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 2011, Freddie Mac provided affordable single-family financing for almost 600,000 low- and moderate-income families, including nearly 400,000 low-income families, and more than 100,000 very low-income families.
In 2011, Freddie Mac:
- Helped more than 90,000 homebuyers buy their first home.
- Financed over 300,000 mortgages for lower-income borrowers (at 80% or less of the area median income)
- Provided financing for approximately 17,000 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 320,000 apartment homes. Approximately 90 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 of affordable multifamily rental properties. We did this by securitizing $15.3 billion in bonds with Fannie Mae and providing $7.4 billion in credit and liquidity support.
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 Mission Continues: FHFA Sets New Housing Goals
To facilitate the financing of affordable housing, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are directed – via affordable housing goals – to focus our mortgage purchases on low- and moderate-income borrowers and borrowers living in low-income or undeserved areas. Our regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), sets these goals and evaluates our performance.
We describe our performance against the affordable housing goals, as well as other affordable housing initiatives, in the Annual Housing Activites Report below.