Subject: Housing
-
The folks at the SurRealEstate blog (the organizing and policy department of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board) poked some fun at slumlords using the Sh*t My ____ Says" meme:
more
The DC-based think tank Bipartisan Policy Center announced the full member roster of its housing commission last week. The announcement comes two months after former HUD secretaries Henry Cisneros and Mel Martinez, and former senators Kit Bond and George Mitchell…
-
Two weeks ago I joined thousands of advocates, researchers, and community leaders from throughout the country at the Equity Summit in Detroit, hosted by PolicyLink, to talk equity strategy. The atmosphere was electric and hopeful — a seemingly rare emotion…
Now that the narrative has slowly — slowly — changed from a cuts-only policy perspective to something more nuanced, complex, equitably-minded discussion (thanks, in part, to movements like The New Bottom Line and Occupy Wall Street), homelessness, as we noted in our previous post, should be high on nation’s agenda.
Homelessness is also particularly widespread among the country’s veteran population. When Veterans Affairs and HUD released the latest update to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report, the number of vets who spent at least one night in an emergency shelter or in transitional housing inched closer to 150,000 — or 11.5 percent of all homeless adults. While we’ve seen cuts to many important housing programs across the board, there could be some good news out of VA’s proposed FY2012 budget related to homeless veterans programs, including $224 million for the Homeless Providers Grant and Per Diem Program, $100 million for the Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) Program, and an additional $50 million for HUD-VA Supportive Housing (VASH) case management (not to mention that HUD’s proposed FY2012 budget sets aside $75 million for VASH rental vouchers, bringing the total number of vouchers to about 48,500, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans).
But secretaries Shaun Donovan of HUD and Eric Shinseki of Veteran Affairs, as well as others, “have indicated that the number needs to be closer to 60,000 vouchers”:http://blog.endhomelessness.org/an-update-on-the-va’s-plan-to-end-veterans-homelessness/ to properly address chronic veteran homelessness, in line with goals put forth in Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, that outlines four primary goals of ending chronic homelessness in five years; prevent and end homelessness among veterans in five years; prevent and and homelessness for families, youth, and children in 10 years; and to “set a path to end all types of homelessness.” more
-
Last week, we asked you to share your thoughts on preserving the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Here’s how you responded. Selected reader comments at the break.
more
-
Last week, we asked readers “What are your thoughts on proposed changes to HARP to help out underwater borrowers?” Here’s how you responded:
more
-
Last week I testified before the Senate Banking Committee on the virtues of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. For eight decades running, this type of mortgage has made homeownership affordable and stable for working and middle-class families and has allowed millions…
-
A contract-for-deed program making headway in North Minneapolis offers another look at how using the CLT model to offer potential homeowners once saddled with bad credit can turn into an opportunity to attain a permanently affordable home, while taking on…
-
The latest battle of the Rent Wars has ended in Albany, and the kindest word that I could find to describe it from the advocates of stronger rent laws is “disappointing.” So, while New York State celebrates the passage of…
-
The legislative frenzy that led up to the passage of New York State’s marriage equality bill eclipsed a deal to extend the state’s rent regulations. Some tenant advocates are lauding the deal, but is it enough? Did the new rent…
-
In March, as part of a series looking at the impact of state and local budget cuts on communities across the country, New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt examined the potentially-devastating effect of an austere budgetary climate on the nation’s 75,000…
-
The gap between income and rent continues to widen, and “high unemployment, falling wages, and low rental vacancy rates driven by a post-recession return to renting have combined to put housing stability beyond the grasp of low income households across the country,” according to a new report issue by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
NLIHC released Out of Reach 2011 yesterday as part of its Out of Reach reports, an annual series launched in 1999 that calculates the amount a person working full-time must earn to afford the Fair Market Rent (FMR) on a two-bedroom unit, otherwise known as the Housing Wage.
This year, while foreclosure crisis-related attention has often focused on the unemployed, Out of Reach places an emphasis on the effect of the housing crisis on low-income people. According to the report, a household must earn $38,400/year to afford the national two-bedroom FMR of $960/month. Widening the availability of affordable units and creating overall housing stability for low-income Americans, “won’t be accomplished without dramatic increase in housing stock that’s affordable for people in those income groups,” said NLIHC President and CEO Sheila Crowley, yesterday on a press call that also included Raphael Bostic, HUD assistant secretary for Policy Development & Research.
Bostic pointed to HUD’s Worst Case Housing Needs 2009, released earlier this year, that shows that the 20 percent increase in worst-case housing over the last two years represents the largest two-year increase in history. “Worst case housing” is defined as “as very low-income renters with incomes below 50 percent of the Area Median
Income who do not receive government housing assistance and who either paid more than one-half of their income for rent or lived in severely inadequate conditions, or who faced both of these challenges.”
NLIHC’s Out of Reach reports that the estimated average wage for renters in the United States is $13.52 — 92 cents down from the 2010 average of $14.44, and $1.17 down from the 2009 average. The report goes on to note that at the federal minimum wage of $7.25, a household would have to work 102 hours each week to afford the nation’s average FMR for a two-bedroom home.
NLIHC offers up data for every state, metropolitan area, and county in the country. For example, in New Jersey, with a “housing wage” of $24.54, an average renter earning $15.82 per hour would have to earn $8.72 more per hour to afford a modest unit or work 62 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. According to NLIHC data, roughly 61 percent of New Jersey renters do not earn enough to afford a two-bedroom unit at FMR.
New Jersey has the fourth-highest FMR in the nation, behind Hawaii, California, and Maryland.
Out of Reach 2011 provides highly useful material for communities, local governments, and organizations. It also provides data that can be used to place pressure on state and local legislators to encourage more equitable wages and to promote the availability of safe, decent, affordable housing that is priced in line with what renters earn.
For more information and for data in other parts of the country, visit http://www.nlihc.org/oor/oor2011/ more
-
April, as you might have heard is Fair Housing Month, commemorating April 1968 when President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law just days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The historic act, Johnson, said, represented a new era where fair housing would become “a part of the American way of life.”
Of course, the work continues, and the vision expands. As HUD Assistant Secretary John Trasvina noted in a recent blog post, “By itself, the Fair Housing Act does not end barriers to living free from discrimination. That cause depends upon vigorous civil rights law enforcement, sustained public education, working with housing providers and the real estate industry, and ensuring that HUD’s own house is in order.”
More, in our interview with Trasvina, he pointed to the fact that HUD receives 10,000 discrimination complaints each year. And it’s not just communities of color, as the Fair Housing Act was born out of the Civil Rights movement. In the 21st century, we see more and more discrimination in other communities: disabled, LGBT, single parents, and more.
One of the great things about the Fair Housing Act is that it is a mirror image of some of the greatest movements in our nation’s history. The women’s movement of the 1960s, for example, eventually led to the inclusion of gender discrimination in the Fair Housing Act in 1974. In 1988, the act recognized the history of discrimination in housing against families with children and people with disabilities.
So as we are now in the 21st century, beyond our focus on the existing statute, we are also looking at the conditions of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) people, and looking at source-of-income discrimination. We have to be a civil rights office that is relevant to the 21st century. This means addressing the needs of newcomers and new families without forgetting the core issues of discrimination that formed the target of the ‘68 Act.
Trasvina acknowledged that success is difficult to document, but that now more than ever, there’s still work to be done. more
As part of a research project funded by the Open Society Institute, one of the sessions Monday at the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual policy conference was a “guided discussion on housing preservation, investment, and mobility,” titled “Should we…
This chart from Visualizing Economics calls into question the bedrock assertion that housing is a good investment, showing that its real value doesn’t actually rise. The accompanying post says basically that all the asset building that people get out of…
Today, the Center for Housing Policy released Housing Landscape 2011: An Annual Look at the Housing Affordability Challenges of America’s Working Households. The report finds that despite falling home values — the number of working households spending more than half of their income on housing costs — rose to 10.5 million, an increase of 600,000 from 2008 to 2009.
Roughly one in four working households had a severe housing cost burden in 2009, and the rate increased significantly in 25 states.
The report also helps identify why housing affordability has worsened in recent years. Incomes for working households fell by 4 to 5 percent between 2008 and 2009, due in part to under-employment that has prevented even those with jobs to work as many hours as they have in the past. As incomes have fallen, housing costs for working renters actually increased by 2 percent. And even though housing costs fell slightly for the typical working homeowner, household incomes retreated further still.
Far from solving the affordable housing problem, the current economic crisis has only exacerbated it because monthly housing costs for working households have risen relative to monthly incomes. In these tough economic times, governments that cut funding for affordable housing programs in an attempt to balance their budgets will only make it increasingly harder for their residents to balance their own. more
-
The HUD/Treasury report to Congress, Reforming America’s Housing Finance Market, has sparked a debate about who should own a home (and all the equity — both financial and social involved in limiting homeownership availability) and how explicit or implicit the government’s role in the housing market should be.
Nevertheless, the existing rules for homeownership will very likely change in the longterm as pointed out in this piece in the Los Angeles Times:
Take a snapshot of today’s mortgage market conditions and frame it. It’s highly likely you’ll never see anything like these favorable combinations of rates and terms again. That’s the inescapable conclusion emerging from the Obama administration’s white paper on possible remedies for the two ailing giants of housing finance — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — along with events underway in the national economy.
Source: Los Angeles Times more
-
Here’s an interested graphic from Calculated Risk that reflects the recently released Case-Schiller Home Price Index. The chart indicates that those areas with more central, walkable downtowns have held up better in terms of property value loss than others, or,…
-
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:
more
-
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…
Next »
National Housing Institute
