July 2008

  • Employment as Crime Prevention

    With the hottest, often most violent, month of summer still to come, Chicago has logged record numbers of killings of public school students this year, with at least 30 teens gunned down or otherwise murdered since last fall. This mirrors…

  • The Mess In Texas (Houston: We Have a Recycling Problem)

    The New York Times reports that of the nation’s 30 largest cities, Houston, the fourth largest city behind New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, comes in dead last in recycling, turning over a shameful 2.6 percent of its total…

  • Section 8 Is Only One Part of Addressing the Housing Crisis

    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…

  • A Messy Food Fight

    Everyone’s a little tense about groceries lately—eggs up to an average of $2.18 a dozen from $1.45 in 2006, whole milk around $3.87 a gallon, up from $3.20 two years ago. But here in Los Angeles we’ve had our food…

  • Core and Periphery: “Trading Places”?

    In a cover story for the latest issue of The New Republic, Governing Magazine editor Alan Ehrenhalt proclaims that the American city has reinvented itself by becoming the suburbs. Ehrenhalt isn’t talking about the proliferation of strip mall CVS Pharmacy…

  • Buffaloonly Problems

    I was a little premature in celebrating New York’s modest land bank bill, it seems, as it has not yet been signed by the governor. Some sources say he is concerned about the liability to the state of taking ownership…

  • Abolishing HUD, Simplistic Solution to Complex Problems

    A call to eliminate HUD will easily attract many right-wing politicos, and apparently others as well—and it is appealing. That said, while all of us can point to various examples of incompetence, ineffeciency, and corruption at HUD, if the agency…

  • Abolish HUD?

    When faced with a serious and persistent problem, it is often tempting to propose dramatic ideas, like blowing up existing programs and starting from scratch. Occasionally that might be useful, but more often it is simply overzealousness. It is more…

  • Fan & Fred Bill: The Catalyst For a Better Housing Market?

    The American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008: approved by the Senate on Saturday should appropriately be called the “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Rescue Bill” because that is what the bill focuses on. It allows the Treasury…

  • Can’t Look Past the Rescue Short Fall

    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…

  • Housing Bill: Look Past the “Bailout” Blather

    Invisible amid all of the media talk of a congressional “bailout” for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a triumph for affordable housing advocates secured when the House Wednesday passed the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008…

  • Small Cities: Stepchildren No Longer

    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…

  • The Wave that Follows The Atlantic

    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…

  • It’s an Affordable Housing Victory, But How Do We Win Over the Towns?

    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…

  • The Urban, Dystopian Blame Game

    Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion. So asserts the New York Times’ review of The Dark Knight,,…

  • “No Pain,” But Lots of Spin

    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?),…

  • Housing, Credit Woes: When Can We Exhale?

    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…

  • Who Dun It in the “American Murder Mystery?”

    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…

  • New Jersey Regional Coalition Wins Affordable-Housing Victory

    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…

  • The Thanks of a Grateful Nation

    The Marine base that exerts an outsize gravitational pull on Twentynine Palms, Calif. is the largest in the world, and shimmers several miles outside of town in the desert at the foot of the Bullion Mountains. Twentynine Palms is some…

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