The Man Winding Down Fannie and Freddie

The man with power over more than half of U.S. mortgages lives in a 1961 split-level brick house with a basketball hoop in the driveway and a green Subaru in the carport. The homes on Edward DeMarco’s block in a suburb of Washington, D.C., are so close together that neighbors see into each other’s windows. This surprised several dozen demonstrators, one in a vampire costume, who visited in September to demand he quit his job as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. “My home is better looking than this,” said Catrese Tucker, a Massachusetts toll collector whose house is in foreclosure.

As the overseer of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, DeMarco, 52, has been criticized by homeowners and lawmakers who want more aid for troubled borrowers, even as the government-run companies subsist on $190 billion in taxpayer life support. Congressional Republicans and Democrats and President Barack Obama want to wind down and replace Fannie and Freddie, yet they haven’t agreed on how. That makes DeMarco the only official in Washington actively working to shrink the two companies. “The FHFA under the leadership of Acting Director DeMarco is slowly but surely enacting housing finance reform without the guidance or consent of Congress,” says Isaac Boltansky, a policy analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading. “That’s due in part to the complete inability for Congress to find any consensus.”