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Blog posts by: Mike LaFontaine

Don't blame the victims for foreclosure crisis
By Mike LaFontaine Most social and economic problems are so complex that it is impossible to name any one factor as the “cause,” so analyzing them is usually best done through a wide lens. The foreclosure crisis is a good example of how difficult it is to sort through the stew of contributing factors: inadequate regulation and financial complexity, low-cost foreign capital at the national level and easy access to low-cost home loans at the local level, investors chasing higher interest rates...
6 weeks 1 day ago | more
Community developers can help address income inequality
By Mike LaFontaine The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently published an analysis, Addressing Widening Income Inequality through Community Development. In addition to providing an excellent summary of the various factors that have led to the current disparity of incomes in America, the analysis was particularly relevant to me as a community developer because it framed the issue in more-global terms than usually presented. Two quotations mentioned in the study nicely summarize the...
27 weeks 5 days ago | more
We couldn’t have said it better
By Mike LaFontaine Sometimes other people do as good a job of getting to the heart of what the Community Loan Fund does as we can. That was the case with a recent blog post by Arnie Alpert, the American Friends Service Committee's New Hampshire Program Coordinator and a former board member here. Concord’s Wall Street is Already Occupied clearly explains how our local, community-based work connects to crucial national issues like economic opportunity and the economy. Please take a look, and...
30 weeks 6 days ago | more
Why we oppose the car-title loan bill
By Mike LaFontaine If you’ve noticed the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund’s public policy work, you may wonder why we have been so outspoken in our opposition to so-called “payday loans.” After all, the Community Loan Fund doesn’t make personal loans, so why get involved? Most recently, we asked the legislature to uphold Gov. John Lynch’s veto of Senate Bill 57. This bill would repeal recently enacted state laws that strictly regulate car title loans (payday loans that use the family or...
30 weeks 6 days ago | more
Affordable housing advocacy isn't for sissies
By Mike LaFontaine If you like stories with tidy endings, affordable housing advocacy isn’t for you. There are two things you can count on in this business: few permanent victories and the need to keep telling your story year after year because even though the story doesn’t change, the audience does. Because the members of the New Hampshire legislature are elected every two years, there is sizable turnover. As a result, challenges to recently passed laws are frequent, especially when they...
42 weeks 1 hour ago | more
Flawed article threatens federal funding for affordable housing
By Mike LaFontaine The Washington Post recently published an investigative report of the federal HOME program, which for years has been a key component of the federal funding used to develop affordable rental housing in New Hampshire. Charges of mismanagement at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are nothing new. This story, however, painted an inaccurate and grossly distorted picture of how the program operates. With federal spending under a microscope and virtually all...
50 weeks 1 day ago | more
So you think you know what poverty is?
By Mike LaFontaine Care to test your knowledge of what it’s like to be really poor? I dare you. The Coalition on Human Needs and two other national organizations have created a test to measure just how much (or little) ordinary people really understand about poverty in America. Even after years in the business of financing affordable housing, taking the test was a real eye-opener for me. It’s one thing to understand in a general way that there are a lot of poor people out there. and that life...
1 year 19 weeks ago | more
The poor are clever with money -- to a point
By Mike LaFontaine Spotted this statement in a profile of MIT professor and economist Esther Duflo in the The New Yorker (May 17, 2010). Dr. Duflo studies the economies of developing countries, but her observations offer a helpful insight for our own work with poor households: "... the poor are very clever about money, except when they are not clever at all; they are 'incredibly smart' about day-to-day financial matters, 'because the cost of errors is much bigger,' but 'so busy doing this...
1 year 30 weeks ago | more