A year ago, David K. Elam was moving into his new offices on the 15th floor of the Blaustein Building on North Charles Street. It was a weekend, and he had boxes of files in his car that he wanted to carry in.
So he told a maintenance worker he was a new tenant, working for Fannie Mae, and needed to park next to the building for a few minutes. "Fannie Mae?" asked the maintenance worker. "You work for Fannie Mae? Who's she?"
And therein lay Mr. Elam's challenge as the new director of
Fannie Mae's Baltimore Partnership Office. He works for a company with the funny name that has a massive behind-the-scenes role in the U.S. housing market as one of the largest purchasers of mortgage loans made by banks and savings and loans.
By purchasing pools of mortgages from lenders, Fannie Mae constantly replenishes the supply of money available for home loans. And Fannie Mae has a lot to say about the loans -- what down payments it wants to see, what kinds of credit history, what income loan applicants must earn to pass muster.
But because it does most of its business with lenders, and not directly with borrowers, Fannie Mae has traditionally had a low profile since its Depression-era creation.
However, that may change over the next few years -- in Baltimore and across the country -- as the Federal National Mortgage Association, as Fannie Mae is formally titled, rolls out its aggressive nationwide campaign to boost homeownership among low- and moderate-income households in beleaguered central cities.
"The Baltimore homeownership rate is in the high 40s," observed Mr. Elam. "The national average is around 63-64 percent. How do get our homeownership percentage rate up?" he asked.
One way to do it is to boost Fannie Mae's activity in serving minority and low- and moderate-income residents, and to educate lenders and real estate agents about the increasingly flexible Fannie Mae requirements. Mr. Elam said he has been encouraged by the early results, as he analyzes Baltimore mortgages purchased by Fannie Mae in his office's first year:
* The percentage of minority household mortgages has grown from 13 to 37 percent.
* The percentage of first-time homebuyer mortgages has grown from 20 to 48 percent.
* The percentage of low- and moderate-income household dTC mortgages more than doubled, from 33 to 67 percent.
