Subject: Affordable Housing
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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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As Look Past the Bailout Blather notes, there are aspects of American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 that are welcomed. Especially, key is the White House backing off their threatened veto in opposition to the $4 billion…
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What do you know about New Bedford, Altoona, or Terre Haute? Should we figure that big-city revitalization work will just trickle down to these former industrial hubs?
A new report from PolicyLink, To Be Strong Again, takes a look at what separates smaller “older industrial cities” (under 150,000 population) from their larger counterparts, and lays out suggestions for revitalization with size in mind.
The report (which I co-authored with PolicyLink associate director Radhika Fox) started from the observation that places like Scranton, Albany, or Youngstown are actually not just mini Philadelphias, New Yorks, or Clevelands. Nor, of course, were they small towns. These small cities, with their blend of urbanness and small scale, history and isolation, have different challenges, and also different assets from their larger counterparts.
We found some interesting things when we looked at the data — small cities tend to be more volatile on many indicators or well-being, often showing either much higher or much lower rates of things like job loss or racially concentrated poverty, while larger cities tended to cluster inbetween in a smaller range. While this means that many smaller cities have large problems that are often overlooked by their states and philanthropy alike, I take this variability to also be a sign of hope: small changes in context can make big differences in results in these smaller cities. The right combination of leadership and action can make a big difference.
If small cities position themselves in their own niche— a best of both worlds kind of approach—and they and their regions and states approach revitalization with the strengths and challenges of small scale in mind, they have a chance, as the report’s title says, “to be strong again.” But they can’t do it alone, and part of our argument is that these small cities, struggling as they are, are crucial parts of our past, present, and future. They are overlooked to the detriment of the nation.
The report has already started some great conversations between mayors and other leaders working in many of these cities.
I’d love to see Rooflines readers weigh in as well. Does size matter? How? What other strategies or examples should be added to the framework we outline? more
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When The Atlantic dropped Hanna Rosin’s story linking Section 8 housing with increases in violent crime in Memphis neighborhoods, the ripple effect went well beyond what even Atlantic editors had in mind.
Or did it?
Incendiary reporting is often used to move magazines off the shelves, or, even in its most productive use, it is used to spark a discussion on important subject matter with the purpose of starting a useful dialogue.
But in the case of The Atlantic story, “American Murder Mystery,” which appeared in the magazine’s July/August 2008 edition, the response has only fueled existing negative opinions on affordable housing from the right wing, and has backed low-income housing proponents into a corner, forcing them, once again, to reassert the benefits of Section 8 and Hope VI.
A group of housing policy experts have weighed in on Shelterforce. The piece, by Occidental College’s Peter Dreier and MIT’s Xavier de Souza Briggs, first points to Rosin’s use of “misleading stereotypes” and her creating a piece that is “part investigative reporting, part misleading caricature,” but then builds off that, establishing a platform that asks fundamental questions related to the high poverty rate in the U.S., and continued segregation by way of race and income.
We also need to invest in education and job training, to raise the minimum wage at least to the poverty level, to expand the [Earned Income Tax Credit] so it reaches more families, and to provide low-income parents with the support they need to enter the job market, such as child care and health insurance. Redoubled efforts to fight crime in the most violent neighborhoods, and to protect those places, which tend to be poor racial ghettos, from an utterly disproportionate share of our society’s environmental hazards, are vital too.
Without using sensationalism, Briggs and Dreier offer solutions. more
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Let’s get one thing clear: at least in New Jersey, we’re having the affordable-housing-as-mandate discussion. The fact that so many taxpayers, elected officials, and housing advocates in the Garden State are committed to implementing some sort of affordable housing set-aside…
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Columbia Deal Avoids Eminent Domain Pain trumpeted yesterday’s New York Post headline. After all the struggle over Columbia University’s plan for a new campus in the Manhattanville neighborhood, which I covered for Shelterforce earlier this year (Will Columbia Take Manhattanville?),…
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After a week of dizzying feints by the White House, the Treasury Secretary, the head of the Federal Reserve, and some members of Congress, does anyone have any idea where the Bush administration really stands on the credit/banking system and…
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The Atlantic story on crime in Memphis (Tenn.) and Louisville (Ky.) by Hanna Rosin and her identifying “one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades [the Section 8 housing voucher program and public housing demolitions]” as the culprit…
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Tomorrow afternoon, Gov. Jon Corzine will sign one of the most important changes to New Jersey’s affordable-housing laws since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1985. The centerpiece of the recent legislation is the abolition of regional contribution agreements…
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After a week of crazy financial news, I always look forward to reading Gretchen Morgenson’s “Fair Game” column on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Business section.
Yesterday, July 13, her column The Fannie and Freddie Fallout was especially timely and insightful. Her opening paragraph is relevant to many financial stories that the Bush administration has generated:
It’s dispiriting indeed to watch the United States financial system, supposedly the envy of the world, being taken to its knees. But that’s the show we’re watching, brought to you by somnambulant regulators, greedy bank executives and incompetent corporate directors.
more
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Charlie Rangel, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been seen in recent months manicured and pressed, stumping for Hillary Clinton, and most recently, for Barack Obama. This whole time I’ve been wondering: This guy’s 78…
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The current foreclosure crisis that is sweeping our country illustrates how vulnerable homeowners are — especially low- and moderate-income households. Some reports estimate that over 40 percent of foreclosures are occurring with homeowners who had good, 30-year, low-interest loans in place before they got caught up in the refinancing frenzy promoted by many mortgage providers. Unwisely, many homeowners switched their stable mortgages for other mortgage products that were, simply put, too good to be true.
In addition to the families that refinanced, there are many others now facing the prospect of foreclosure. Some people bought homes they could not afford as their primary residence betting that the rapid escalation in home values would continue. Others bought second and third homes expecting to resell within a short time-frame and realize a quick profit.
The fault for this crisis falls on many. Buyers who were often not well informed, mortgage brokers eager to earn fees, insurance analysts who did not accurately rate the risks, the financial industry that was pulling in investment dollars at record pace, and regulators and politicians who ignored the growing risks. The result is so widespread that it has jeopardized our nation’s economy and affected the world economy as well. This crisis is especially harmful for families of modest means. more
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The latest report on gentrification in American cities is also the latest to try to give it a decent name. The new study says that gentrifying areas actually attract quite a few residents in lower to middle parts of the…
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Low-income housing experts and advocates are expressing frustration at a recent investigative article by the Boston Globe on Barack Obama’s record of establishing tax credits for privately developed affordable housing. The article has stirred considerable criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate, mostly on right-wing blogs.
“It was a total bag job,” said Michael Kane, the executive director of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants. “It was sloppy. The author clearly has no concept of the value of government-subsidized housing.”
The Globe‘s Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos argues that the story’s purpose was not to examine the value of tax-credit programs. “This was not a story on the merits of these programs, but on Barack Obama and his role as a political leader in Chicago dealing with the issue of affordable housing,” Canellos said.
Canellos formerly served as the Globe‘s housing-policy reporter. (The article’s author, Globe housing reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, has reportedly accepted a new job at the Washington Post. Citing Globe policy, he declined to comment.) more
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Hanna Rosin has caused quite a stir with her dramatically titled Atlantic Monthly article American Murder Mystery. (For the record, we writers rarely get to write our own headlines, so don’t hold her accountable for that.)
The uncomfortable pattern that she reports on from Memphis was identified by a criminologist and housing expert who happen to be married to each other and discovered to their chagrin that a recent rise in crime across Memphis’s neighborhoods was correlated with the demolition of public-housing projects and the spread of former residents, now with Section 8 vouchers.
Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section 8 rentals…. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.
This sounds, of course, like fighting words to all low-income advocates, fair-housing advocates, and people who don’t believe that the poor are inherently criminal. And Rosin’s article, while it does not simplistically demonize former public-housing residents, does slip into phrases like “criminal element” and asserts in one place that the point of programs to disperse concentrated poverty was to inculcate the poor with “middle class values.” Yuck. more
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Everything was going along great for the New Jersey Legislature in its now jittery, ambling pursuit of affordable housing across the state. June was looking promising as the state legislature was approached passage of the $32.9-billion state budget, and despite…
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During my recent reporting in New Orleans for a story for Amnesty International on the continuing homelessness and displacement crisis, we saw the stark irony of 42,000 vacant homes, many of them actually in decent shape, juxtaposed with tens of…
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Do we face a housing crisis when home prices are spiraling upward or when they are tumbling downward? Or both? Between 2000 and 2006, the median price of a new single-family home (in 2007 dollars) increased from $215,075 to $254,423,…
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National Housing Institute
