(RECAP: While the days of “NINJA loans” (no income, no job, no assets) are for the most part gone from the American mortgage marketplace, at least one housing reckon tank says the pendulum has now swung too far in the other direction and made it harder for many Americans to get a mortgage. Less than 1% of loans that have been made after 2011 have defaulted, according to Fannie Mae’s data, the Urban Institute said, even for those borrowers with FICO scores under 700. Only “the best borrowers are getting loans today and these loans are so thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned before they’re made that hardly any of them end up going into default,” wrote Laurie Goodman, co-director of the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center in an Aug. 31 blog post on the institute’s website. “A near-zero-default environment is clear evidence that we need to open up the credit box and lend to borrowers with less-than-perfect credit,” she wrote.)

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