The Shelterforce blog

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 waste. The Times cites a study conducted this year by my new favorite news source, Waste News, that puts New York City — roughly four times the size of Houston — at the top of the big city recycling list with a 34 percent rating. The Times report goes on to say: But city officials say real progress will be hard to come by. Landfill costs here are cheap. The city’s sprawling, no-zoning layout makes collection expensive, and there is little public support for the kind of effort it takes to sort glass, paper and plastics. And there appears to be even less for placing fees on excess trash. more

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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

• 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 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

• 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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