July 2008

  • With ACORN, Transparency Is Just as Important as Good Values

    The last few months has seen a number of articles, editorials, and interviews about the lack of financial responsiveness and accountability in the private and public sector. In recent years, we’ve read about financial scandals at institutions as diverse Halliburton…

  • Bush Legacy: Unregulated Speculation Destroying Economy and Communities

    After a week of crazy financial news, I always look forward to reading Gretchen Morgenson’s “Fair Game” column on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Business section. Yesterday, July 13, her column The Fannie and Freddie Fallout was especially timely and insightful. Her opening paragraph is relevant to many financial stories that the Bush administration has generated: It’s dispiriting indeed to watch the United States financial system, supposedly the envy of the world, being taken to its knees. But that’s the show we’re watching, brought to you by somnambulant regulators, greedy bank executives and incompetent corporate directors. more

  • Rangel’s Wrangle with Rent Control

    Charlie Rangel, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been seen in recent months manicured and pressed, stumping for Hillary Clinton, and most recently, for Barack Obama. This whole time I’ve been wondering: This guy’s 78…

  • What Foreclosure Crisis? Community Land Trusts Offer Secure Homeownership

    The current foreclosure crisis that is sweeping our country illustrates how vulnerable homeowners are — especially low- and moderate-income households. Some reports estimate that over 40 percent of foreclosures are occurring with homeowners who had good, 30-year, low-interest loans in place before they got caught up in the refinancing frenzy promoted by many mortgage providers. Unwisely, many homeowners switched their stable mortgages for other mortgage products that were, simply put, too good to be true. In addition to the families that refinanced, there are many others now facing the prospect of foreclosure. Some people bought homes they could not afford as their primary residence betting that the rapid escalation in home values would continue. Others bought second and third homes expecting to resell within a short time-frame and realize a quick profit. The fault for this crisis falls on many. Buyers who were often not well informed, mortgage brokers eager to earn fees, insurance analysts who did not accurately rate the risks, the financial industry that was pulling in investment dollars at record pace, and regulators and politicians who ignored the growing risks. The result is so widespread that it has jeopardized our nation’s economy and affected the world economy as well. This crisis is especially harmful for families of modest means. more

  • {caption}

    In New Jersey’s Hub City, A Push to Change Government Gets Big Government Resistance

    In the 1970s, New Brunswick, NJ was struggling. Like other New Jersey cities experiencing the hangover of race riots of the 1960s, the schools were in decline, white flight began to set in, and all of a sudden, the Hub…

  • Gentrification Keeps Trying to Improve its Image

    The latest report on gentrification in American cities is also the latest to try to give it a decent name. The new study says that gentrifying areas actually attract quite a few residents in lower to middle parts of the…

  • Globe Article Makes Hash of Housing Policy

    Low-income housing experts and advocates are expressing frustration at a recent investigative article by the Boston Globe on Barack Obama’s record of establishing tax credits for privately developed affordable housing. The article has stirred considerable criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate, mostly on right-wing blogs. “It was a total bag job,” said Michael Kane, the executive director of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants. “It was sloppy. The author clearly has no concept of the value of government-subsidized housing.” The Globe‘s Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos argues that the story’s purpose was not to examine the value of tax-credit programs. “This was not a story on the merits of these programs, but on Barack Obama and his role as a political leader in Chicago dealing with the issue of affordable housing,” Canellos said. Canellos formerly served as the Globe‘s housing-policy reporter. (The article’s author, Globe housing reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, has reportedly accepted a new job at the Washington Post. Citing Globe policy, he declined to comment.) more

  • Tuscany, Barcelona, Croatia… the Rust Belt?

    This weekend, the New York Times suggested Pittsburgh as a destination (for at least 36 hours) alongside these locales, and as of my writing this post, the article remains the most popular in the paper’s travel section. This isn’t the…

  • Memphis’s Unwelcome News

    Hanna Rosin has caused quite a stir with her dramatically titled Atlantic Monthly article American Murder Mystery. (For the record, we writers rarely get to write our own headlines, so don’t hold her accountable for that.) The uncomfortable pattern that she reports on from Memphis was identified by a criminologist and housing expert who happen to be married to each other and discovered to their chagrin that a recent rise in crime across Memphis’s neighborhoods was correlated with the demolition of public-housing projects and the spread of former residents, now with Section 8 vouchers. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section 8 rentals…. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots. This sounds, of course, like fighting words to all low-income advocates, fair-housing advocates, and people who don’t believe that the poor are inherently criminal. And Rosin’s article, while it does not simplistically demonize former public-housing residents, does slip into phrases like “criminal element” and asserts in one place that the point of programs to disperse concentrated poverty was to inculcate the poor with “middle class values.” Yuck. more

  • The COAH Bluff, the Midas Touch, and New Jersey’s Fight for Affordable Housing

    Everything was going along great for the New Jersey Legislature in its now jittery, ambling pursuit of affordable housing across the state. June was looking promising as the state legislature was approached passage of the $32.9-billion state budget, and despite…

    • « Previous