Tax preferences for housing are under fire, with mounting evidence that these preferences are inefficient, unequal, and too expensive to warrant a place in the tax code. Critics of proposed changes in the tax treatment of home ownership argue that these reforms would slash home prices at the very time they are showing signs of [...]

Housing industry lobbyists often make the case that, whatever you think of the mortgage interest deduction, now would be a terrible time to eliminate or restructure the subsidy. After all, they say, the housing market remains so shaky that ending the deduction would send home prices back into a tailspin. However, there is a contrary [...]

Taxpayers who took the 2008 tax credit for new homebuyers were unhappy when Congress made the credit much more generous in 2009. People who bought homes in 2008 have to repay the $7,500 credit over 15 years. Those who bought in 2009 or 2010 don’t have to pay their credits back. It turns out that [...]

The deduction for interest on home mortgages may be the most beloved of all tax subsidies. A politician needs only to muse about repealing or restructuring the deduction to be set upon by suburban mobs (led, perhaps, by real estate agents and mortgage lenders). But a new analysis by my Tax Policy Center colleagues Ridathi Chakravarti [...]