• Company Profile
• News and Information Center
• Corporate Citizenship
  • Affordable Housing
  • Community Programs
    • Consumer Outreach and Education Initiatives
    • Meeting the Needs of Underserved Communities
    • Reaching More People With Innovative Tools
  • Corporate Giving
  • Diversity
  • Educating and Protecting Consumers
  • Employee Volunteerism
  • Freddie Mac Foundation
• Investor Relations
• Careers

Community Programs

Expanding Opportunities for Affordable Housing

Freddie Mac is dedicated to promoting the stability, liquidity and affordability of the housing market, helping millions of families to own a home of their own and obtain affordable rental housing. In fact, our strong and steady support of mortgage lending keeps the housing market strong, which in turn provides crucial support to the national economy. Though we don’t issue loans directly to individuals, we have made homes possible for more people by:

• Helping to lower mortgage rates by an average of ½%. This saves families about $18,000 over the life of a $150,000 loan and allows more families to achieve homeownership

• Providing affordable rental housing to America’s families by purchasing a record number of multifamily mortgages

• Consistently meeting the toughest affordable housing standards in the industry. In 1992, legislation created affordable housing goals to be administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), providing low-cost mortgage finance to very low-, low- and moderate-income families and people living in underserved areas

• Renewing and increasing our commitment to fulfilling the affordable housing component of our mission under our new leadership, including major initiatives to increase our purchases of mortgages supporting affordable housing

• Continuing our leadership in promoting improved practices in the subprime industry by being the first secondary market institution to ban the purchase of mortgages with mandatory arbitration clauses.

But there is more that we can and must do. Right now, only about half of minority families own homes, compared to an overall homeownership rate of nearly seventy percent. This gap is unacceptably wide. In the years ahead, nearly two-thirds of all household growth will come from minority families while at the same time, the number of white first-time homebuyers actually declines. This means that our progress will ultimately depend on our ability to meet the needs of minority and immigrant families who have not yet been fully served by the mortgage industry. The emerging markets of the past will be the surging markets of the future and we plan to be equipped to serve them.