January 2010

  • The Risk In The System Starts to Come Home

    Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor who chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel that watches over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has never been known to mince words, and she’s not starting now. In the past few days by way…

  • “Top Of The Pecking Order” for Housing Bubble Blowups

    The New York Times has a pretty good rundown of all the players involved in the collapse of the sale of New York City’s Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town apartment complexes, replete with this quote: “It’s the poster child for the entire housing bubble,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner of Westwood Capital. “There’ll be some other spectacular blowups, but this will be at the top of the pecking order.” While investors are left in limbo, the residents of some 11,000 apartments are also left in the lurch as maintenance of the 80-acre complex is widely believed to suffer as creditors take over the twin housing complexes. more

  • Massive NYC Real Estate Deal Collapses

    The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the purchaser of two colossal apartment complexes on Manhattan’s east side, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, has abandoned them to its creditors, after it defaulted on the on the $4.4 billion debt…

  • Honor Thy Mortgage!

    Thinking about walking away from your mortgage because of your underwater mortgage? Stephen Colbert, in his inimitable way, tells us to think again, and to honor mortgage because “your honor was so precious to the banks that they bundled it…

  • Some Thoughts On This Martin Luther King Jr. Day

    On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as one of the lucky ones who actually had the day off to reflect on this great man’s legacy, I started thinking about what’s actually happening around race in the United States today.…

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    Inclusive Revitalization In the South Bronx: Melrose Commons

    I’m sure many in the Rooflines readership are familiar with the inspiring story of Melrose Commons and Nos Quedamos in the South Bronx. It is much less known in my world of environmental advocates, so I chose it as my…

  • HUD Announces NSP2 Grants

    The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced this morning the long-awaited list of grantees for the second round of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP2) — $2 billion in available funds set aside in the American Recovery and Reinvestment…

  • NSP2 Announcement Coming Soon

    HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan is expected to announce the NSP2 grantees, benefitting from nearly $2 billion of neighborhood stabilization program funds made available in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Donovan will hold a press conference today in Detroit to…

  • The Shadow (Inventory) Knows

    What used to be dismissed as a bogeyman by real estate professionals is now a reality of unknown capacity: homes that fall into the shadow inventory of foreclosure. The December report from Lending Processing Services indicates that one in every seven-and-a-half properties are either behind on payments or in foreclosure and that “more than 4 percent of the loans that were current in December 2008, fell behind by 60 days or more, including foreclosure, by the end of November 2009. It’s the highest rate for that part of the year since LPS began reporting the data.” The foreclosure inventory continues to stack-up as the foreclosure rate in November reached 3.19 percent, a 1.46 percent increase from the previous month and an 81.41 percent increase from November 2008. This inventory, however, doesn’t factor in the so-called “shadow inventory of foreclosure.” Housing Wire cites data from First American CoreLogic that puts that shadow inventory in the 1.7 million range as “the roadblocks of the government incentive programs and moratoriums clog the foreclosure pipeline.” The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), while having slowed down foreclosure starts, has largely been seen as ineffective in creating modifications on a permanent basis and, in many cases, only delayed foreclosure starts for already troubled properties. more

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    DC Population Rises While Crime Plummets

    New end-of-year data confirm what some of us have been reporting for a long time: central cities in the US are no longer in decline. This is great news for the environment, since it is more evidence that sprawl is losing its hold on the American psyche. In Washington, DC, where I live, a steady trend of population growth in the last decade has reversed years of population loss caused by middle-class flight to the suburbs. In 2009, that growth (a net gain of 9,583 residents) was larger than anything seen since the 1940s. A story in The Washington Post, written by Carol Morello and Tim Craig, further reports that last year’s gain was due in significant measure to residents moving into DC from other US municipalities, not just immigration from other countries as in previous years. more