Very recently, Eric Belsky was appointed managing director at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, a housing think tank. But he’s been with the center for more than 12 years, first as a researcher and later as interim executive director. Now that’s he’s shifted into the top spot, he’ll be shaping the mission for the center, one of the nation’s most respected sources of housing analysis and information, and creators of the State of the Nation’s Housing Report.

Eric S. Belsky

Title: Managing Director, Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies; Cambridge

Age: 49

Experience: 22 years

What brought you to Harvard?

I was at [the National Association of Home Builders] and then I was at Fannie. The way I got here was that I was at some event where I was speaking, and the director [of the center] said ‘You know, it’d be great to get you up at Harvard…’ although that director was on his way out. The person who actually hired me, who subsequently became [Federal Housing Administration] director, was Bill Apgar. I came initially to work on a remodeling project, which was an attempt to understand why people spend what they do on repair and remodeling activity. If you look at the focus of much research on construction, it was on new construction… but a lot of people pointed out that remodeling was a $100 billion-plus industry about which less was known, and which is going to become a bigger and bigger part of the economy [as the nation’s housing stock grows older].

Where is the center focusing its research now, in the aftermath of the housing bust?

Obviously now, given how central housing has been to the economy more generally, and housing finance has been to some of the issues that emerged in the financial system, we’ve been doing a lot of work trying to understand what happened, what it may suggest about the future and where we kind of are now. What questions and issues people should be thinking about regarding people’s access to mortgage credit. Almost all of it has either FHA insurance, or is through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Right now underwriting standards are very tight. They’ve retreated to a level of tightness that would go back, way back, well before the 1990s, when some of these automated underwriting tools came in and relaxed some of the standards. So the question is, where will this shake out? Where will that come from? Will there be a loosening of standards in some of these programs that have some federal backing and support, or will it come from the part of the market that doesn’t? How far will that part of the market go, over what kind of time frame? Right now, the world is living with a mortgage finance system that is very tightly underwritten.

Any other topics of interest?

There’s also an argument that can be made that we have reached a tipping point around sustainable development, around green building, and we want to participate more in understanding some of those issues. Particularly in understanding what are some of the financing innovations that may help support an agenda like that, what are the design innovations that may be out there…We’re going to start to look at those issues a little bit more.

I think we’re also interested in doing a little bit more on some international policy issues. Urbanization around the world is proceeding at a very rapid pace, and it’s producing a lot of strains at the municipal level, from which we think not only would it be useful [for us] to give some perspective, but to be able to translate the information back domestically, about how municipal governments operate under the strains of rapid growth.

This year’s report touched on the effect of immigration on long-term housing demand. How important is that for the overall housing picture?

Immigration has played an incredible role in the US. We’re closing in on one in 10 households being headed by a foreign-born person. When you add in the children of the foreign-born who are born here in the US, it’s an even larger number. So a lot of the impact doesn’t come with people arriving on our shores, as in the popular imagination, but in the fact that when they’re here, since so many of them arrive in their 20s and 30s, they have children who are born here…the combination of those two things has really filled in dramatically [the Echo Baby Boom and the Baby Bust generations]. If you look at the age distribution of the population, if you imagine each age stacked up, it’s like a column now [with just as many people in their 20s and 30s as there are in their 50s and 60s]. In most developed countries around the world, it’s very top-heavy with people over 65, because they didn’t get filled in by immigration. The US is unique…So from that perspective it looks like there’s a lot of demand feeding the system. That’s a trend that we’re monitoring because right now immigration appears to be suppressed because of the poor economy. If we get back any normal level of GDP growth, accompanying that will be some degree of immigration. There are two wild cards with [immigration]: The economy, also the politics, that could have an effect on the character of immigration. The incomes and wealth of immigrants skew lower, but they’re a substantial and growing fraction of the upper-income groups.

Top five questions Belsky Would Answer If He Had A Crystal Ball: 

• When will non-government-backed funding come back for residential mortgages? And what kind of funding?
• Will Washington pass some kind of immigration reform?
• Are we at the end of the downturn?
• How sustainable is the sustainability movement? Have we reached the tipping point where “green-ness” will truly drive purchase decisions?
• Are the Red Sox going to win this year? Says Belsky, a Yankee-hating Mets fan and Red Sox Nation immigrant: “That’s the one I’d really like to know.”