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33 Urb. Law. 433 (2001)
Confronting the Barriers to Native American Homeowners on Tribal Lands: The Case of the Navajo Partnership for Housing

handle is hein.journals/urban33 and id is 443 raw text is: Confronting the Barriers to Native American Homeownership on Tribal Lands: The Case of the Navajo Partnership for Housing1 Yair Listokin2 Ph.D. Candidate, Princedton University; M.A., Princeton University, 2000; B.A., Harvard University, 1997. I. Background NATIVE AMERICANS LIVING ON RESERVATIONS suffer severe housing distress. Even middle- and upper-income Indians3 on reservations are confronted by inadequate housing, a situation aggravated by a lack of access to home mortgages. Through 1994, not a single conventional mortgage had been closed on the Navajo Nation, an Indian reservation with a land area larger than that of nine states.4 1. This article was originally published in a study conducted for the Fannie Mae Foundation. Making New Mortgage Markets: Case Studies of Institutions, Home Buy- ers, and Communities (© 2000 Fannie Mae Foundation. All rights reserved). 2. Yair Listokin is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Princeton University. At the time he wrote this article he was employed as a researcher at the Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research. 3. Some question exists as to the appropriate nomenclature for Native Americans. The term Native American gained currency in the 1970s. In the 1990s, American Indian, or simply Indian (if there was no confusion with people from India), was the term most commonly used. For example, a July 1997 conference conducted by the Comptroller of the Currency was titled Lending in Indian Country. This study will use the popular references of Indian and Native American interchangeably. As a tech- nical note, legally (e.g., for eligibility for targeted mortgage programs) the terms In- dian and Native American have various meanings depending on why they are being used. In the most general terms, a person must meet two requirements to be an Indian or Native American. He or she must: (1) have some Indian blood and (2) be regarded as an Indian or Native American by his or her community. To get funding for many federal programs, however, a person must also be a member of a federally recognized tribe. In this context, tribal status is as important as individual status, which means that one cannot be a Native American without a tribe. DAVID LISTOKIN ET AL., U.S. DEP'T OF Hous. & URBAN DEV., RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR URBAN POLICY RESEARCH (CUPR), SUCCESSFUL MORTGAGE LENDING STRATE- GIES FOR THE UNDERSERVED 95 (1998). 4. Native Americans and Mortgages, COMMUNITY INVESTMENT, Aug. 29, 1994, at 5.

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