How old is barney franks husband

Frank told the group at Boston College that he predicted, and might have prevented, the real-estate crisis that has engulfed the economy. By this time, many aspects of the crisis were well known. The end of the housing bubble had caused home values to plummet and mortgage defaults to rise, particularly among subprime borrowers. Many financial-services firms had assembled mortgages and bought and sold them as securities, and the value of those assets had also declined sharply—a development that devastated the firms.

The investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had closed their doors, and the financial-services industry was on the brink of collapse, even after Congress authorized an emergency seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout, in October.

And we did too much pushing of people into inappropriate mortgages and into homeownership. In one respect, Frank went on, the current crisis has had a salutary effect: home prices have fallen, making homes more affordable for those who still have the money to buy them. I want to lose twenty-five pounds—but not by Sunday. Frank arrived in Congress when the Reagan Administration was withdrawing the federal government from the business of building housing for the poor. At the time, it was clear that the private sector had little incentive to build low-income housing without government assistance in the form of tax breaks or subsidies.

The Reagan Administration assisted low-income renters by offering them vouchers to help them pay rent and by providing tax credits to local developers who built low-income housing. In subsequent years, Frank has fought with intermittent success to preserve such programs from major budget cuts. In , Frank embraced a new approach. That year, Bernie Sanders, then a representative from Vermont, sponsored a bill to create a government trust fund that would be used for building and renovating low-income housing.

The funding for the trust would be automatic—not subject to annual congressional approval. So I can do a lot of units without directly competing for the appropriations.

The idea was based on a variety of similar programs at the state and local levels. In the past few decades, governments across the country have set up nearly six hundred trust funds to build low-income housing, typically by collecting small taxes or fees from real-estate transactions.

In , Frank used his influence as committee chairman to insure that the housing trust-fund bill finally passed the House. In , a similar measure made it through the Senate as part of a larger bill, which President Bush signed. By that time, however, Fannie and Freddie were mired in debt, and the value of their shares was collapsing. The Committee on Financial Services, which has seventy members, is one of the biggest panels in Congress.

But not here in the federal government! At the hearing, Frank responded testily to Garrett. It does seem to me to be important to set the record clearly before us. The number of occasions on which either Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay consulted me about the specifics of legislation are far fewer than the gentleman from New Jersey seems to think. I was unable to stop their irresponsible tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and a Patriot Act that did not include civil liberties.

Frank and I discussed his role in the housing crisis at his district headquarters, in a small office building in Newton. Frank explained that he first became interested in housing during his service, in the late sixties, as the top aide to Kevin White, who was then the mayor of Boston. The city had a long history of building public housing, mostly high-rises, and White pledged to encourage the construction of small apartment complexes, in keeping with the scale of most Boston neighborhoods.

And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. When White was mayor, one of the most infamous public-housing projects in the city was Columbia Point, in Dorchester. The project was said to be so dangerous that ambulances refused to enter it without a police escort. In a process begun under White, and shepherded in its early days by Frank, Columbia Point was turned over to a private developer, who converted it to a mixed-income community, which included housing for the poor and market-rent apartments for the more affluent.

I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal. In , while the Democrats were still in the minority, Frank contributed to a bipartisan effort to put his objectives—tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and new funds for rental housing—into law. At the time, Fannie and Freddie were regulated by a small agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the bill proposed to create an independent agency to monitor their operations.

Frank and Michael Oxley, who was then chairman of the Financial Services Committee, achieved broad bipartisan support for the bill in the committee, and it passed the House. But the Senate never voted on the measure, in part because President Bush was likely to veto it. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process. He eschews the grandstanding style that so many members use and prefers to work behind the scenes and get something done.

The real problem was outside of Fannie and Freddie, with the banks, and nobody in Congress was talking about it. He intends to secure additional funding from, among other sources, the Federal Housing Administration, a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development which insures mortgages. Specifically, he wants to fund the trust with profits from an F. The number of housing units that will be built or renovated with funds from the trust is likely to be modest at first.

Frank declined to provide an estimate. But Barney got it done. The private sector in Houston does a great job of providing low-cost rental housing without help from the government. The question is whether this program will make a difference in places like New York and San Francisco, where there is a shortage. Poor people buy used cars.

The question is whether that faith is justified. When the Republicans won control of Congress in , the Democratic leadership in the House made Frank a kind of one-man immediate-response team to Newt Gingrich, the new House Speaker.

Frank and Gingrich sparred almost daily, and Frank still professes surprise that Gingrich took their disagreements personally.

He would not discuss the matter for this article. For Frank, the word has particular resonance: one of his high-school classmates was Chuck Wepner, a heavyweight boxer who was known as the Bayonne Bleeder. My father was a middleman or something.

He refused and was found in criminal contempt. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. He served for about a year. I was very struck by that.

Good for you. Because Bayonne was such a sleazy place, nobody knew whether Barney was going to wind up in Congress or in jail. All four Frank children settled far from Bayonne. Ann Lewis, the eldest, was the director of communications in the Clinton White House and a top aide to Hillary Clinton during her Presidential campaign.

David Frank works as a speechwriter for the A. In the nineteen-seventies, Elsie Frank moved to Boston and later became the president of the Massachusetts Association of Older Americans. She died in Earlier this fall, the Democrats in the House had to take sides when Henry Waxman, of California, challenged John Dingell, of Michigan, for the chairmanship of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which Dingell had held for a year.

Dingell also chaired the committee from to The contest represented a classic ideological confrontation between the left and the center of the Democratic Party.

As chairman of the House oversight committee, Waxman, an outspoken, pro-environment liberal, led high-profile investigations of Republican wrongdoings, while Dingell, a pro-labor moderate, is known as a behind-the-scenes player, often on behalf of the automobile industry.

Frank voted for Dingell, who lost, — I think there is a danger of what will look like liberal overreach. But I do think there should be some burden of proof before you throw out a chairman. To the public, Frank looks much like Waxman—a blunt partisan with a flair for sound bites—but, like Dingell, he has a record as a pragmatic legislator.

He graduated from Harvard in and began a long, ultimately unsuccessful quest there for a Ph. I once asked him the subject of his planned dissertation. What about the legislature? He later attended Harvard Law School, and graduated in In the mid-sixties, as a teaching assistant at Harvard, Frank lived on campus and had time for non-academic pursuits.

He spent five weeks registering black voters in Mississippi, and travelled around the country as an organizer for the activist Allard Lowenstein, an early leader of what would become the student movement of the late sixties. Frank also befriended a group of young, reform-oriented politicians, who hoped to wrest control of the commonwealth from the long-serving Democratic Party stalwarts who dominated state government. In time, his circle of politician friends coalesced into an entity known as the Democratic Study Group, for which Frank served as an unpaid executive director, and which quickly came to center on a young state representative from Brookline named Michael Dukakis.

We persuaded Barney to take the Red Line down from Harvard to be our staff guy—for free. He was smart as hell and funny as hell and worked like hell. White, who was thirty-eight, belonged to a generation of charismatic young politicians—including John V. If elected president, Democrat Joe Biden would repeal the current U. While in office, Frank was instrumental in passing landmark legislation to protect consumers after the financial crisis.

Chris Dodd, created new regulatory bodies and directed existing agencies to write hundreds of regulations aimed at creating stability in the financial markets. It was the most sweeping financial regulatory statute enacted since the response to the Great Depression in the s. Looking back, Frank said he remains proudest of his abilities as a legislator and has composed his epitaph based on his time as a Washington lawmaker. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly.