In 2007, Frank used his influence as committee chairman to insure that the housing trust-fund bill finally passed the House. In 2008, a similar measure made it through the Senate as part of a larger bill, which President Bush signed. By that time, however, Fannie and Freddie were mired in debt, and the value of their shares was collapsing. And, because Frank’s committee was supposed to oversee the two mortgage giants, he faced questions about what he might have done to avoid the catastrophe.

The Committee on Financial Services, which has seventy members, is one of the biggest panels in Congress. (It was known as the Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs Committee until the Democrats lost control of the House in 1994, and Frank attributes the change to “Republican political correctness.”) Congressional hearings customarily begin with statements from members, a practice that can take hours. Frank and Michael Oxley, the Ohio Republican who was his predecessor as chairman, shared a distaste for the tradition, and together they were known as the “impatient caucus.” Still, Frank allows his colleagues to speak briefly before a hearing, and, on October 21st, Scott Garrett, a conservative Republican from New Jersey, used his time to attack Frank—in particular, his claim that he had anticipated the crisis.

“Before we are able to go forward with new and important changes to the over-all regulatory structure for our financial-services industry, I do believe that it is essential that we better understand just how we got into this problem,” Garrett said. “Now, one of the main parts of the problem was poor regulation in the past, specifically in the area of Fannie and Freddie.” According to Garrett, “our distinguished chairman” had no right “to claim the mantle of being a champion of reform with Fannie and Freddie.” On the contrary, Garrett argued, he and other Republicans had wanted to “raise the capital levels, to reduce the retained portfolios, to lower the conforming loan limits.”

Garrett’s accusations were genteel compared with those made by Bill O’Reilly, a few weeks earlier, when Frank appeared on his show on Fox News. “You blame everybody else! You’re a coward!” O’Reilly bellowed. “In any private concern, you’re out on your butt! But not here in the federal government!” Frank, in turn, berated O’Reilly for his “ranting” and “stupidity.” (The confrontation has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.)

At the hearing, Frank responded testily to Garrett. “The purpose of this hearing was to be forward-looking,” he began. “And I had hoped we could focus on that. But, after the gentleman from New Jersey’s comments in having decried partisanship, he then practiced it. It does seem to me to be important to set the record clearly before us.” Frank pointed out that when Garrett had attempted to tighten regulations on Fannie and Freddie, Republicans had controlled the House. “Had a Republican majority been in favor of passing that bill, they would have done it,” Frank said. “Now he has claimed that it was we Democrats—myself—who blocked things. The number of occasions on which either Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay consulted me about the specifics of legislation are far fewer than the gentleman from New Jersey seems to think.

“I will acknowledge that during the twelve years of Republican rule I was unable to stop them from impeaching Bill Clinton,” Frank went on. “I was unable to stop them from interfering in Terri Schiavo’s husband’s affairs. I was unable to stop their irresponsible tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and a Patriot Act that did not include civil liberties.” In other words, Frank insisted, if the Republicans had wanted to try to prevent the mortgage crisis, they would have had plenty of opportunities to do so.

Frank and I discussed his role in the housing crisis at his district headquarters, in a small office building in Newton. His boyfriend, Jim Ready, who runs an awning company in Maine, had just returned from Whole Foods with Frank’s lunch, a salad, which he was eating with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Frank explained that he first became interested in housing during his service, in the late sixties, as the top aide to Kevin White, who was then the mayor of Boston. The city had a long history of building public housing, mostly high-rises, and White pledged to encourage the construction of small apartment complexes, in keeping with the scale of most Boston neighborhoods.

“At first, when you talk about affordable housing and subsidized housing, people immediately ask, ‘What sort of public housing?’ ” Frank said. “ ‘Is it run by the city, like Cabrini-Green?’ ”—a notorious, now demolished project in Chicago. “And we long ago learned how not to do that, but that still was in people’s heads. And if you can do a word-association test, where a picture floated out in people’s heads, there would be these sterile high-rises. And it struck me, before I conceptualized this, that the answer to that was public-private partnership, that that’s the way to do affordable housing. And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. Public-private-sector coöperation.”

When White was mayor, one of the most infamous public-housing projects in the city was Columbia Point, in Dorchester. The project was said to be so dangerous that ambulances refused to enter it without a police escort. In a process begun under White, and shepherded in its early days by Frank, Columbia Point was turned over to a private developer, who converted it to a mixed-income community, which included housing for the poor and market-rent apartments for the more affluent. “Barney is a real capitalist,” Joe Corcoran, the developer who took over Columbia Point, told me. “He understands that we have to make a profit. Barney is the smartest politician I’ve ever seen. I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal.”

Frank’s experience in city hall in Boston led to an impatience with abstractions. He recalled a comment by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who will be the director of the National Economic Council in the Obama Administration: “Larry said, ‘Oh, well, in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rented car.’ Well, people wash leased cars all the time. And, secondly, poor people don’t rent cars. It’s just one of those irrelevant things.” Frank went on, “In 2004, it was Bush who started to push Fannie and Freddie into subprime mortgages, because they were boasting about how they were expanding homeownership for low-income people. And I said at the time, ‘Hey—(a) this is going to jeopardize their profitability, but (b) it’s going to put people in homes they can’t afford, and they’re gonna lose them.’ ” (In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President Bush, wrote that Frank “is the only politician I know who has argued that we needed tighter rules that intentionally produce fewer homeowners and more renters.”) Frank recalled with disdain a Bush Administration proposal to allow time limits on rental vouchers for poor people. “They said, ‘Well, don’t you agree that we should limit the amount of time people have a voucher?’ I said, ‘Yes, if you limit the amount of time they can be poor—“I’m sorry, you can only be poor for four years.” ’ ”

In 2005, while the Democrats were still in the minority, Frank contributed to a bipartisan effort to put his objectives—tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and new funds for rental housing—into law. At the time, Fannie and Freddie were regulated by a small agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the bill proposed to create an independent agency to monitor their operations. Frank and Michael Oxley, who was then chairman of the Financial Services Committee, achieved broad bipartisan support for the bill in the committee, and it passed the House. But the Senate never voted on the measure, in part because President Bush was likely to veto it. “If it had passed, that would have been one of the ways we could have reined in the bowling ball going downhill called housing,” Oxley told me. “Barney, to some extent, is misunderstood—with this image of him as a fierce partisan. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process. He eschews the grandstanding style that so many members use and prefers to work behind the scenes and get something done.”

Frank’s prescience on the housing crisis should not be overstated, because Fannie and Freddie represented only one aspect of the problem. “Fannie and Freddie were contributors to the bubble, but they came late in the really bad loans, after the private issuers like Merrill and Citigroup,” Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, said. “The law probably would have curtailed their lending, but it’s hard to say it would have made any difference. The real problem was outside of Fannie and Freddie, with the banks, and nobody in Congress was talking about it.”

Frank hopes that the housing trust fund won’t have to rely entirely on Fannie and Freddie for money. He intends to secure additional funding from, among other sources, the Federal Housing Administration, a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development which insures mortgages. Specifically, he wants to fund the trust with profits from an F.H.A. program that allows older homeowners to borrow money against the equity in their homes. “We’re going to expand that program, which makes money for the federal government, and start with part of the profits from it,” Frank told me. “If you know how the government works, you can find ways to do what you want.”

The number of housing units that will be built or renovated with funds from the trust is likely to be modest at first. (Frank declined to provide an estimate.) But the money will be available to both nonprofit and commercial developers, fulfilling Frank’s longtime goal of promoting public-private partnerships. “Barney has been our champion in the House, and he has been unbelievably effective,” Sheila Crowley, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which lobbied for the establishment of the trust, said. “If the bill hadn’t come out of Barney’s committee to the House with universal Democratic support and strong support from moderate Republicans, the Senate wouldn’t have paid any attention. But Barney got it done.”

The bill takes effect this year, but it’s unclear whether the housing trust will work as Frank expects. “I am skeptical that a national housing trust will address the real problems in our housing markets,” Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor who studies the housing market, said. “In many places, there is a lot of housing available at low prices. In Buffalo and throughout the industrial Midwest, there’s loads of low-cost rental housing available. The private sector in Houston does a great job of providing low-cost rental housing without help from the government. The question is whether this program will make a difference in places like New York and San Francisco, where there is a shortage. It’s not obvious that you want to think about new or renovated housing for poor Americans. Poor people buy used cars. There’s no reason to think that used housing isn’t often the right answer as well.” Moreover, it’s not clear that Frank’s determination to avoid the annual congressional appropriations process makes good public policy. “Once you have funding on automatic pilot, the money is spent regardless of what other priorities are there for the federal government and whether it’s properly targeted and properly administered,” David John, who studies housing as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said. “This is why we have an appropriations process.” Scott Garrett, Frank’s colleague and ideological adversary on the Financial Services Committee, told me, “Barney has a great deal of faith in government’s ability to solve people’s problems. The question is whether that faith is justified.”

When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, the Democratic leadership in the House made Frank a kind of one-man immediate-response team to Newt Gingrich, the new House Speaker. Frank and Gingrich sparred almost daily, and Frank still professes surprise that Gingrich took their disagreements personally. “Barney Frank hates me,” Gingrich said at the time. (He would not discuss the matter for this article.) According to Frank, Gingrich is a “bleeder”—a derogatory term for a boxer who is prone to cuts. For Frank, the word has particular resonance: one of his high-school classmates was Chuck Wepner, a heavyweight boxer who was known as the Bayonne Bleeder.

“My first day of high school, I was sent to the vice-principal for discipline, because I got in trouble for talking too much,” Frank told me. “When I got to her office, Chuck was already there. He’d gotten into a fight with the toughest kid in the school.” (In 1975, Wepner went fifteen rounds in a heavyweight championship bout against Muhammad Ali and, in so doing, it has been said, inspired Sylvester Stallone to create the character Rocky.)

Frank’s parents, Sam and Elsie, raised their four children in a distinctly less rarefied setting than the ones in which they all eventually arrived. Sam Frank operated Tooley’s Truck Terminal, near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. “My father ran a truck stop,” Frank told me. “He sort of lived on the fringes. We’re talking about Hudson County—Frank Hague was the boss—a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father’s brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something.” Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. “For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York,” Frank recalled. “I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw ‘Robin Hood,’ with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father’s sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn’t have to talk.”