Category Archives: housing

A non-presidential candidate gets to the point

 

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.”

Fascinating notes from all over

A Monday potpourri that panders to our friends with short attention spans:

starbucks

  • Starbucks, which offers tuition-assistance to its U.S. employees, offers rental assistance to its workers in the U.K. After a year’s employment, they can get a no-interest loan for a rental deposit.

downsize

  • The U.K., never short of fresh approaches to chronic social problems, offers this one for the housing affordability shortage: oldsters downsizing to free up their unused extra space for youngsters. Worthy of debate, no?
  • Vermont’s recurrent lament that it’s getting too old and can’t hang on to its youth prompts the question: Where are the youth going? Well, here’s one answer, in the form of a list of cities where Millennials are buying homes in large numbers. They’re mostly out west (Des Moines! Grand Rapids!), the same territory where young Vermonters fled during the 1830s. Back then, the people they left behind wrung their hands about that exodus, too.

dubai

  • Maybe some of the fleeing youth are heading to Dubai, but if they are, they’re encountering – ta-dah! –– an affordable housing shortage, complete with 30-mile commutes from the suburbs.

 

Something to cheer in Woodstock

The opening of Safford Commons in Woodstock earlier this week has been widely and deservedly celebrated. This 28-unit development was about a decade in the making – a decade marked by legal battles and neighborhood opposition. You can get some of that history from a Valley News story on the ground breaking a year ago, and a you can get an thumbnail idea of where things stand now from accounts on Vermont Digger and on VPR, source of this photo:

saffordvpr

Let’s throw a little context around this. Woodstock is an employment center, with more than 2,100 jobs in more than 270 establishments last year, according to the Vermont Department of Labor. By that measure alone, Woodstock would seem to be a prime candidate for workforce housing – that is, housing that working people can afford to live in.

Woodstock is also a relatively wealthy town, with an estimated median income of about $99,600, compared to Vermont’s average of $68,100, according to Vermont Housing Data. A smaller share of its total housing units are rented (23.5 percent) than Vermont’s average (25.9 percent), and those residents who do rent in Woodstock tend to be slightly better off than their average Vermont counterparts. Just 29 percent of Woodstock’s renters are housing-cost “burdened” (that is, they pay 30 percent of their income on housing), compared to Vermont’s average of 52 percent; and just 14 percent are “severely burdened” (they pay 50 percent or more), compared to Vermont’s average of 26 percent.

All of which suggests that many of the lower-wage employees who work in Woodstock don’t live there and have to commute from some place else.

Until Safford Commons opened, however, Woodstock had only two subsidized housing complexes (Melishwood I & II), with a total of 26 units (11 of them for elderly residents). The addition of a third affordable rental complex in Woodstock is not only welcome, it’s overdue. Here’s hoping it won’t be the last.

 

New population bulge: renters

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.

apartment2

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.”

 

Teachable moments in New Hampshire

If you think New Hampshire is a socio-political backwater, from its license plate slogan to its lack of an income tax, think again. The state has been grappling with its affordable housing shortage for years — certainly since 2008, when a “landmark law” (as state housing officials termed it) sought to goad towns into taking action.

New Hampshire’s Workforce Housing Law mandates that every municipality provide “reasonable and realistic opportunities” for the development of workforce housing. What is “workforce housing”? As defined by the law, it means housing for that’s affordable (a cost burden of no more than 30 percent of income) for families making up to 100 percent of median income, and for renter families who make up to 60 percent of median income. (Click here for the income numbers.)

Now, “reasonable” and “realistic” may be subject to varying interpretations, as a recent discussion at a City Council meeting in Londonderry suggests. Londonderry officials are trying to open up more opportunities after an examination of the towns ordinances last year revealed impediments. The current push, as this news article indicates, is both for multi-family developments and increasing density in single-family zones.

londonderry-nh

The latter got pushback at the meeting. (We’d recommend that people in Londonderry and elsewhere watch our “Thriving Communities” webinar when it becomes available on our site, because it shows, among other things, how neighborhoods of the same density can be designed well (aesthetically pleasing) or badly (cookie-cutter ugly).

In any case, we’d argue that this kind of discussion – from the opening up of restrictive land-use practices to the acceptance of residential density in workable and appealing forms — could be going on in Vermont towns, as well. Never mind that Londonderry, N.H., with population of about 24,000, is bigger than every Vermont community except Burlington. The same challenges apply here, on a Vermont scale.

 

An elegant solution: home sharing

We all know that no single approach will alleviate the affordable housing crisis. Government, which bears the lion’s share of the responsibility, is not fully up to the task, and as we’ve mentioned, the issue is not even getting its share of attention in public forums or political campaigns.

Here and there, private and nonprofit initiatives peck away at the problem. Among those initiatives is home sharing, which addresses two of Vermont’s well-known trends: a greying population that wants to be able to age in place; and unaffordable housing costs for the younger set, including the proverbial young professionals.

homeshare

Home sharing matches older homeowners with younger renters willing to help out who can’t afford market rents. An apt match is a win-win, as this article in Monday’s Valley News explains.

Granted, this program  is a drop in the housing-unaffordability bucket, with fewer than 200 shared properties. But it’s a drop that deserves to grow, along with the post-65 population bulge that makes Vermont, by some measures, the oldest state in the country.