The housing crisis and a renewed emphasis by federal agencies and nonprofits on rental housing runs the risk of undermining the positive values of homeownership, said Habitat for Humanity International CEO Jonathan Reckford in a speech at Harvard University last night.

"What we really don’t want is for the pendulum to go so far the other way that people cease to believe in the value of homeownership, because we’ve seen, both for individual families and for communities, some percentage of homeownership helps in stabilizing and anchoring the community," he said.

Reckford’s speech was the 13th annual John T. Dunlop Lecture at Harvard, sponsored by the university’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and the National Housing Endowment. He discussed what he saw as three myths of affordable housing: That housing is important, but that it’s not at the top of the list of society’s needs; that affordable housing is somebody else’s problem; and that homeownership isn’t for low income people.

Habitat for Humanity has provided mortgages to sub-sub-prime borrowers for more than 40 years, he pointed out, and several years ago theirs was one of the few successful private mortgage securitizations in the country precisely because they had zero losses on their mortgage portfolio. He also discussed how the collapse of the housing market and the concentration of distressed properties in many neighborhoods has caused the group to shift its emphasis in the U.S. from building homes to rehabilitating homes. He also pointed to a recent mid-rise project the group had worked on in Melbourne, Australia, as an example of a useful way to increase affordable housing even in times of tight financing. On that project, the three lower levels of an eight-story apartment building were made affordable, enabling the project to get financing.

Though his own group focuses on homeownership, Reckford acknowledged there are unmet needs on the rental side.

"The private sector does an amazing job of providing rental housing, [but there’s a need for nonprofits to provide] community glue, and the partnership on the community side to do some of the same work and provide a path so that they’re successful renters, and I think we need more of that as well," he said.