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STIMULUS AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY — TOGETHER AT LAST….Glenn Hubbard thinks the housing market is close to its natural bottom, and in order to keep it from overshooting it’s time for the government to step in and start offering below-market mortgage rates. Brad DeLong agrees:

All in all, I approve of the plan: having Fannie and Freddie buy up mortgages at market prices and refinance them at 4.5% could do a lot of good for the country and make a fortune for the government.

I’m agnostic on how close we are to a housing bottom. My guess is that we still have a ways to go, but since it takes a while for a program like this to take effect, maybe now is the time to get started.



But if we’re going to do some social engineering with mortgage loans, why not go whole hog? An outfit called Architecture 2030, founded by Edward Mazria, suggests that we offer homeowners not just low-interest loans, but a sliding scale of low-interest loans that’s conditioned on renovating their homes to increase energy efficiency. Their proposed scale is on the right. The nickel explanation is below:

Mazria walked me through a hypothetical example that highlighted the huge incentives the plan could unleash. Say you’re a homeowner with a $272,000 mortgage at 5.55%, paying about $1550 a month. You decide you want your mortgage rate to drop to 3%. In order to qualify for the reduction, you have to improve the energy efficiency of your home 75% below code, and it’s going to cost you a pretty penny: about $40,000. Existing tax credits would take care of about $10,000 of that cost. The rest would get tacked on to your existing mortgage, bringing it up to $302,000. But, at 3%, you’d be paying only about $1280 — saving almost $300 a month on the mortgage alone, plus another $150 in reduced energy costs. The value of your home rises, you have more disposable income, you’ve given work to someone to do the upgrades for you — and s/he’s now paying federal taxes, and you’ve reduced your carbon footprint.

The Architecture 2030 folks claim that their program (which has a component for commercial buildings as well) would cost a mere $170 billion over two years, and in return would create over 8 million new jobs, jump start a new $1.6 trillion renovation market, save consumers a boatload of money, and reduce CO2 emission by about half a billion tons. What’s not to like?

To be honest, I’m not sure. There’s something a little too free-lunchish about this plan, and I figure there has to be a catch somewhere. I invite everyone reading this to try and figure out what it is. But if the sums really add up the way they say they do, it seems worth considering, no?