Just across the street from Boston’s South Station sits a man to whom the nation should be listening. But we’re afraid his words are being lost in the din of political grandstanding and the drone of media ignorance.

Paul Willen is a senior economist and policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He’s a dedicated researcher who looks for facts to back up his assertions. He and his colleagues have written extensively over the past couple of years on the housing crisis. His most recent work is an exploration of why more lenders don’t renegotiate mortgages that are in default. And it was on that topic that he was in Washington, D.C., on July 16, testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Not that anyone was listening.

Willen’s testimony that day was startling. What he said effectively undercuts most of what Congress has been trying to do in reaction to the nation’s housing crisis, and it certainly undermines quite a lot of the hysterical blamestorming that’s been going on in the media. Willen and his co-authors decided to see what the facts actually tell us about the subprime mortgage crisis and the rise in foreclosure activity.

Fact 1: There is scant evidence of consumers being “steered” into subprime loans when they could have otherwise qualified for normal mortgages. Although some critics have argued that FICO scores for subprime borrowers were often similar to ones that qualified for conventional mortgages, the data shows that subprime borrowers were purchasing homes in which they put less money down and for which their monthly payment to income levels were higher, pushing them into the subprime category.

Fact 2: Subprime “resets” didn’t play a factor in the rise in defaults. The “research reveals that in fact the so-called ‘teaser’ rates on subprime mortgages were very high to begin with … If resets were truly important, we would expect to see a dramatic increase in the likelihood that a borrower has trouble with his or her payment to coincide with the first reset of an adjustable-rate-mortgage. But we see no such relationship in the data and, in fact, the majority of borrowers who default on subprime adjustable rate mortgages start missing payments long before the rate increases with a reset.”

What Willen and his co-researchers – Manuel Adelino and Kristopher Gerardi – proved is that what set off the great foreclosure cascade wasn’t an influx of bad loan products, but the decline in housing prices, coupled with the beginning of the economic recession.

Even in good times, people lose their jobs and fall behind on housing payments. In 1999, for example, one of the strongest employment years in decades, there were 300,000 new unemployment claims being filed weekly. But in an era of rising home prices, when borrowers ran into trouble, they could sell their homes, pay off the outstanding mortgage, and have a few dollars left over.

When home prices fell, though, that equity pool evaporated. Without equity, the same borrowers who before could have escaped foreclosure instead fell into it. Indeed, the same scenario happened in the great real estate recession of the early 1990s. Borrowers who purchased in the late 1980s didn’t see their equity return until 1998 when homes in Massachusetts finally regained all their lost value. Over that period, foreclosures increased even while the number of home sales was rising.

“Life events” is the term economists use for what was going on: folks and/or their spouses losing their jobs, or experiencing some other economic stress. But it was not predatory lending, nor abusive practices that set off this foreclosure crisis. It was the cyclical nature of housing, coming down after an unusual high.

Didn’t know that? That’s because that story isn’t as juicy as one in which the financial markets can be painted as villains. Which is what the politicians – are you listening, Rep. Frank? – and the press continue to do.