June 2008 -- Rooflines -- National Housing Institute

June 2008

Something Completely Different…

For those looking for some light summer entertainment, try You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. Adam Sandler and crew take on the unlikely tale of a Mossad agent who decides to act on a long-buried desire to become, what else,…
Crackdown Rocks Real-Estate Industry

The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today that the Justice Department has indicted more than 400 defendants in 144 mortgage fraud cases. The indictments, part of a sting operation that began on March 1, was designed to “combat the threat mortgage fraud poses to the U.S. housing industry and worldwide credit markets,” according to an FBI statement. “Operation Malicious Mortgage,” is “the culmination of substantial coordinated efforts during the last three and a half months to identify, arrest and prosecute mortgage fraud violators through the United States,” the FBI reports. The Associated Press reports a suspected 53,000 mortgage fraud cases in 2007 alone, representing a 37,000-case increase from 2006, and a ten-fold increase from 2001-2002. AP cited statistics provided by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. In related news, the FBI statement said that it was “committed to” the prosecution of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tanin, two former Bear Stearns portfolio managers who were arrested Thursday for securities fraud. According to The New York Times, the indictments are the first to be “brought against senior Wall Street executives linked to a tight credit market that has rattled global markets, led to more than $350 billion in write-offs, cost numerous executives their jobs and culminated in the demise of Bear Stearns.” more
Injury to Injury

I don’t have any links to post on this, because I haven’t found it being covered anywhere, but in some conversations I’ve been having with state housing trust fund managers, an additional ripple effect of the whole foreclosure crisis keeps…
The Limits of Federalism

Responding to Andrew Macurak’s post on Pennsylvania interfering with its counties’ right to pass strict smoking bans and but allowing them opt out of paying for transit: On all of the instances you describe, I am in complete agreement. The…
Race and Class: Katrina vs. Iowa

Concentrated poverty and hypersegregation generate wide-ranging costs in almost every major U.S. city, particularly for less favored populations. New Orleans clearly fits this description. Cedar Rapids less so. The problems facing residents of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane…
Taking Blame for the Floods

We stood at the end of a road leading into the waters of the Mississippi River, which had burst through a levee in Gulfport, Ill. and swamped thousands of acres of farmland and most of the town. The water, filled with a bobbing mass of soggy cornstalks and algae, literally crept several inches up the asphalt incline every minute. About a mile away stood Lois Russell’s farmhouse, in about four feet of water that was quickly rising. The mile of water between us and the farmhouse had been her fields. Russell, 83, is obviously a tough woman but cried softly as she watched her house and land consumed by water. A muskrat popped his head out of the floodwaters near the crowd of people gathered there, then quickly dived back underwater and swam into the broth. ”He’s more scared of us than the flood,” said one woman. Her comment symbolized something many people have been thinking about. What role did we play in these floods? To what extent did we, not the whims of nature, actually cause them? The floods drowning the Midwest are being called 500-year floods, meaning there is only a one in 500 chance each year that such a flood would occur. But the 1993 deluges in the same area also met the definition of 100- and 500-year floods. At this point, people don’t think it will be another half millennium before more floods of such magnitude hit the Midwest. The reality is, our society has a lot to do with the floods. more
Drops in the Bucket on Racial Inequality

Check out Greg Squires’ challenge in yesterday’s article on The Nation’s Web site to talk about race in a way that matters during the presidential campaign. Despite all the coded barbs during the primary season about race — “hard-working white…
You Don’t Support Our Transit, But We Should Support Your Highway?

Overcoming pleas that such a measure will destroy small businesses – just as similar measures apparently have destroyed all small businesses in Chicago, New York and Paris – the Pennsylvania state legislature has stopped wringing its hands long enough to…
Iowa: The Midwest Katrina?

“It looks like Katrina,” said a man stuck in traffic, his bare foot hanging out his car window, on the jammed freeway through Cedar Rapids on Friday June 13, as the river swamped the city with eight feet of water.…
Obama’s Urban Policy Team: What We Should Expect

Michael Davis, a Dallas city planner, has been named to Barack Obama’s Urban Policy Committee. Barack Obama, if elected, plans to create a White House Office on Urban Policy “to ensure that all federal dollars targeted to urban areas are…
The Russert Factor

How important was Tim Russert to presidential politics? Certainly he was a central figure in the news coverage in the 2008 cycle, and let’s not forget his famous Florida triplet in Bush v. Gore in 2000. Tim Russert’s style outraged…
Make Your Streets Livable!

An exciting new resource is available to community developers who want to make the streets in their neighborhoods more inviting to people on foot, on bikes or traveling by some other non-vehicular form of transit. Livable Streets, a Web portal…
What’s the Take-Away of the Jim Johnson Saga?

So James A. Johnson has resigned from Barack Obama’s vice president search committee in the aftermath of the Wall Street Journal’s revelations that Johnson, a former chief executive of Fannie Mae, according to The New York Times “received mortgages on…
Massachusetts is watching

Given the interesting but not widely known fact that foreclosure rates in the current crisis are lower in neighborhoods with a larger percentage of CRA-regulated institutions, it’s promising to see Massachusetts using a bit of its banking regulatory powers in…
New Math for a New (We Hope) Era

Long, long ago, children, in 1981, Ronald Reagan became President of the United States and expanded the military budget by 43 percent over what it was during the U.S. war in Viet Nam. He also scared the holy hell out…
So It’s Come to This?

Forget two-year presidential campaigns that raise hundreds of millions in donations. It’s back to basics time and it’s time to know your candidates. In an apparent attempt to avoid being Swift-Boated, Barack Obama has launched www.fightthesmears.com. You might have received…
ACORN Rates State Attorneys General on Foreclosure Prevention Leadership

While America has been waiting for Congress and state legislatures to get their act together on the foreclosure crisis, some state attorneys general have been taking matters into their own hands and taking law-enforcement actions against predatory lending practices and…
Doctor Evil Lives!

Remember in the first Austin Powers movie, when Doctor Evil, recently thawed out from a couple of decades of suspended animation in orbit, gets hold of an A-bomb and threatens the U.N. with it? And he says he wants money…
Not Your Father’s Electorate (Instead, His Father’s)

The Republican vote was as high as ever. But the Democratic candidate still won — because more Democrats turned out to the polls than ever before. The electorate had expanded, and the demographic had shifted. Working class city-dwellers suddenly realized…
Awarded for Smart Growth

It’s an old joke, but in the development sense, the term “smart growth” is an oxymoron in many cases. There’s a reason why we celebrate things like adaptive reuse, transit villages, and redevelopment: because it’s not sprawl growing away from…