Category Archives: housing

Stuck in the middle

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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

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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

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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.”

 

Variations on a sordid theme

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“Forty families on one lot, using one water faucet. Living in barren one room huts, they were deprived of the glory of sunshine in the daytime, and were so poor they could not even at night use the electricity that is to be generated by our great river…

“I found one family that might almost be called typical. Living within one dreary room, where no single window let in the beneficent sunlight, and where not even the smallest vagrant breeze brought them relief in the hot summer – here they slept, here they cooked and ate, here they washed themselves in a leaky tin tub after carrying the water for 100 yards. Here they brought up their children ill-nourished and amid sordid surroundings…”

The speaker was Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, in his home district of Austin, describing the “slum tarnish” he observed during a Christmas Day walk through town. He made his remarks in a radio address to his constituents (this was well before LBJ himself got into the radio business), hoping to win their support for something new in town: public housing. The address became known as his “Tarnish” speech.

Here’s a photo (albeit not from Texas) that seems to capture what he was talking about:

slumscene

 

 

 

 

 

Thirty years before he orchestrated the passage of the Fair Housing Act as president, Johnson – whose ambition as a young congressman is captured by this 1937 photo of him shortly after his election, with FDR in Galveston – prevailed in that housing campaign.

lbj1938B

The first public housing in the country built under the 1937 housing act was in Austin. It was segregated, like most public housing that sprang up around the country over the next few decades, but less sordid than what they replaced. LBJ used that word – sordid – to good effect at HUD’s inauguration, when he declared: “Our cities and our new urban age must not be symbols of a sordid society.”

“Sordid” might be an apt description for some blocks of big-city, high-rise public housing, thoroughly segregated, underfunded and bereft of hope, if not sunlight. High rises came into planners’ favor in the ‘40s, but a couple of decades later they were not. For a tidy history of public housing, click here.

Some argue that public housing outside the big inner cities has worked quite well, and perhaps that can be said for places like Vermont, which apparently got into public housing fairly late in the game. (Burlington’s housing authority dates from 1961, and the state’s, from 1968.) If a history of Vermont’s public housing hasn’t been written, it’s a thesis topic in waiting.

Housing opinions get short shrift in D.C.

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questionnaire

You may have missed it, but the MacArthur Foundation, by way of Hart Research Associates, did a national poll of 1,401 adults last spring on housing issues – the third such survey since the Great Recession. Guess what: A majority thought the housing crisis isn’t over yet!

No surprise there, given that 60 percent said they regard housing affordability as a “serious problem,” and 55 percent said they’d made at least one sacrifice (e.g. taking second job, eating more junk food, etc.) to cover their housing costs.

We’ll spare you the responses to the questions on class mobility and Millennial stresses, and simply highlight a couple of disconnects:

  • Respondents appeared divided about what role, if any, the federal government has in addressing the housing-affordability problem. Fifty-three percent said it wasn’t the federal government’s responsibility, compared to 39 percent who thought the federal government should be involved.

And yet, a big majority – 75 percent – said they want elected leaders in Washington to make housing affordability a priority. (See? We’re not alone in saying stuff like this, or this.) And 79 percent said they wanted state and local elected leaders to do so.

  • But those elected leaders – national, state and local – are not making affordable housing enough of a priority, at least in respondents’ eyes, as suggested by this chart:

Maca$

Dare we suggest a reason why public officials are not responding? Because they have a sense of impunity, inasmuch as making affordable housing a high priority would, in all likelihood, require spending appreciable amounts of tax dollars. How would the poll’s respondents feel about that?

More housing-crisis dispatches

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Another of our occasional samplers on the unaffordability epidemic:

  • As Seattle wrestles with housing unaffordability, an op-ed in the local paper recommends looking to Berlin!

berlin2

Germany’s largest city, newly flooded by young people and immigrants, has a population of 85 percent renters and has introduced a new form of rent control — the “rental price brake,” which seeks to rein in rent increases. (Median rents have gone up 50 percent in six years, by one account.) And government has imposed other constraints – on renovations (can’t be too fancy without approval) and on conversion to vacation homes. Well, that may sound promising, but to what effect? Protesters are in the streets, we learn in the Wall Street Journal, as “Berlin’s Housing Problems Boil Over.”

Unicode

  • In Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, 96 percent of the housing stock is unaffordable to a family of four earning $43,000 annually. So, the City Council is considering a form of inclusionary zoning with a buy-out provision. New developments would have to include 10 percent affordable units, or that requirement could be waived if the developer pays $220,000 per unit into a city fund to support affordable housing. Now, that’s not a new idea, but the buy-out figure looks rather high (Burlington’s is $100,000 per unit), and of course, there’s the concern that any new housing developed by the city not lump all the lower-income people together in their own blighted enclave.
  • In Columbus, Ohio’s Franklin County, more than 24,000 people applied for Section 8 vouchers from an agency that is prepared to give out … 200, followed by 70 a month. That’s in a county where 13,000 vouchers are in use.
  • In Miami, old people camped out overnight just so they could file applications to live in an affordable senior housing complex.
  • In Portland, Ore., the newly declared “housing emergency” is expected to last at least a year.
  • And in Palo Alto – we know, we know, this is Silicon Valley and expected to be unaffordable beyond  imagining – a local man and college graduate who earns a “decent salary” is living with his parents because he can’t afford an apartment. He graduated from Palo Alto High 20 years ago, so he’s too old to be a Millennial! Here’s what he told the City Council about himself and his cohorts:

“All of us went to great colleges, great grad schools, and not one of us can live in the city.”

 

So much for artists’ affordable housing

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When Burlington’s mayor announced that he would not support housing in the South End’s Enterprise Zone, he won cheers from artists who feared gentrification. While the mayor’s isn’t necessarily the last word in “Plan BTV South End,” the product of extensive public input (or so the city proudly insists), it does stack the odds against any kind of housing in the zone.

Too bad. One of the more intriguing prospects raised in the draft plan was to create work/live spaces – aka, affordable housing – for artists. Could that be done deftly in some of those South End warehouses without gussying up the surrounding neighborhood and driving up rents for everyone else? Maybe, maybe not, but it seems a shame not to consider this. A blanket ban on housing seems to foreclose the possibility.

southend

Well, it’s a possibility that’s being embraced elsewhere, all around the country – in little towns and big cities, both. “Colorado’s affordable artist housing efforts catching on quickly,” read a headline in Saturday’s Denver Post. Artspace, out of Minneapolis, has been developing work/live artists’ lofts for more than 20 years – but apparently none yet in New England.

If Burlington’s artists aren’t interested, perhaps their counterparts in other warehouse-rich Vermont towns might be. Bellows Falls, Springfield, Rutland, Brattleboro, among many others? Here’s the view in Colorado, according to the Post article:

“The hope is that some rural projects will have the added advantage of preserving historic structures in need of attention. That makes Trinidad, with its excess of significant, and underused, buildings, a good candidate for the pilot program…”

Check out what’s been done in Fergus Falls, Minn. (pop. 13,300)…

fergus

or  Hastings, Minn. (22,400).

hastings

If you’re looking for an example of a dreary warehouse transformed, look at Council Bluffs, Iowa …

council bluffs

or even Memphis – which is fashioning an arts district around its project.

memphsis

Now, it may be that some of projects, the affordable housing notwithstanding, have contributed to surrounding gentrification. But if so, did it have to be that way? Municipal planners take note.

 

 

Carrots and sticks

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Affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) is a recurrent theme on this website, so if you’re still not conversant with the phrase, today’s post is another opportunity. Essentially, the AFFH rule issued by HUD over the summer represents a reinvigorated push to promote inclusive communities and to break up concentrated areas of segregation and poverty that the 1968 Fair Housing Act was intended to dispel.

AFFH

If for no other reason, you should become familiar with AFFH because it’s a key addition to contemporary American civil rights vocabulary. You can bone up on previous posts here,  or here, or delve in to some of this website’s Resources.

And if you’re a citizen committed to supporting affordable housing development in mixed-income, higher opportunity areas, your role may be important than you thought. Consider this excerpt from an essay by Michael Allen, a partner in the civil rights law firm of Relman, Dane & Colfax and one of the leading legal lights nationally in fair housing litigation:

“What HUD produced is a Final Rule long on ‘carrots,’ but painfully short on ‘sticks.’ To compound that problem, HUD does not currently have—and is very unlikely to acquire—sufficient resources to police the compliance of 1200 block grant recipients and 3400 public housing agencies. As a consequence, the promise of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) mandate is likely to be realized only in communities where grassroots and legal advocates mobilize and create their own enforcement strategies. The success of the Final Rule will depend on this grassroots mobilization, on a community-by-community basis, all over the country. That means advocates, collectively, need to step up to the plate and provide the tools and resources for a sustained ‘ground game.’”

As for “carrots” that municipalities can offer for affordable housing development, the Fair Housing Project’s own Ted Wimpey offered a nice summation in his August testimony to the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: inclusionary zoning, density bonuses and impact-fee reductions, among others.

 

Burlington’s unaffordability update

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Yesterday was the due date for Burlington’s CAPER – that is, the Consolidated Annual Performance & Evaluation Report that the city has to file with HUD every year as a condition of receiving Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and HOME funds. (HOME is a federal program that supports the rehabilitation, acquisition and construction of rental housing.)

burlingtonapt

If you want to know more about the allocation of these funds, which amount to several million dollars, and about the beneficiaries, you can go to the report, which covers July 1, 2014 to June 30 , 2015. Here, we’re just going to refer to  three graphics that apply to housing.

The first two may look familiar to you. They’re in Appendix A, Pages 53 and 54. Rental vacancy rates in Chittenden County have been exceedingly low for at least two decades, as shown on the first graph, and still are. That’s one reason rents are as high as they are.

The vacancy rate here here is typically below 2 percent. That’s below  the “Balanced rate” of 4 percent supposedly the threshold for a healthy rental market, and its well below the rates for the Northeast and the U.S.

As for the housing wage – that is, the amount a person has to earn to be able to afford to rent an dwelling of average cost — well, no big surprises here, either. The graph on Page 25 shows four pillars, left to right, represent the costs of renting apartments: efficiency, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom. As you can see, a minimum-wage worker is out of luck, as is a median-wage worker who wants anything bigger than an efficiency.

By definition, you can “afford” an apartment if you spend no more than 30 percent of your income on housing. For context: According to the 2015 edition of “Out of Reach,” put out by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Vermont’s two-bedroom-apartment housing wage is $20.68 an hour, and the average wage for renters is $11.78.

OK, so how did Burlington fare for the year in its affordable housing program? It came up short, as you can see in the following table:

CR-20 – Affordable Housing 91.520(b)

Evaluation of the jurisdiction’s progress in providing affordable housing, including the number and types of families served, the number of extremely low-income, low-income, moderate-income, and middle-income persons served.

 

  One-Year Goal Actual
Number of Homeless households to be provided affordable housing units  

15

  

0
Number of Non-Homeless households to be provided affordable housing units  

76

  

46
Number of Special-Needs households to be provided affordable housing units  

0

  

0
Total 91 46

 

  One-Year Goal Actual
Number of households supported through Rental Assistance  

0

  

0
Number of households supported through The Production of New Units  

25

  

28
Number of households supported through Rehab of Existing Units  

6

  

6
Number of households supported through Acquisition of Existing Units  

60

  

12
Total 91 46

Granted, a single year is a rather arbitrary term to judge and overall program, given that affordable units might well be coming on line before or after. Such is the case here, the report notes, with the prospect of the Bright Street Co-op. You can read the city’s account of its affordable housing program on Pages 24-26, where the reader is assured that:

“Ensuring the availability of a continuum of housing, for all residents of Burlington, continues to be a top priority for the City.”

 

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.