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Mark Calabria has a message for Congress: Help the Trump administration overhaul mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or he will do what he can on his own, the Wall Street Journal reported. The two companies, critical to half the nation’s mortgages, have been under government control since the 2008 financial crisis. For over a decade, policymakers have tried and failed to return them to the private sector and scale back the government’s role in housing. Calabria is expected to send ideas to Congress as early as this week. He acknowledged that mortgages could become more expensive if the Trump administration returns Fannie and Freddie to private hands without a broader legislative solution — a reason Congress ought to act, he said.

In a stealth aftershock of the Great Recession, nearly 100,000 loans that allowed senior citizens to tap into their home equity have failed, blindsiding elderly borrowers and their families and dragging down property values in their neighborhoods, USA Today reported. In many cases, the worst toll has fallen on those ill-equipped to shoulder it: urban African Americans, many of whom worked for most of their lives, then found themselves struggling in retirement. Alarming reports from federal investigators five years ago led the Department of Housing and Urban Development to initiate a series of changes to protect seniors. USA Today’s review of government foreclosure data found that a generation of families fell through the cracks and continue to suffer from reverse-mortgage loans written a decade ago. Those foreclosures wiped out hard-earned generational wealth built in the decades since the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The Treasury Department dealt the final blow to programs in states like New York and New Jersey designed to help residents circumvent the $10,000 limit on deductions for state and local taxes, Bloomberg News reported. The federal regulations, issued yesterday, prohibit workarounds that would allow residents to create charitable funds for a variety of programs where donors can get a state tax credit in exchange, effectively removing the state and local tax (SALT) limitation. The rules could also curb donations to some similarly structured charitable funds for private school tuition vouchers in Republican-led states such as Alabama and Georgia. Treasury said such programs allowed taxpayers to claim too many tax breaks in exchange for the donations. The 2017 tax law change capped at $10,000 the amount of state and local tax payments that filers could deduct from their federal returns. That change spurred states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to find a way to remove the economic pain of the cap, but Treasury said that most plans gave people too many tax breaks.

The owners stopped making mortgage payments on their crown jewel, the Rosewood Care Centers, barely a year after buying it in 2013. Paperwork about the chain’s finances was never filed with the government. In the end, the business defaulted last year on $146 million in government-backed mortgages — the biggest collapse in the history of a little-known loan-guarantee program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the New York Times reported. The Rosewood situation demonstrates the problems plaguing the HUD program, which helps nursing homes obtain affordable loans and has become a linchpin of the American elder-care system. By the government’s own admission, the federal agency’s stewardship of the program has been haphazard. HUD officials described Rosewood as an outlier, saying that only 1 percent of the guaranteed loans end up defaulting. “Mortgage defaults in this program are exceedingly rare, yet reaching an acceptable resolution requires an owner’s willingness and ability to work on behalf of their residents,” the department said in a statement. But the program — run by a department better known for fostering affordable housing — is a vulnerability for the federal agency. The nursing home industry is increasingly being run by for-profit operators facing dwindling margins. Some homes — especially those in rural areas — are struggling to stay open, with operators blaming low occupancy and insufficient payments from Medicaid and Medicare.

The owner of Los Angeles’s most expensive real estate listing ever, a sprawling 157-acre undeveloped property in Beverly Hills dubbed “The Mountain,” has filed for bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Secured Capital Partners LLC, the current titleholder, sought chapter 11 protection on Wednesday at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles to prevent a key lender from foreclosing on the property. Bankruptcy court papers peg Secured Capital Partners’ total assets at somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. How much the lender is owed is the subject of a dispute that will now be decided by a bankruptcy judge. Ronald Richards, a lawyer for the property owner, said that filing for bankruptcy will provide a fair forum to determine how much the lender, the Mark Hughes Family Trust, is owed, potentially preserving value for other creditors. “This is chapter 11 that is designed to save close to $200 million in equity from being unfairly diverted to a single creditor,” he said Friday. The largely undeveloped hilltop was once listed for a record $1 billion, though that figure was later slashed to $650 million. Now, the property is slated to be sold to the highest bidder in a bankruptcy-court-supervised sale process.

Trump administration officials are putting the finishing touches on a plan to return mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private-shareholder ownership, the Wall Street Journal reported. The proposal, coming more than a decade after the government seized the firms to save them from collapse, would seek to put the companies on a sounder financial footing and then release them from government control, if Congress doesn’t enact a more fundamental overhaul. The plan is being developed by the Treasury Department in consultation with a regulator of the companies, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It could change as it advances through the Trump administration, works its way through the White House and ultimately is submitted to the president for his approval as early as June. The proposal is expected to include a version of what has been called “recap and release,” which would ensure the firms have adequate capital to absorb loan losses in a future housing slump and thus avoid needing another taxpayer-backed bailout. If carried out, the companies could return to a status similar to how they operated before the financial crisis. Still, administration officials would prefer that Congress act on a more sweeping remake of housing finance, and their plan would also make a series of recommendations for lawmakers to consider.

Investment trusts that buy residential home loans are piling into mortgage bonds, taking on a more prominent role in the housing market as the government retreats, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mortgage real-estate investment trusts were once small players in housing finance, but they’ve increased their mortgage-bond portfolios by almost 28 percent to $308 billion over the 12 months through March. It was the largest stockpile in a half-dozen years, according to an analysis of 15 REITs by industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. Annaly Capital Management Inc. and AGNC Investment Corp., the two biggest companies in the sector, accounted for the majority of the growth. REITs often are publicly traded entities that invest in all types of real estate and pass most of their profits along to shareholders via dividends. They typically fund investments by raising capital in the equity and debt markets, including through short-term financing, and they use leverage to amplify their bets. The REITs focused on home loans are small relative to the $11 trillion mortgage market. But they have become a key source of capital in the housing market, particularly as the Federal Reserve trims its portfolio of mortgage bonds accumulated through stimulus measures. Additionally, government efforts to overhaul the housing-finance system could benefit REITs if policy makers clear the way for more private capital to enter.