Nicolas Retsinas MCP 1971

“It used to be in this country that the rules were simple,” says Nicolas Retsinas MCP 1971, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, a collaborative venture of the Harvard Design School and the Kennedy School. “You got a job, and it enabled you to find a decent place to live. Now we’ve got this phrase, a hideous phrase:
‘the working poor.’” The rules, he says, are no longer simple, especially for the “working poor.”

Recently recognized by the National Low Income Housing Coalition for his “wisdom and deep sense of fairness and justice that inform all aspects of his work,” Retsinas says many of the working poor constantly move around, due in part to the lack of affordable housing currently plaguing this country. As a result, their children often switch schools, which means they grow up lacking a foundation for a solid education.

Before returning to the Kennedy School, Retsinas worked at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for five years as assistant secretary for housing. Under his watch, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) assisted more first-time buyers than during any comparable period. He also served as director of the Office of Thrift Supervision from October 1996 to November 1997, during which time he provided regulatory supervision of all federal and many state-chartered thrift institutions.

But before he landed in Washington, DC — before he even received his master’s degree in urban development, a degree now run in collaboration with the Kennedy School — Retsinas spent his formative years working in his family’s restaurant. Then he worked for two professors at Harvard. “It was my first job,” he says, “where I didn’t have to wear an apron.”

His return to Harvard in 1998 as director of the Joint Center on Housing Studies has brought him “full circle,” he says. While at the Joint Center, which conducts research to examine and address the most critical housing and community development issues in America, Retsinas, who now lives a short drive from where he grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, has focused his energies on coming up with solutions to our country’s housing crisis.

He argues that, to a large extent, we now build houses for people buying second or third homes. “We don’t build starter homes anymore,” he says, which makes it more difficult for first-time homebuyers. In 1950, two-thirds of all new homes were smaller than 1,200 square feet; last year, fewer than 6 percent were that small, he says.

“Twenty years ago, you might have been told that your spouse should get a job to help with the mortgage. Or maybe you should work a little overtime” says Retsinas. “Today you need to do that in order to qualify.”

But looking to the past won’t provide us with the answers we need to deal with today’s housing problems, he says. Given the current economy, Retsinas believes we’re looking at a classic good news/bad news scenario: “We’ve got very efficient housing finance, and people have taken advantage.” But instead of building up equity, many Americans are “regarding their homes as ATMs,” as they continue to take out home equity loans.

“Owning a home is still the definition of success” for many in this country, he says. “Our research shows that, even when you control for income, homeownership brings tremendous social capital benefits. [Homeowners] are more likely to vote, join civic organizations, have children who do better in school, and have fewer teen pregnancies. And more dreams.”

— Aine Cryts