All posts by Ted Wimpey

California’s sideshow

affordable housing, California, elected leaders, housing, housing crisis, News, renters, workforce housing, , , , ,

Nowhere, seemingly, is the U.S. housing crisis more acute than in California.

GG1

So you might suppose that here, in unassuming, modestly-overpriced Vermont, we can safely ignore what’s unfolding in California. To the contrary, it does make sense to pay some attention, for these reasons:

 

  • California social trends and public policies have a way of diffusing through the rest of the country. Not only that, middle-class Californians, in exodus because they’ve been priced out of the housing market, are moving in droves to other parts of the country and effectively bidding up housing prices in the places where they relocate.
  •  Sundry housing-affordability initiatives in California might give us some ideas about what to do here. San Francisco has a Nov. 3 election with a ballot full of affordable housing measures. Redwood City, to the south, just approved an affordable-housing impact fee over developers’ objections. People in L.A. are looking into the prospects for land trusts, something Vermonters already know a fair amount about. And as we’ve mentioned before, school districts are facilitating workforce-housing developments merely to attract and retain teachers.
  •  California generates much of what we consume here as mass-media entertainment, so we should be aware of the social context.
  •  Unavoidably, the part of entertainment value in what we’re hearing about the extraordinary California housing market, especially the one in the Bay Area, is in the form of Schadenfreude. Apparently, “there goes the neighborhood” applies when Apple employees start moving in.

Any dreams you have of moving out there should be dispelled by this short film, “Million Dollar Shack,”

a middle-class lament is filled with tales of egregiously over-priced properties, skyrocketing rents, absentee overseas investors, etc.

 

At the root of school segregation

affordable housing, civil rights, elected leaders, fair housing, housing, integration, News, segregation, , , ,

It wasn’t the failure of “forced busing” that led to current racial disparities in school achievement outcomes. The problem, rather, is that the nation’s schools have become more segregated over the last three decades, as integration dropped from the agenda of education policy-makers.

So wrote a Syracuse University education professor, George Theoharis, in an interesting piece in the Washington Post Sunday. syracuse1

Two startling observations derive from his home town — which happens to be in our neck of the woods.

He notes the enormous disparities in programs, and outcomes, between a middle school with an 85 percent black and Latino student body and another middle school, 10 miles away, that’s 88 percent white. And he points out that in 1989, the city’s schools were about 60 percent white and 20 percent black/Latino, and that now, the district is 28 percent white, 55 percent black/Latino.

Theoharis goes on to discuss how a renewed emphasis on desegregation in educational policy could provide remedies: Redesigning school districts, for example, and putting them together “like pie pieces, so they cut across urban, suburban and even rural spaces”;  or creating magnet schools; or providing incentives to school districts to desegregate.

(Note: Magnet schools were the Burlington School District’s remedy for socioeconomic achievement gaps.)

But Theoharis never delves into the heart of the matter: residential segregation. This has grown worse in many cities since 2000, with an increase in the number of high-poverty neighborhoods, as we noted in an earlier blog post citing “The Architecture of Segregation,” a paper that detailed the demographic trends. In Syracuse since 2000, according to that paper, “the number of high-poverty tracts more than doubled, rising from twelve to thirty… As a result, Syracuse now has the highest level of poverty concentration among blacks and Hispanics of the one hundred largest metropolitan areas,” as shown in this table:

syracusetable

 

 

 

 

 

 

The takeaway is that addressing residential segregation iskey to addressing school segregation. Another analysis of school segregation and racial performance disparities, by the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, put it like this:

“Education analysts frequently wonder why a black–white achievement gap remains, even when individual poverty and family characteristics are similar. Partly it’s because of greater (and multigenerational) segregation of black children into neighborhoods of high poverty, few employment opportunities, and frequent violence….

“It is inconceivable to think that education as a civil rights issue can be addressed without addressing residential segregation … Housing policy is school policy; equality of education relies upon eliminating the exclusionary zoning ordinances of white suburbs and subsidizing dispersed housing in those suburbs for low-income African Americans now trapped in central cities.”

That’s what affirmatively furthering fair housing is all about, right? But you already knew that.

 

Right under our nose

affordable housing, elected leaders, fair housing, housing, United Nations, , , , ,

We’ve heard a lot over the last few years, both in Vermont and nationally, about how “health care is a human right.” But what about housing as a human right?

If we haven’t been hearing much about that, it’s because we haven’t been paying attention.

UN1

Adequate housing as an international human right has been a familiar theme in the United Nations for years. In fact, it’s centerpiece of the message that the U.N.’s housing rapporteur delivers regularly to the General Assembly. The current rapporteur, appointed last year, is Leilani Farha, executive director of Canada Without Poverty, a lawyer. Her full title is “Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living.”

That title derives from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, which, while not declaring housing a right per se, does say this:

Article 25.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services …

and this, foreshadowing the spirit of fair housing law:

Article 13.

  • (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

Over the years through assorted covenants and agreements, we learn by browsing U.N. documents, housing has achieved recognition as a human right.

Here we pause to note that much of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which is worth reading, if refresh your memory of how many rights remain unfulfilled) has been willfully ignored by many U.N. members. And of course the U.N. has negligible power to enforce compliance. (We seem to recall that the U.N. brought its “water is a human right” message to Detroit last year. How did that turn out?)

We turn now to the website of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights:

“Increasingly viewed as a commodity, housing is most importantly a human right. Under international law, to be adequately housed means having secure tenure – not having to worry about being evicted or having your home or lands taken away. It means living somewhere that is in keeping with your culture, and having access to appropriate services, schools, and employment.

“The right to housing is interdependent with a number of other human rights: rights to health, to education, to employment, but also to non-discrimination and equality, to freedom of association or freedom from violence, and ultimately to the right to life.

Too often violations of the right to housing occur with impunity. In part, this is because at the domestic level housing is rarely treated as a human right…”

The rapporteur’s 2014 report notes that “under international human rights law, it is the State that is held responsible for the compliance with international human rights to which it is bound.” That means national governments, but also, in the case of housing, “state/provincial and municipal governments.”

She acknowledges that ”the evolving nature and diversification of the State and the multiplicity of actors who may be involved in fulfilling its obligations under international human rights law make implementation all the more complicated.”

She can say that again, in housing’s case.

 

A digital-age summit in the oral tradition

affordable housing, elected leaders, housing, housing crisis, News, , , , , ,

The J. Ronald Terwilliger Foundation for Housing America’s Families held a daylong “housing summit” Friday attended by assorted luminaries and seven presidential candidates (six Republicans and one Democrat).

summit

No doubt you’re wondering what they said. You’re probably also wondering about J. Ronald Terwilliger. He is, among other things, a developer of rental apartments in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh/Durham. He established the foundation last year, the foundation’s website informs us, “to recalibrate federal housing policy to more effectively address our nation’s critical affordable housing challenges and to meet the housing needs of future generations.” The foundation’s five-member executive board, besides Terwiller, comprises former senator Scott Brown, former congressman Rick Lazio, former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, and Harvard Business School real-estate lecturer Nic Retsinas.

Besides the candidates, who were each allotted about a half-hour in a conversation format, the event featured several panel discussions, including one on “Accessing Private Capital to Build Affordable Housing.”

Fine, so what was said of substance? Don’t ask the J. Ronald Terwilliger Foundation. No transcript was made of the proceedings. For some reason, perhaps because it’s relatively new, the foundation didn’t take any steps to “seize the narrative” of its own event. The only record of the summit is in a spotty collection of news stories and snarky commentaries.

Chris Christie got a fair amount of attention, in a Boston Globe story and a harshly critical Times blog post, but also for his Twitter-worthy remark that housing doesn’t get a lot of notice in the presidential campaign “because it’s not the sexiest issue in the world to talk about, and it kind of depresses people.”

The most comprehensive account we’ve found was an article on a TV station’s website. The Republicans (who also included Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul and George Pataki) acknowledged that many Americans have an affordability problem, but some tried to link that to federal regulation. The lone Democrat, Martin O’Malley, called for doubling funding for the low income housing tax credit program and Community Development Block Grants.

But we’re not going to attempt a synopsis. You’ll just have to be satisfied with the summaries you get at places like Real Estate News or Forbes or NH1 TV news, or a video clip of Huckabee, on base guitar, backing Scott Brown’s daughter, the singer. Good luck finding any account of the panel discussions.

 

Stuck in the middle

affordable housing, housing, housing crisis, housing subsidies, middle class, News, renters, workforce housing, , , , , , , , ,
Couple with daughter together in front yard
 

Middle-class financial struggles have occupied the public discourse for some time, but wouldn’t you know, we’re starting to hear more about housing unaffordability as a stresser for this beleaguered population segment.

The annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report from Harvard took note this summer:

While long a condition of low-income households, cost burdens are spreading rapidly among moderate-income households. The cost-burdened share of renters with incomes in the $30,000–45,000 range rose 7 percentage points between 2003 and 2013, to 45 percent. The increase for renters earn­ing $45,000–75,000 was almost as large at 6 percentage points, affecting one in five of these households. On average, in the ten highest-cost metros—including Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—three-quarters of renters earning $30,000–45,000 and just under half of those earning $45,000–75,000 had disproportionately high housing costs.”

Granted, much of the news about middle-class housing unaffordability is coming out of the big cities – places where “middle income” is construed to reach far above Vermont standards. For example, Cambridge, Mass., is taking steps to reserve a share of “affordable” housing in a new Kendall Square building for families with incomes in the low six figures! San Francisco is also considering measures that would expand affordable housing eligibility and help out renters in the $100,000 to $140,000 bracket. And Portland, Ore., where the “housing emergency” is apparently wide-ranging, is looking at a form of inclusionary zoning that make apartments available to people making 100 120 percent of the median income (Up to $96,875 for a family of four).

Perhaps it’s a testament to the severity of the housing crisis around the country, and/or to the fragility of the middle-income stratum, that the terms “middle class” and “subsidy” are suddenly being spoken in the same breath.

middle2

Here’s the thing: To qualify for most subsidized housing, applicants can’t earn more than 80 percent of the local median income. Where does that leave people who draw an average salary, or perhaps a little more? Perhaps in a place where they can’t readily afford housing but can’t get any help, either. How many such people there are in Vermont is unclear; plenty, no doubt.

(Note: Middle-income earners are not beneficiaries of Burlington’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, which aims to provide affordable rentals for people earning up to 65 percent of the median; and for sale, up to 75 percent.)

For an illustrative display of how housing costs compare to standard incomes, the National Housing Conference’s interactive “Paycheck to Paycheck” shows bar graphs for each of the nation’s metro areas – and just one in Vermont, Burlington/South Burlington. One graph compares salaries to the pay needed to afford a median-priced home; another does the same thing for 1- and 2-BR apartments at HUD’s “fair market rent.”

Below are the charts for 10 occupations that might be considered to be middle class. As you can see, eight of the 10 would be hard pressed to afford purchase of an average home in Burlington:

paycheck3

 

 

 

 

 

 

paycheck5

 

 

 

 

 

 

They do a little better in the rental market, but still, six of 10 can’t comfortably afford a two-bedroom apartment in Burlington:

paycheck4

 

 

 

 

 

 

paycheck6

 

Vermont dreaming … in California

affordable housing, high-rises, housing, News, renters, , , , ,

Vermont fantasies can take many forms, but one has to wonder: Where are the Vermont brand police when you need them? Not in California.

Consider “The Vermont,” a luxury, high-rise apartment complex in L.A.’s Koreatown that promises “sky-high decadence.” Here’s the web page’s come-on (“bask in paradise seven stories up”):

vermontcover

Hmm, doesn’t look much like Vermont (come on, we have only a handful of buildings higher than six stories in the entire state!) , so where might the name have come from? Perhaps from Vermont Avenue, which runs alongside and is one of L.A.’s longest thoroughfares.

Why that street is named for Vermont is another question. A quick Google search didn’t provide an answer, but it did turn up this 1874 photo of an area where Vermont Avenue was later platted:

vermontave1

That’s more like it.

Now, you may consider all of this off-topic for a housing blog, but bear with us…

 

 

 

There’s another curious Vermont vestige in L.A. that’s more than a century old, called Vermont Square. It’s a section of south Los Angeles (Vermont Avenue runs through it) that’s among the city’s most densely populated areas.

Vermont_Square,_Los_Angeles,_California

 

 

 

 

 

“Vermont Square” apparently was a developer’s name for what, in the early 20th century, was a huge subdivision — “the largest ever put on the market in Los Angeles,” according to this 1909 newspaper ad, “comprising fifty-two city blocks – a town in itself.”

vermontsquaread1909

That doesn’t seem particularly Vermont, either.

Back on Vermont Avenue, we learn that one of its southern segments is known as “death alley,” with one of the highest homicide rates in the city.

That’s certainly not very Vermont, so we’ll retreat to “The Vermont,” on the corner of Vermont Avenue and Wiltshire Boulevard. What are apartment rates?

A corner two-bedroom-two-bathroom suite, about 1,000 square feet, “starts” at $2,890.

vermontcorner

Finally, an unmistakable Vermont quality! Unaffordability!

 

NJ’s lessons for VT

affordable housing, density, fair housing, housing, housing crisis, integration, segregation, workforce housing, , , , , , ,

The Times’ Sunday editorial was a ringing endorsement of affirmatively furthering fair housing as put into practice in Mount Laurel, N.J. Mount Laurel, of course, was the epicenter of a fair housing lawsuit that resulted in state supreme court rulings in 1975 and 1983 known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine.

mtlaurel1

Essentially, the doctrine held that every town must make room for people of all incomes and can’t legitimately exclude low or moderate income people through restricting planning and zoning policies. The Fair Share Housing Center, a primary litigant in the case that led to the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel that’s lauded by the editorial, calls it “one of the most significant civil rights cases in the United States since Brown v. Board of Education (1954).”

That statement might sound self-serving, but it has some credence, given that other states all over the country – including Vermont – have at least paid lip service to this principle. (For a quick summary of the Doctrine and how it resonates in Vermont, check out our previous blog post on this.

One thing that was missing from the editorial was any invocation of the incisive language in the New Jersey justices’ rulings. Like this, from Mount Laurel I:

“By way of summary, what we have said comes down to this. As a developing municipality, Mount Laurel must, by its land use regulations, make realistically possible the opportunity for an appropriate variety and choice of housing for all categories of people who may desire to live there, of course including those of low and moderate income. It must permit multi-family housing, without bedroom or similar restrictions, as well as small dwellings on very small lots, low cost housing of other types and, in general, high density zoning, without artificial and unjustifiable minimum requirements as to lot size, building size and the like, to meet the full panoply of these needs. Certainly when a municipality zones for industry and commerce for local tax benefit purposes, it without question must zone to permit adequate housing within the means of the employees involved in such uses…” (emphasis added)

Those guidelines are as apt today as when that opinion was written, in 1975 – 40 years ago!

Another thing missing from the editorial was anything more than a passing reference to complexities and controversies that attended efforts to implement the doctrine in municipalities across the state. It’s a long and tangled story, and while it’s true as the Times intones that “some local officials are working diligently to turn back the clock…” and that “Gov. Chris Christie and his allies in some of the state’s wealthy towns would like nothing more than to kill this remedy…” there is an added complication in many communities, and this one has resonance in Vermont, too.

newjersey2

Some of the challenges New Jersey’ Sussex County faces in providing more affordable housing, according to this New Jersey Herald account, may sound familiar here:

“ ….a shortfall of utilities — sewer, water, electric — to accommodate more housing and population; and a lack of practical public transportation in the area that limits the ability for low- and moderate-income people to get to decent-paying jobs.

“But the most glaring problem is that with the population declining and the economy volatile, the county is not an ideal place for developers to invest.”

 

We’re full, so go somewhere else

affordable housing, density, high-rises, News, segregation, , , , , , ,

density1When someone says that a town or a city is “built out,” what does that mean? It often means simply that the speaker doesn’t want any more people moving in – even though it might be possible to design more space, in keeping with local standards, that would accommodate more people.

The common claim that a city has run out of room reflects not a physical reality, but rather, an exclusionary prejudice, as Emily Badger suggests in a thought-provoking piece in the Washington Post. She points to widely varying population densities of major “First World” cities (Seattle, 3,000 people per square mile; New York, 4,500; Paris, 9,500; London, 14,600). How can anyone in San Francisco, even with its topographical challenges, argue that that city is “built out” at a mere 5,400 people per square mile? In fact, according a Berkeley economist, the city could accommodate 30-40 percent more people without losing its character.

Building higher and shrinking parking lots can seem reasonable as planning options, but there are limits. In Burlington (2,730 people per square mile), for example, any building higher than about 12 stories would likely be seen as excessive, and no one is ready to enforce a dramatic reduction in vehicles plying the city’s roads. There is such a thing as overcrowding, too (HUD’s so-called Keating memo calls for a limit of two people per bedroom), but of course most American communities are nowhere near their limit.

The most densely populated municipality in Vermont is undoubtedly Winooski , about 4,800 people per square mile.

winooski

And Winooski, when you meander through it, doesn’t come across as particularly dense – much of its 1.5 square miles is occupied by single-family lots, after all. It could get denser and still be less so than LA (6,000 people per square mile) or Madrid (12,100) – never mind Mexico City (25,100) or Jakarta (24,500).

Nationally, exclusionary land-use practices have had the effect of holding down housing supply and pushing up housing prices. Consider California, where housing prices began to soar above those in the rest of the country starting around 1970. One reason California diverged, according to an legislative analysis that came out earlier this year, is housing construction has been limited – by community resistance, environmental policies and other factors – in coastal urban areas. That has driven up prices there and inland as well.

The legislative analyst called for policy changes that would lead to significantly more housing along the coast. Here again, the suggested remedy for unaffordability was a familiar one: increase the housing supply. But does anyone believe that can be left simply to market forces?

Moreover, merely eliminating exclusionary policies and increasing density, while favoring more affordability, aren’t necessarily sufficient to promote inclusiveness, or integration. The pro-density strategy has to be combined with affirmatively fair housing, as Jamaal Green argues in this Shelterforce article.

 

Taller & brighter

affordable housing, high-rises, public housing, public opinion, workforce housing, , , , , ,

Once upon a time, believe it or not, planners of public housing in the United States believed high rises were a good thing. In the early ‘40s, we learn from J.A. Stoloff’s history of public housing, the thought high-rises “could provide a healthy, unique living environment that would contrast favorably with surrounding slum areas.”

Well, as we all know, high-rises for families didn’t work too well in the big metro areas. Two notorious examples in Chicago were Cabrini Green …

cabrinigreen

 

 

 

 

 

and Robert Taylor Homes…

 

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
 

 

drab, unsightly, unlivable in many ways, they unfortunately tainted the popular conception of public housing. No public-housing high-rises were built after the early ‘70s, and by the ‘90s many of these buildings were being torn down.

As it turned out, though, some public-housing high-rises did work pretty well – for elderly residents. One such example, built in 1971, is the tallest building in Vermont – 11-story Decker Towers in Burlington, operated by the Burlington Housing Authority for elderly and disabled residents:

decker

 

 

 

 

 

 

Granted, construction of ANY public housing is passe in this country, sadly, but before you stop thinking about high-rises, look at some examples in Singapore, where public-housing high-rises are home to a majority of the population. These shots are by Peter Steinhauer, a photographer:

sing1

 

 

 

 

These photos make two things really clear: (1) High rises don’t have to be drab and dreary…sing3

 

sing2

 

… and (2) no one should have any trouble finding the street address of these places.

 

 

 

The bright colors bring to mind some of the buildings in Burlington’s Old North End, many of them owned or developed by Stu McGowan …

stu2

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we’ve drawn your attention back to Vermont, let’s consider building height on a Vermont scale as we also consider how to add to the state’s affordable housing stock. High rises are out of the question, of course, especially in our small towns. But what about adding a third story to buildings in town centers, here and there, for family apartments? Is that such an outrageous idea? This three-story building in the photo below doesn’t look a bit out of place.

stu1

 

 

 

 

 

 

What they didn’t talk about

affordable housing, civil rights, elected leaders, fair housing, segregation, , , , ,

debate2

The Democratic presidential candidates had a fair amount to say last night about the disappearing middle class, but not about where all of those fallen people can afford to live. Housing unaffordability is a “crisis” throughout the country, judging from news accounts, but it was not among the “pressing issues” deemed worthy of discussion in the debate.

One likely reason is that “pressing issues” for the purpose of this debate were defined, in part, by the volume of traffic they generate on Facebook. Perhaps housing advocates need to devote themselves more devoutly to social media.

Another reason, as we’ve suggested in previous posts, is that any substantial solution to the affordability problem will require major federal investments, in the form of subsidies, public housing and so forth. To be sure, raising wages – as the candidates pledged to do – will help alleviate the problem, but even a minimum wage of $15 will leave millions of people house-poor.

Here’s an idea that might have been introduced during the debate’s back-and-forths about capitalism, but wasn’t: Housing, like education and health care, is basic human need that requires major governmental intervention and that can’t simply be left to market forces. Don’t take our word for it –check out what an establishmentarian magazine, The Economist, has to say about housing as one of capitalism’s unmet challenges.

Another housing topic the candidates bypassed was the pronounced racial segregation that still marks residential settlement patterns in metropolitan areas all over the country, 47 years after the passage of a Fair Housing Act that was intended to undo that segregation.

They had opportunities to discuss this, when they were invited to talk about “issues of race in America” or the unrest in Baltimore, but the focus remained on reforming the criminal justice system, improving educational opportunities, and so forth. Not that these aren’t important, but there’s another perspective on the events of Baltimore and Ferguson that deserves attention. Consider this analysis by the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, published soon after the Baltimore riots:

“Whenever young black men riot in response to police brutality or murder, as they have done in Baltimore this week, we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality—training officers not to use excessive force, implementing community policing, encouraging police to be more sensitive, prohibiting racial profiling, and so on. These are all good, necessary, and important things to do. But such proposals ignore the obvious reality that the protests are not really (or primarily) about policing.

“Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population. A legacy of these policies is the rioting we have seen  ….Whether after the 1967 wave of riots that led to the Kerner Commission report, after the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, or after the recent wave of confrontations and vandalism following police killings of black men, community leaders typically say, properly, that violence isn’t the answer and that after peace is restored, we can deal with the underlying problems. We never do so.

“Certainly, African American citizens of Baltimore were provoked by aggressive, hostile, even murderous policing, but … (w)ithout suburban integration, something barely on today’s public policy agenda, ghetto conditions will persist, giving rise to aggressive policing and the riots that inevitably ensue. Like Ferguson before it, Baltimore will not be the last such conflagration the nation needlessly experiences.”