Category Archives: home ownership

Plotting neighborhoods, top and bottom

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To your library of testimonials on the growing income inequality, you can add this one from the Urban Institute, a study titled “Worlds Apart: Inequality between America’s Most and Least Affluent Neighborhoods,” that shows disparities increasing from 1990 to 2010. This paper uses a composite index (income, educational attainment, home ownership rates, median house value) to identify neighborhoods in the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent.

You can see them plotted on an interactive national map. Here’s 2010  (blue is “top,” grey “bottom”):

citylab

If you scroll to the Northeast you can check out Vermont’s evolution – interesting, but not particularly dramatic.

As is the case with most such national surveys that focus on metropolitan areas, this one analyzes “commuting zones.” In Vermont’s case, that’s a designation of questionable applicability, because it means a zone centered on Burlington with a population of 321,946, more than half the state’s total.

In an appendix, the study lists dozens of commuting zones, each with its “inequality index,” and Burlington comes out OK – somewhere in the middle. Ditto Burlington’s growth of income disparity over 20 years.

Although there has been some shifting of the top and bottom zones across the country, the wealthy zones have remained fairly impregnable. One reason for that, as this analysis of the Urban Institute data emphasizes, is that discriminatory housing policies, such as exclusionary zoning (e.g., large lot sizes) that preserve richer residential enclaves. Multi-family rental housing, affordable or not, is typically missing from these neighborhoods altogether.

Of course, discriminatory land use policies aren’t the sole culprit. High land prices are an obvious deterrent for affordable housing development. Then again, discriminatory policies in many cases may have contributed to the higher prices … a vicious circle.

 

A non-presidential candidate gets to the point

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Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, gave a speech Sunday in Boston that the website “Salon” called “the realest talk on race by any American politician.” She delivered her remarks at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate as part of a “Getting to the Point” lecture series.

Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP Chairman Elizabeth Warren briefs reporters on the latest news of her agency, which oversees the government's disbursement of billions of dollars to U.S. banks and the auto industry by the Troubled Assets Relief Program, at the Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in Washington, April 27, 2009. REUTERS/Mike Theiler (UNITED STATES POLITICS BUSINESS)

She had something to say about violence, about voting, and about economic justice – and economic justice as it relates to housing. Some excerpts:

“For most middle class families in America, buying a home is the number one way to build wealth. It’s a retirement plan-pay off the house and live on Social Security. An investment option-mortgage the house to start a business. It’s a way to help the kids get through college, a safety net if someone gets really sick, and, if all goes well and Grandma and Grandpa can hang on to the house until they die, it’s a way to give the next generation a boost-extra money to move the family up the ladder.

“For much of the 20th Century, that’s how it worked for generation after generation of white Americans – but not black Americans. Entire legal structures were created to prevent African Americans from building economic security through home ownership. Legally-enforced segregation. Restrictive deeds. Redlining. Land contracts. Coming out of the Great Depression, America built a middle class, but systematic discrimination kept most African-American families from being part of it.

“State-sanctioned discrimination wasn’t limited to homeownership. The government enforced discrimination in public accommodations, discrimination in schools, discrimination in credit-it was a long and spiteful list.”

Here we interject that she’s just scratching the surface of the federal government’s tawdry history of promoting residential segregation by race. For an eye-opening summation, check out what Richard Rothstein, of the Economic Policy Institute, had to say at the recent HUD conference in Washington. See the video we posted previously.

We note also the racial disparity in home ownership. In 2010,  in Vermont, according to the 2012 “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice,” the home-ownership for whites (71.4 percent) was nearly twice that for blacks (32.5 percent).

Warren went on to talk inequality over the last few decades, including the disparate effects of predatory lending that preceded the housing crash:

“Research shows that the legal changes in the civil rights era created new employment and housing opportunities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, African-American men and women began to close the wage gap with white workers, giving millions of black families hope that they might build real wealth.

“But then, Republicans’ trickle-down economic theory arrived. Just as this country was taking the first steps toward economic justice, the Republicans pushed a theory that meant helping the richest people and the most powerful corporations get richer and more powerful. I’ll just do one statistic on this: From 1980 to 2012, GDP continued to rise, but how much of the income growth went to the 90% of America – everyone outside the top 10% – black, white, Latino? None. Zero. Nothing. 100% of all the new income produced in this country over the past 30 years has gone to the top ten percent.

“Today, 90% of Americans see no real wage growth. For African-Americans, who were so far behind earlier in the 20th Century, this means that since the 1980s they have been hit particularly hard. In January of this year, African-American unemployment was 10.3% – more than twice the rate of white unemployment. And, after beginning to make progress during the civil rights era to close the wealth gap between black and white families, in the 1980s the wealth gap exploded, so that from 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between black and white families tripled.

“The 2008 housing collapse destroyed trillions in family wealth across the country, but the crash hit African-Americans like a punch in the gut. Because middle class black families’ wealth was disproportionately tied up in homeownership and not other forms of savings, these families were hit harder by the housing collapse. But they also got hit harder because of discriminatory lending practices-yes, discriminatory lending practices in the 21st Century. Recently several big banks and other mortgage lenders paid hundreds of millions in fines, admitting that they illegally steered black and Latino borrowers into more expensive mortgages than white borrowers who had similar credit. Tom Perez, who at the time was the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, called it a “racial surtax.” And it’s still happening – earlier this month, the National Fair Housing alliance filed a discrimination complaint against real estate agents in Mississippi after an investigation showed those agents consistently steering white buyers away from interracial neighborhoods and black buyers away from affluent ones. Another investigation showed similar results across our nation’s cities. Housing discrimination alive and well in 2015.”

New population bulge: renters

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Renters — and the cost burdens associated with renting — are on the rise across the country. Two recent studies say so, so we might as well cite them here. One, by Enterprise Community Partners and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, projects that renter households will increase by 4.2 million over the next 10 years. Another, by the Urban Institute, puts that number at 6 million. And the share of rental households that’s “severely cost-burdened” – that is, paying 50 percent of income or more for housing – will go up 11 to 25 percent under various economic scenarios, says the former study.

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Meanwhile, says the Urban Institute, the home ownership rate will go down for all but the oldest population segment. The explanations of these and other stark housing projects are familiar – among them, that college-debt-burdened Millennials aren’t moving into the house-buying market the way their age group did a generation or two ago.

Here we inject the good news/bad news for Vermont.

The home ownership rate here is above the national average and has not mirrored the national drop over the last few years.

vthomeownership

Rental cost-burden rates here are, however, about at the national average: 26 percent of Vermont’s renters are “severely cost burdened,” according to Vermont Housing Data.

If the renter population swells in Vermont, how likely is it that the number of affordable housing units keeps pace? Not very, without some form of government intervention. Here’s what the Enterprise/Harvard study says about that:

“The need for affordable housing is already overwhelming the capacity of federal, state and local governments to supply assistance. At last measure, 11.2 million extremely low-income households competed for 7.3 million units affordable to them – a 3.9 million unit shortfall. And with 7.7 million unassisted very low-income renters with worst case housing needs in 2013 as defined by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), only just over a quarter (26 percent) of eligible very low-income households received rental assistance.”

Now, some might argue that if private developers are simply turned loose to produce a flood of new housing, affordability will take care of itself.

That’s not likely, either. Check out the state of affairs in Portland, Ore.,  a place that has experienced both a building boom and an unaffordability boom, and where the mayor just declared a “state of emergency for housing and homelessness.”