Breaking Matt Bai Housing Update Just In!

When Matt Bai, a Times reporter and Yankees fan in his early 40s with two children, wanted to buy a new house, the mortgage brokers laughed at him! But he had perfect credit, and had only bought his last home six years ago! (It was a “center-hall colonial on a corner lot three blocks from the subway and American University.”) Then he found out that his nanny had a very bad mortgage on her house, the payments of which were 75% of her income. And so he bought a new house, a “spacious, if deteriorated split-level,” even though the counter tops were ugly, with a nice, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. And then he wrote about all of this at work.