section 8 and Section 236 rental programs
Freddie Mac also has a long history of increasing the availability of affordable rental housing in the U.S. Last year, we financed over 435,000 apartment homes. Approximately 93 percent of these rental units were affordable to people whose incomes are at or below the area median income.
Together with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Fannie Mae, we continued helping the nation's state and local housing finance agencies continue provide low-rate mortgages to first-time homebuyers and financing for the construction and renovation of affordable multifamily rental properties. We did this through the New Issue Bond Program, which supported both Single Family and Multifamily lending programs and ended in December 2012; and the Temporary Credit and Liquidity Program which has been extended through December 2015.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae do more to finance affordable housing than any other financial institutions in the country. In fact, Freddie Mac’s ability to step in and make a difference in markets like these that might otherwise be neglected is one key benefit of our public mission – and something that clearly distinguishes us from the private sector.
Our regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), sets affordable housing goals for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and evaluates our performance related to these goals. We describe Freddie Mac's performance against the affordable housing goals, as well as other affordable housing initiatives, in the Annual Housing Activities Report and Annual Mortgage Report below.