Bankers who lend money for housing urged President-elect George Bush on Thursday to take early steps against rising home mortgage rates and said they favor a broad-based tax increase if necessary to ease the deficit and save the housing market. ``We hope ... that the Bush administration, as a last resort, will not foreclose the option of raising new revenues if necessary to bring down the deficit,'' said Warren Lasko, executive vice president of the Mortgage Bankers Association. ``He has to find a way to step away from his read-my-lips philosophy,'' said Lasko, referring to Bush's campaign pledge not to raise taxes. But Lasko told a news conference that housing lenders would oppose any effort by the administration or Congress to eliminate or reduce the income tax deduction home buyers can take on their mortgage interest. He said such a move would be a tax increase. Lasko said the association, which represents 2,800 mortgage companies and other lenders, hopes Bush will give increased attention to housing in line with his promise for a ``kinder, gentler nation.'' He said the new president and Congress will have ``an opportunity to weave a stronger thread of home ownership and housing opportunity into the social fabric of the nation.'' The association says home ownership is declining in relation to the population, with eight percent fewer families headed by men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 owning homes now than did when Reagan was first elected in 1980. It also says home buying takes a bigger bite out of family income, rents are higher, low-income housing is scarcer, vacancies are higher among high-income units, and 9.5 million American families live in substandard housing. Lasko criticized the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Reagan for failing to work with Congress or with state and local officials to combat the housing problem. ``HUD has been negligent in recent years in not attending to the fact that housing and community building are to be carried out with governors and mayors,'' he said. Lasko noted that interest rates on home mortgages have been creeping up in the past week and said they could reach 11 percent by the end of the year, further slowing housing markets. Increases in the amount of public and private debt tend to push interest rates up, and Lasko said the United States has become a nation ``addicted to debt.'' He said Bush's first priority for benefitting housing should be to decrease the deficit. ``Nothing affects housing affordability more than interest rates,'' he said.
