Subject: Policies
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Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor who chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel that watches over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has never been known to mince words, and she’s not starting now. In the past few days by way…
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Thanks to the National Housing Conference’s Sharon Price for passing this info on only moments after the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 4173, better known as the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009. It looks as…
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You’ve probably seen the reports that highlight some pretty ridiculous inaccuracies on the federal government’s very own virtual stim-tracking tool, Recovery.gov, including listing 440 non-existent Congressional districts, and other geographical errors in highlighting the successes of the $787 billion stimulus.…
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Hey everybody, have you heard? The California legislature finally passed a budget plan on July 21 (the constitutional deadline is June 15). The state famously began paying bills with IOUs on July 2. These get paid back with interest, so for each day the budget was late, California went deeper into the hole.
It wasn’t as if the Democratic leadership wasn’t diligent. When the Democratic budget proposal that included some tax hikes to balance deep cuts got voted down on June 24, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and President pro tem Darryl Steinberg came back the next day with another plan. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected it, with support from the legislative Republican minority.
Our state budget is late every damn year. California is one of three states that requires more than a simple majority vote to approve a budget. (Howdy Arkansas! How’s it going, Rhode Island? You guys late on your bills and in terrible debt, too?) more
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The White House Office of Management and Budget has announced a series of forums geared to help recipients of funding appropriated through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to “better understand and comply with the Act’s transparency guidelines.” White House…
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Xavier de Souza Briggs, the Associate Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the subject of an upcoming Shelterforce interview, wrote in Shelterforce last fall that “Urban policies are the rules and incentives that shape the prosperity, equity, and environmental sustainability of the metropolitan regions in which 8 in 10 people live.”
So, if that’s the case, it’s somewhat interesting to witness the White House’s quiet unveiling of its Office of Urban Affairs.
Why the muted fanfare? Will this office, as Next American City Editor Diana Lind told The Root’s Dayo Olopade, not “be as serious and as powerful a role as many urbanists had hoped”?
Olopade’s piece goes on:
“Under the Recovery Act, federal funding is flooding state governments — by formula and through competitive grants. A robust and powerful Office of Urban Policy, local leaders say, could handle city-specific conflicts that currently fly under the White House’s radar.”
As Briggs says, urban policy “cannot be airmailed from Washington via one-size-fits-all blueprints. It requires local adaptability as well as public/private coordination, operating under clear standards and oversight.” Hopefully, Director Adolfo Carrion Jr. and his Office of Urban Affairs (once referred to as Urban Policy), will take this slow roll out, with its seeming impressive list of attendees, and create the aggressive, promising office it has the potential to be. more
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Kelo v. New London remains a sticky subject. (Ongoing debate in Shelterforce and Rooflines is proof of that.) The 2005 Supreme Court case that upheld a municipality’s ability to take private land for private development in the public interest is…
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At a US House of Representatives hearing last week on “Livable Communities, Transit Oriented Development, and Incorporating Green Building Practices into Federal Housing and Transportation,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced an new partnership.…
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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the Stimulus Package — passed by Congress in a painful process in February, proposes to create or retain at least 3.5 million jobs — green jobs, construction jobs, infrastructure refurbishment jobs.
But with all the drama surrounding the bill’s approval, one central question failed to get a hearing: does the $787 billion measure offer any guarantees that the jobs it create offer decent pay, benefits, a career ladder?
The answer(s): Yes and No. more
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It was hard to pick a winner in The Chicago Sun-Times’ March 20, 2009 Acronym Test, “What Should AIG Really Stand For?” I’m casting my vote for the title of this blog posting.
The outrage over AIG bonuses is certainly warranted and the outrageousness of AIG’s corporate decision merits public scrutiny. But the media and Congress have become inconveniently (or perhaps too conveniently) distracted from the root causes of our economic crisis — “too much speculation with borrowed money; too little transparency and disclosure; and too many insider conflicts of interest.” more
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Here’s a handy resource released today by The National Low Income Housing Coalition today assembled following last week’s Senate passage of H.R. 1105, the omnibus FY09 appropriations bill. The bill includes nine FY09 spending bills, including the Transportation, Housing and…
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Rail travel is romanticized so much in our nation’s culture — be it in song, film, or political theater — that it’s easy to forget that we forgot about it a long time ago. We were critical here on Rooflines…
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The Obama Budget represents the beginning of a meaningful reform of the U.S. tax code, a reform that is long overdue. In an earlier post on Rooflines , I had quoted Warren Buffet as saying: There’s class warfare, all right,…
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This morning, Treasury Secy. Timothy Geithner announced the Financial Stability Plan, geared to revive the banking system by way “attack[ing] our credit crisis on all fronts with our full arsenal of financial tools and the resources.” The plan calls for…
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Find the latest version of the Senate bill here more
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It was a busy day on Capitol Hill yesterday as the Senate, in addition to several amendments to the now-$900 billion economic stimulus package, approved a homebuyer tax credit for all new home buyers in 2009. The Isakson amendment, named…
Author and columnist Tom Friedman described the nation’s current predicament as when Roy Scheider’s character from Jaws gets his first glimpse at the shark, goes to the captain’s cabin and declares: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” Policy makers…
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As forecasters offer their new year’s predictions of a struggling economy, it is past time to be asking how a federal bailout of our financial institutions can equal no relief for consumers in accessing credit.
The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, December 28, 2008 ran the following opening sentence:
Jim and Cindy Ranallo’s home equity line of credit went from $44,000 to zip, zero, nada in one month…and with it the money for their son’s education.
This article by Kara Spak brings home how the financial crisis is striking households throughout the country. In the Ranallo’s case, it was Chase freezing their credit just weeks before college tuition was due. But as Spak notes:
The Ranallos’ situation is a familiar one for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have found their home equity credit lines frozen or reduced this year. Their struggle to send their children to college also is familiar to parents patching funds together for higher education, constantly worried they will come up short. Chase froze 200,000 home equity lines this year, a bank spokesman said.
more
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Shaun Donovan, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick to head HUD, appears to be an indication that this could be the urban policy president we’ve been hoping for. It’s no secret that for far too long, the department of Housing and Urban…
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Through Change.gov, the public is being offered a first-ever opportunity to peek inside and offer opinion on nearly the entire transition process. A large team of academics, former bureacrats, and leading advocates have been appointed by President-Elect Obama to vet…
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