indoor toilets, running water, and central heating are taken for granted. Homeownership, once the privilege of a small minority, is now enjoyed by nearly two-thirds of all families.

Unlike other countries where housing is categorized as social capital and falls heavily within government's domain, the United States has achieved this remarkable increase in quantity and quality through private markets. Publicly owned housing accounts for a 2 percent sliver of the housing inventory and that proportion keeps slipping. Even with respect to social housing, America's alternatives to public ownership and operation are private nonprofit housing entities—both free-standing and as components of community development corporations. The nurture of these organizational forms has long been a Ford Foundation priority. Our contribution to their growth and enhanced capabilities is widely acknowledged.

A second remarkable housing achievement, of immeasurable importance to the first, has been the revolution in mortgage finance. The home mortgage was once an unstandardized contract between borrower and local lender (not always a bank) that traded, if at all, through improvised transactions. Starting fifty years ago, the residential mortgage was swiftly perfected into a major instrument of the national (now international) capital market. Protected by insurance and guaranty, mortgage terms were liberalized from five-year non-amortized contracts into standardized contracts with up to thirty-year self-amortizing maturities. Because credit risks were eliminated and liquidity provided for, such mortgages carried lower real interest rates than did unprotected, untradable mortgages. Moreover, the transaction costs of servicing mortgages, uninsured as well as insured, were greatly reduced as sophisticated electronic accounting equipment took over. Mortgage trading techniques grew ever more inventive as a network of secondary facilities was established. Investment houses learned how to devise and customize mortgage-based securities in endlessly ingenious ways. So successful has been the mortgage revolution that, to a substantial and increasing extent, government mortgage insurance has been replaced by private insurance.