Subject: Affordable Housing
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Driving along I-95 from Virginia to New England, I noticed how many townhouse-style developments have cropped up where apartment complexes would have been built a decade ago. Here is an example of the demand for housing shifting in a small…
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Here’s a handful of somewhat radical planning ideas to ponder as we enter the Great Mini-Depression: I am wondering what sort of innovations will go mainstream in this strange new age. General Motors is busy touting a plug-in electric car…
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This past summer, I wrote a feature for Shelterforce about a community where a CDC was battling a NIMBY mentality. The CDC was trying to build neighborhood support for over a hundred units of new market and affordable housing in…
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This morning I read about the dismay of residents of a New York City neighborhood who have watched as people who owned homes on their block have suddenly disappeared. Foreclosure signs have popped up on lawns up and down the…
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Losing a home to foreclosure is a nightmare, causing at least one person — Carlene Balderrama of Massachusetts — to commit suicide in recent months. Seeing all the money, work, love, care and dreams put into a home seized out from under you is a frightening and heartbreaking experience, to say the least.
But an under-reported part of the whole foreclosure crisis — ongoing for months and likely to get even worse with the recent economic crash — is the eviction of renters often with little or no advance notice.
When a building is foreclosed upon the owner has several months’ notice, but renters usually have no idea about the owner’s financial status. So when sheriffs are sent to evict people from a foreclosed building, it may be the first the actual residents have heard of it. Most states have laws mandating advance notice to renters, but these laws commonly are not adequately enforced. This means countless scenes of life-shattering chaos, with families thinking they are starting another regular day and ending up with their belongings on the street and nowhere to go. more
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Wall Street is in meltdown. Banks are collapsing. Developers can’t get loans to build homes. Housing values are plummeting. Millions of Americans are facing foreclosure. But in Los Angeles late last month, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, speaking at a crowded union…
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It’s been interesting to watch the conservative conga line blame the affordable housing expansion effort for the country’s current financial crisis. But, as writers on Rooflines displayed when community organizing fell under attack at the Republican National Convention, what’s equally…
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What do you do when your CDC can’t afford to buy pencils or print business cards, and certainly can’t buy land or buildings? You consider a major change in the way your CDC functions, is what. An idea is developing…
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In theory, the current financial crisis is a good thing for neighborhood planning. With developers slowing down their projects because they can’t get financing, there may be an opening for planners and community leaders to step up their long term…
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A report I recently co-authored for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities examines the state of public housing in the United States today using significant new research on the location of remaining units. The report finds that public housing…
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Sorry to keep the focus on New Jersey, folks, but if you are a long-time Rooflines reader, you’ll know that I will, once again, preface this post with: At least we’re talking about an affordable housing mandate (even if that…
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John McCain reinvented himself — again — this morning. And the latest avatar is the reincarnation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Speaking in Green Bay, Wisc. about the global economic collapse that’s flowed directly from the orgy of deregulation he and…
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Being a person who doesn’t have much invested in the stock market, I tend not to pay too close attention to photos on the business pages of weary stockbrokers on the trading floor. We’ve been through crashes before, and this…
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For months, I’ve been leading kind of a single-minded existence, writing a book about the little known and little understood field of community organizing through the lens of ACORN, the largest grass-roots organizing group in the country.
Imagine my amazement when I looked up from my computer screen about two weeks ago and noticed that community organizing had taken center stage in the presidential campaign contratemps.
Although I could hardly believe my eyes and ears, there were the Republicans’ featured speakers at their national convention, lacing into community organizing as a fringy, freaky, suspect, navel-gazing, Sixties-inspired form of self-indulgent radicalism. Or, as Mike Huckabee insinuated, the brainchild of “European ideas.”
The GOP has unleashed such a barrage of bogus claims since the convention that you could be forgiven for feeling like the orchestrated series of smears against community organizing in St. Paul has been bypassed by talk of wolves, pit bulls, barracudas, and lipstick on pigs.
But I’m here to tell you why it’s imperative that we keep the phony attacks against organizers in the public debate.
McCain’s supporters ridiculed Obama’s community organizing work. Remember that Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and George Pataki claim to represent real Americans and to paint Barack Obama as an elitist who held a bogus job called community organizer. In making that equation, they showed ignorance and contempt for the kinds of actions that bind our democracy together and for the everyday people the Republicans claim to represent.
In fact, as Alice Chasan and Peter Dreier have argued in recent Rooflines posts, the Republican strategy of smearing community organizing has backfired, unleashing an unprecedented run of sustained media interest in the role of community organizing in American life and a torrent of impassioned essays by organizers and their supporters explaining what the work has meant to them and their communities. more
Much attention has been on Alaska politics lately thanks to John McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, not to mention Sen. Ted Stevens’ resounding victory in the Republican primary despite his indictment on corruption…
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John McCain could have dismissed his inability to recall how many houses he has as a senior moment, but that would have pointed to his age. So there wasn’t any way for John McMansion to dig out of this one,…
On July 29, 2008, the White House issued a statement that “chronic homelessness decreased an average of 15 percent per year between 2005 – 2007 and demonstrates that targeted, focused resources can achieve measurable results.” This amounts to a decrease…
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Most of the problems foreclosed properties cause come because they tend to become vacant and stay vacant for a while. Often a homeowner flees at the first notice of a foreclosure filing. If not, they, or their tenants, are almost always evicted at foreclosure.
We all know the litany of what happens then: legal limbo, deferred maintenance, vandalism, increased crime, often demolition. An ugly tale.
In my column for Metroland this week, I argue that it’s habit, and a kneejerk desire to punish those who default on mortgages, that keeps lien-holders from exercising their own best interests in maintaining these assets — by doing whatever they can to keep them occupied.
The idea of letting people stay rankles. It doesn’t punish anyone. At least not enough. The destroyed credit rating, lost equity, and shame of failing at the American Dream are not enough. A defaulting owner must pay the largest possible price for . . . for what? For being pressured, misled, or lied to by a mortgage broker in most cases. For betting wrong on a rising housing market in others. For being fiscally irresponsible in some, sure. Or for losing a job or getting sick at the wrong time. Without a ton research into each case, we don’t know.
There are options — from foreclosure deferrals to allowing owners to stay on as renters to buying distressed loans before foreclosure. More and more, I’m hearing that these are going to be crucial strategies to implement as soon as possible.
Relatedly, one researcher from Detroit recently told me that she thinks nonprofits in these hard-hit weak-market areas need help transitioning to a focus on managing rental property instead of developing for-sale property, and quickly, if they are going to play a role in truly stemming the negative effects of vacant property on these high-foreclosure areas. After all, we’re basically ending up with a glut of for-sale homes, but a continued shortage of affordable rentals.
Thoughts? more
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Now that the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act has been signed by the president, let us examine one of its key provisions. Under this act, the Federal Housing Administration is allowed to insure up to $300 billion in…
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Editor’s Note: The following is a response to a comment posted by Rooflines blogger Nandinee Kutty that points to “serious weaknesses” in Section 8 housing, as well as its “failure to serve as a reliable safety net for families in…
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National Housing Institute
