Category Archives: News

Housing notes from all over

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shippingcontainers1

  • Before you dismiss the idea that shipping containers can be used for housing, consider this student-housing complex in Amsterdam, as described by The Guardian. Can you imagine something like this on the northwest corner of Burlington’s Main Street/S. Winooski intersection, which has been suggested as a possible site for privately developed UVM student housing?

 

  • The City Council in Portland, Ore., where a “housing emergency” has been declared and where rents have risen more than 20 percent over five years, boosted the city’s affordable housing fund by $64 million. The money comes from a property-tax set-aside, and the council is looking for more revenue sources.  Portlandcoliseum And one of the councilors has lofted an idea that some other cities beset by under-used mega-athletic complexes might want to seize upon: sell the Portland Coliseum for to a developer who will put affordable housing in its place.

 

 

 

  • As we’ve noted before, the nationwide initiative to affirmatively further fair housing calls for affordable housing development (at least a good share of it) in low-poverty, “high-opportunity” areas. A country club would seem to fit that description, at least generically. So we were interested to learn that the Planning Board in Mahwah, N.J., recently approved the redevelopment of a country club there for affordable housing.

mahwahclub

Before you get too excited, though, you should know about the downside: Much of the land is contaminated from years of pesticide spraying, and the cost of remediation (which includes removal of hundreds of trees) contributed to a reduction in development’s affordable capacity: down from 350 multi-family units to less than 100 single family homes.

  • Uber will deliver $1 million to Oakland’s affordable housing fund for the privilege of turning a former Sears building into an office space. oaklanduberThe deal was prompted partly by fears that Uber’s corporate arrival, with an anticipated 3,000 employees, would lead to gentrification and even higher housing prices.

 

  • Attention, City Market, Hunger Mountain, et al: A food co-op in affordability-challenged Asheville, N.C., is contemplating adding affordable housing to its expansion plans, which also (and less intriguingly) include enlarging its existing store, parking lot and office space. ashevillecoop

 

 

 

 

  • Speaking of parking, the Berkeley City Council has voted to target underused parking-lot space for affordable housing development. Berkeleyparkinglot2 Council members were reminded at the meeting that the average cost of a 1 bed-room apartment is $1,400 a month, and that’s under rent control! The average cost of an apartment not under rent control? $3,256 a month.

Sleeper issue snoozes on

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cnbcdebateWe’ve read through the transcripts of the two GOP-presidential-candidate debates held on CNBC last night, in order that — to steal one of Gail Collins’ recurrent lines — you don’t have to do it.

The two debates, of course, featured the “undercard,” with four candidates, and the “main card,” with 10.

In nearly four hours of discussion, the word “housing” was uttered once. That was when Rand Paul lambasted the Federal Reserve Board for, among other alleged malfeasances, having “caused the housing boom and the crisis…”

The candidates had nothing to say — nor were they asked by their CNBC interlocutors — about the housing unaffordability that afflicts millions of Americans, or about persistent residential segregation by race and income. And they had virtually nothing to say about the bubble-burst that ushered in the Great Recession. Maybe that’s partly because the bubble was fed by the kind of deregulation that small-government proponents are fond of promoting.

True, six of these candidates had been given brief opportunities to hold forth at a daylong “housing summit” in New Hampshire that we noted last week (here’s yet another account of that event, by the way), but it seems unlikely they were each talked out after that experience. Perhaps they, their fellow contenders, and the CNBC panel all agree with Chris Christie’s comment at the summit that housing is an unsexy issue that “kind of depresses people.”

On the other hand, the candidates talked a lot last night about other things they presumably think are depressing, such as ”big government” and taxes. One might have expected that housing could get some attention in a debate that was supposed to focus on economic matters.

Perhaps the candidates believe that their various plans for shrinking government and “growing” the economy will jump-start the private market to spur housing development, raise incomes of working families, and take care of the affordable housing problem. If so, it would be nice if they’d explain in some detail how that will work.

It would be even nicer if reporters would start making them talk about it.

 

California’s sideshow

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

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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

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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.

 

A digital-age summit in the oral tradition

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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

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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:

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

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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!

 

We’re full, so go somewhere else

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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.

 

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?

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.