NHI’s John Atlas to Discuss New ACORN Book
Posted by Rooflines on June 22, 2010
John Atlas, a founder of the National Housing Institute and Shelterforce, will appear today in the 1 p.m. hour (eastern) on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show to discuss his new book, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group.
Atlas’ new book goes “beyond the headlines of the last Presidential campaign to describe what really happened in ACORN’s massive voter registration drives, why it triggered an unrelenting attack by Fox News and the Republican Party, and how it confronted its internal divisions and scandals.”
New York-area listeners can tune in at 93.9 FM or 820 AM; everyone can tune in at www.wnyc.org.
0 Comments
Banks Cleaning up Their Mess to Count as CRA Credit?
Posted by Miriam Axel-Lute on June 18, 2010
Financial regulators proposed yesterday to allow all activities carried out under the auspices of NSP to count toward a lender’s CRA compliance. This would only last as long as NSP is in effect.
So, for example, donating foreclosed properties in targeted areas to community developers; financing the purchase and rehab of foreclosed, abandoned, or vacant properties; or loans, investments, and services that support the redevelopment of demolished or vacant properties in those areas all would count.
My first reactions to this are mixed: On the one hand, of course, those sound like very worthy CRA-related activities and if it helps open the spigot a little for difficult-to-get-financing, that would be great.
On the other hand, it is a little uncomfortable to feel like (yet again) we’re going to the institutions that got us into this mess and patting them on the back for participating in the clean up at all. (Though it should be noted that CRA-regulated lenders were far less to blame for bad loans than those not covered by CRA.)
I can easily picture some frustrated neighborhood-level folks wondering why a bank should get credit for offloading worthless properties they’re not maintaining and making them someone else’s problem, for example.
Still, knee jerk sense of justice aside, for the most part it seems like this would be a good thing, giving additional weight to those inside these institutions who are trying to move the overwhelmed bureaucracies they are a part of toward prudent, neighborhood stabilizing lending and REO practices.
Or would it divert money away from traditional CRA activities, since CRA credit could be gained by doing things lenders are already under pressure from other quarters to do (or eventually will figure out are good for their balance sheets)? What do you think?
0 Comments
Some Relief in the Gulf for Homeowners
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on June 17, 2010
Housing Wire reported this morning that mortgage giant Fannie Mae has authorized its servicers to reduce mortgage payments or suspend payments altogether for those homeowners affected by the BP oil spill, either by lost wages or damages to property.
According to Fannie Mae president and CEO Michael Williams:
“We want to give homeowners every opportunity to weather this unprecedented disaster, including relief from their mortgage payment if that will help them get back on their feet and stay in their homes…Our policy is in place to support those who are experiencing a disaster-related hardship through no fault of their own and are acting in good faith to meet their mortgage obligation.”
According to the report, servicers can use Fannie Mae’s Special Relief Measure policy in order to lessen or eliminate payments for up to 90 days. The servicer then assesses the homeowner’s situation and offer up forbearance for an additional three months of forbearance, or even conduct a loan modification.
0 Comments
The Case For Rentals Over Homeownership
Posted by Kaid Benfield on June 15, 2010
Richard Florida, chronicler of societal trends and Twitter addict (follow him at your peril), believes that there is a strong case to be made that America should shift somewhat away from homeownership and toward more rentals, perhaps achieving a 50-50 balance between the two.
In the video below, he points out that homeownership has been massively subsidized, to the extent that we now have an eight-year surplus of housing on the market for sale to owner-occupants. He believes that we need to reinvent rental into a more robust and flexible system.
As I pointed out at my blog, I’m not entirely sure I agree with the premise, by the way. True, homeownership is subsidized, but in my experience owner-occupiers are frequently willing to invest in a property beyond what landlords do, to the benefit of neighborhood and place. The subsidy may, in fact, be in the public interest. Moreover, while many cite the mortgage interest deduction as a cause of sprawl, that deduction is just as available to those who buy in cities and walkable suburbs. (It is also worth pointing out that those who invest in rental properties have the benefit of a range of business deductions and subsidies not available to ordinary homeowners.)
But RF’s point of view is interesting nonetheless. Check it out:
0 Comments
Does Public Housing Have a Future?
Posted by Peter Dreier on June 11, 2010
Everybody hates public housing, except the low-income people who live there and the people on the long waiting lists to get in.
Now, after years of neglect, the Obama Administration wants to save public housing for future generations. It has a plan to inject billions of dollars into the developments to make long-deferred repairs.
But a few liberal Congressmembers,advocacy groups, and left-wing academics view the proposal with skepticism, worried that it is really a scheme to “privatize” the government-run housing projects and lead to rising rents, evictions, and perhaps the elimination of scarce affordable housing.
A recent memo written by some radical urban studies professors makes it seem like Obama wants to hand public housing over to Goldman Sachs or turn the low-income projects into luxury housing. And separately, in an article for Huffington Post, George Lakoff, the well-known UC-Berkeley linguistics professor, warns that the Obama administration is trying to “privatize all public housing in America” and “give conservatives a victory they could not have anticipated.” It is, Lakoff wrote, evidence of Obama’s “move to the right.”
Continued... · 0 Comments
Strategic Default Can Make Sense, Right? Well, Not So Fast
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on June 10, 2010
Walking away from one’s mortgage, particularly a mortgage that is underwater, has increasingly become a viable option for homeowners who can no longer live by the terms of their mortgage contract—a contract that stipulates that a homeowner pays the monthly payment, or have the bank take back the house.
It’s right there in the contract. Don’t pay, no house. Many homeowners see voluntary defaults as a very real option that, once upon a time, was considered anti-social and amoral and unthinkable for no other reason than making payments on your mortgage, no matter what, and had less to do with making the right financial decisions for the homeowner and family. There are even people who will offer advice as to how to walk away from your mortgage.
But now, inserted in House bill that would nearly triple the cap on annual premiums the Federal Housing Authority can charge borrowers and gives the agency more powers to protect itself from fraudulent or poorly-underwritten loans, is a measure that requires HUD to “rein in strategic defaults” on FHA loans, according to Dow Jones:
The amendment requires the HUD Secretary to define strategic default and work with lenders to block borrowers who default when they can still afford their mortgages from the FHA program. The amendment also requires HUD to use all its powers to ensure the FHA is sufficiently capitalized.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C, and regular Shelterforce contributor, who recently wrote a piece on giving homeowners in unwanted default on their mortgage loan the right to rent, points out the hypocrisy of such a measure, inserted by New York Rep. Chris Lee, a Republican, writing on Talking Points Memo that this is simply nanny stating of a different kind:
“Rather than respecting the sanctity of contract, the Republicans want to punish homeowners who look out for their own best interest and strategically default. Hence they want to prohibit them from later getting a loan that is insured by the FHA. Who knows what other sanction they may look to impose. Maybe they will also prohibit strategically defaulters from getting a loan through the Small Business Administration or allowing their children to getting a government guaranteed student loan.”
Strategic default, he notes, is also standard business practice. Look no further than New York City’s Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town—the massive housing complex whose owner strategically defaulted on the on the $4.4 billion debt used to help finance the deal.
Baker does not glaze over this double standard, of course:
“Actually, the Republicans are doing the country a valuable service by showing us in the clearest possible terms that they couldn’t give flying f*** about the ‘free market.’ They are about redistributing income upward. If they can rig the rules of the market to get the income flowing upward, that’s great. But, if it takes the big hand of big government to make sure that the money goes to their friends, then they have no qualms about going this route also.”
0 Comments
Had Enough of the Spill? Stop Sprawl and Support Revitalization
Posted by Kaid Benfield on June 4, 2010
Enraged at the spill in the Gulf and the American appetite for oil that ultimately caused it? Stop land development on farmland, forests and other fringe locations and direct future development to close-in opportunities. A massive new study, years in the making, makes it crystal-clear that it can make a big difference.
In particular, transportation uber-researchers Reid Ewing (University of Utah) and Robert Cervero (UC-Berkeley) have published a painstaking “meta-analysis” of nearly 50 published studies on the subject of land use and travel behavior. Writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the two return to a subject to which they have dedicated most of their careers, in this case updating their previous meta-analysis from 2001.
What they found: location matters most when it comes to land use, driving and the environment.
The study’s key conclusion is that destination accessibility is by far the most important land use factor in determining a household or person’s amount of driving. To explain, ‘destination accessibility’ is a technical term that describes a given location’s distance from common trip destinations (and origins). It almost always favors central locations within a region; the closer a house, neighborhood or office is to downtown, the better its accessibility and the lower its rate of driving. The authors found that such locations can be almost as significant in reducing driving rates as other significant factors (e.g., neighborhood density, mixed land use, street design) combined.
The clear implication is that, to enable lifestyles with reduced driving, oil consumption and associated emissions, we should stress opportunities for revitalization and redevelopment in centrally located neighborhoods. As Ewing and Cervero put it: Almost any development in a central location is likely to generate less automobile travel than the best-designed, compact, mixed-use development in a remote location.
After location, the next most important factor in reducing driving is a well-connected street network. For more about the study, go here.
(Photo by roadsidepictures, creative commons.)
0 Comments
Housing Markets that Will Never Recover?
Posted by Miriam Axel-Lute on June 1, 2010
Residents of Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, Buffalo are probably surprised to know that they didn’t make 24/7 Wall Street’s list of 13 Housing Markets that Will Never Recover.
This is probably just because their housing prices hadn’t risen enough to take the kind of tumbles that the list compilers were looking for (they combined housing price drop and unemployment rates). Although some weaker market areas, like Toledo and Grand Rapids did show up on the list, it has a high showing of bubble cities from California, Florida, and Nevada.
Though list-making is largely a web-traffic generating exercise rather than a journalistic one (I know this from my days as a blogger on a parenting site) and not to be taken too seriously, this one still raises the question: why are we still talking about “recovery” to mean reattaining unsustainable bubble prices? There’s clearly a recovery possible in which Reno and Vegas and Palm Coast, Florida, stay more affordable (and stable) in the long run. And recovery in the markets that were lower priced to begin with is clearly even more complicated.
Perhaps the community development world should make our own lists to focus attention on the results of foreclosures and their effects on neighborhoods. What would they be?
Photo credit: Paraflyer
0 Comments
Sustainability: Still a Novel Idea
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on May 27, 2010
I had an exchange with an acquaintance about a recent tweet we put out when we were covering the fourth annual summit of the National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations. The tweet made a quick reference (since we’re limited to 140 characters) to the keynote speech by HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, where he addressed institutionalizing policy focused on sustainability:
“Sustainability is not the exclusive domain of the rich; it has to be for everyone.”
My friend correctly noted that people like Van Jones, the one-time Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, a non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation (see the Shelterforce interview here), have been talking about this for years, and he’s right of course. But while this type of thinking has been prevalent for years in environmental, advocacy, and social justice circles, embracing sustainability, not only from an economic, transportation, and environmental standpoint, but also used as an approach to creating policy, is something we’ve now seen regularly from this administration—and that’s what makes Sims’ words notable.
Specifically, Sims was talking about the ideals behind sustainability driving federal policy and federal agencies crossing silos to collaborate on large-scale initiatives (think the HUD-DOT-EPA Partnership for Sustainable Communities)
“It’s important for us to look at regional plans on how sustainability and livability are developed so that we can accomplish what we call an integrated system.
“It doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t have individual areas in those regions that are going to be targeted initially—we’re going to look for those as well—but our goal is whether the entire community will benefit.”
Sims then went on to discuss his home county of Washington State’s King County, where, as county executive there, he garnered national attention for his work on urban development, affordable housing, transportation, and homelessness. In King County, the 13th largest county (and eighth richest) in the country, with a metropolitan area of 1.8 million residents and 39 cities that includes Seattle, it was possible to predict health outcomes by ZIP code, as well as illness rates, and even tooth decay rates, Sims said.
While NOFAs have yet to go out, Sims pointed to upcoming grants coming out of HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities and what his department hopes to achieve:
“Don’t come back to us and say ‘the prosperous will always proper.’ We’re saying that the rising tide must lift all boats. Sustainability is not the exclusive domain of the rich—it has to be for everyone—and [in these grants] we expect to see a reasonable narrative that brings that about. We want to see the fullness of a region.”
Here’s a segment of his 15-minute address:
0 Comments
Not Just Affordable Housing, but Connections to Neighborhoods
Posted by Matthew Brian Hersh on May 25, 2010
Shelley Poticha, director of HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Community Development, speaking at NACEDA’s annual summit, outlined two main grant programs in HUD’s Sustainable Communities Program and placed a heavy emphasis on how communities address growth at a regional level, and emphasize regional needs.
“Issues of a community don’t stop at the boundaries of that neighborhood. [Regional planning involves] a much more complicated decision-making process that we haven’t necessarily looked at in the past.
Poticha announced that HUD would be issuing NOFAs for two grant programs, a $100 million grant program for regional planning, that aims to help people that are already working in this field to put together a regional housing or transportation strategy, and a $40 million Sustainable Communities Challenge Planning Grant Program that was designed to encourage detailed planning at the neighborhood scale.
Poticha, appearing on a panel, “Integrated Approaches to Building Sustainable Communities,” said the grants were designed to spur engagement ‘from people who are not normally involved in these discussions when it comes to planning on the regional scale.”
“We need to reach out to people in communities who are applying for funds, but we are also trying to help provide support, capacity, and training to help create the government structure to help embrace inclusive discussions on decision making.”
Also appearing on the panel was Beth Cooper, a staff member at the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, who discussed Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) Livable Communities Act that would establish two grant programs—one for $400 million over four years for communities, and a Challenge Grant Program to implement sustainable development projects allocating $3.75 billion for grants over three years.
National Housing Institute
