Mark Fogarty

Thirteen years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the new One World Trade Center is poised to open soon, bringing back memories of a horrific day and hope for a future in which things carry on.

Foreign-born nationals with U.S. citizenship have a lot of positive attributes that make them attractive mortgage applicants. What's even better is that millions are still renters.

Three families from a small American Indian reservation in New Mexico overcame a good many obstacles to take advantage of a USDA program that rewards sweat equity with financing to build new homes.

A mortgage industry laden with government enticements has no choice but to honor a duty to serve its benefactor's affordable housing goals, claim the contributing authors of a new book.

Mortgage Bankers Association chairman David Stevens picked the perfect locale for his latest message about the diversity challenges lenders are going to be facing over the next 10 years.

Though there is still a year for mortgage lenders to get in compliance with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's document changes, the perils of missing that deadline are considerable.

Selling loans into the secondary market was a good strategy for housing finance agencies when rates were falling, but now they are said to be heading back to traditional bond financings to boost their balance sheets.

Another roundup of comments on our Editor at Large blog, from the best and brightest to the funniest.

The CFPB and other regulators are showing an increasing appetite for big data. The HMDA database may be the biggest in the mortgage business and a preview of the upcoming dataset may give lenders a chance to stay one step ahead of the feds.

Mentoring the newbies in the mortgage business may help them avoid boom-and-bust errors later in their careers. And it can be a personally satisfying thing to do as well.

A nonprofit housing group has found an ambitious middle ground between those who oppose any change to the mortgage interest deduction untouched and those who say it must go.

Though probably not endangered this year, low-income housing tax credits have been suggested for elimination often enough to alarm those who work with this important financing source for multifamily construction.

Unless the industry is content to be a boutique player with a hugely smaller pool of potential borrowers, it had better emulate the Fed and ease on down the road.

Competition from site-built homes and distressed sales, the limited availability of conforming mortgages, and an underdeveloped secondary market have prolonged a slump in manufactured housing that started in 1998.

Among the revelations: A large number of single-family homes built in 2013 weren't sold that year; single-family units, surprisingly, kept getting bigger; cash sales remain higher than before the recession.

Though the bulk of the ambitious Housing New York plan is intended to build or rehabilitate rentals, there are several homeownership components as well.

While lenders do not survey applicants on sexual orientation for their Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reports, a look at the data on same-sex couple applicants is intriguing.

It could take quarters or years. It may require fatter yields to entice investors, or move-up homebuyers in need of jumbo loans. This much is agreed upon: Nobody really knows.

Mortgage lenders may have managed to learn about hashtags and followers, but streaming audio and podcasts are still pretty mysterious to them.

The mortgage life support provided by the federal government since the crash is ebbing. It will be interesting to see if the industry can breathe on its own now.