Rick Lazio of theFinancial Services Forum

Former Congressman Rick Lazio (R-NY) admits to a “passion” for multifamily housing. It’s actually more than that. In his years in Washington, he was responsible for a number of major legislative initiatives geared toward encouraging home occupancy and development–with a particular emphasis on affordable housing. He was a cosponsor of the Affordable Housing Improvement Act of 1999, a bill to increase the credit cap from $1.25 to $1.75 per capita. And the Senior Citizens’ Housing Financial Restructuring Act of 1998 (HR 3635), which he authored, would guarantee continued affordable housing for more than 260,000 seniors across the country. Today, as president and CEO of the Financial Services Forum, a public policy institute made up of 21 major financial institutions, Lazio states that his view of the real estate market is “high altitude,” and his work deals with the major, global issues that will impact real estate finance indirectly–technology and privacy, and capital standards, for instance. Lazio appeared most recently at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual Housing Summit in Washington, DC, where he entered into a debate on the relative contributions of the multifamily versus single-family impact on the state of the economy (click on: MBA Debates Pros and Cons of Multifamily Development ). So he remains an active observer in the progress that the industry makes–and sometimes falls short of making. In a recent exclusive interview, he developed some of the themes he brought out during the summit–and he explained what he thought was necessary if the real estate industry was serious about addressing the current housing crisis.

GlobeSt.com: At the MBA Summit, you came down pretty passionately on the side of multifamily housing development as opposed to single-family.

Lazio: One doesn’t exclude the other, and there’s an enormous need for both–especially because you have a new wave of immigration that will be fueling demand for both.