Category Archives: presidential campaign

Here a crisis, there a crisis

affordable housing, elected leaders, fair housing, housing, housing subsidies, integration, presidential campaign, public housing, public opinion, renters, segregation

Never mind California or the Northeast. The housing-unaffordability problem can be found lots of other places, some of them rather unlikely. If you breeze through news coverage from around the country, you can find stories from all over that use the phrase “crisis” or “crunch” or “shortage” to describe the local or regional housing-unaffordability profile:

Just in the past few days, stories have bubbled up from Taos,  Taos Jackson Hole, Aspen, Madison, Asheville, Hawaii, and Austin — all in crisis mode.

Austin is an interesting case: There’s not only an affordability shortage, most of the supposedly affordable units aren’t really affordable after all, according to a rather scathing audit that just came in. From the report summary: “The City does not have an effective strategy to meet its affordable housing needs. Neighborhood Housing and Community Development has not adopted clear goals, established timelines, or developed affordable housing numerical targets to evaluate its efforts in fulfilling the City’s adopted core values. Key information needed to evaluate program effectiveness is incomplete, inaccurate or unavailable.” Austin3  This, in the latter-day birthplace of public housing that  the mayor pronounced the most economically segregated city in the country.

Among the places you might not expect to find a housing crisis: Minot, N.D., rural Iowa, IowaNorth Platte, Neb. (Say it ain’t so, North Platte!) And to think that this is not something the presidential candidates can even be bothered to talk about!

In fact, every county in the country can be said to be in crisis when it comes to housing extremely low-income households (that is, households with less than 30 percent of median income, 11.3 million nationwide). No county has enough units for such people, according to an analysis the Urban Institute did this summer. For an interactive map that will show you how many affordable units in each county for 100 poor households, click here. In Vermont, Orange, Windsor and Windham counties come out the best, with 49 affordable units for 100 households; Caledonia, Lamoille and Orleans have the fewest, at 29. The national average: 28.

Of course, the national challenge is not just to create plenty more affordable housing but to locate it judiciously. New housing options have to be provided for low-income people in low-poverty neighborhoods, otherwise known as “high-opportunity” areas. That’s what affirmatively furthering fair housing is about — breaking up historic settlement patterns of concentrated poverty and segregation and promoting integration.

Naturally, AFFH generates pushback. So, sprinkled among the wash of “housing crisis” stories are accounts of resistance to affordable housing projects in well-healed suburbs – such as Simsbury, Conn. (median household income$104,000) , and Wilmette, Ill. ($127,000).

More brainstorming: self-building

affordable housing, artists' housing, co-living, cohousing, home ownership, housing, housing subsidies, middle class, presidential campaign, workforce housing, , , , , , ,

The housing-unaffordability problem is too big, pervasive and complex to yield to single, simple remedies. Yes, government at all levels has to play a substantially bigger role than it does now. But without substantial new federal funding and subsidies — which can’t be found on mainstream politicians’ lists of spending priorities — we might as well brainstorm about piecemeal, alternative solutions.

Having touched on co-living and cohousing in the last post, we bring you a continental variant of this idea: collective building.baugruppe1

This intriguing headline in the Guardian, “The do-it-yourself answer to Britain’s housing crisis,” offers an entrée: community members, with help from a land trust, building their own affordable homes. Britain even has an organization, the National Custom and Self-Build Association, to promote such efforts.

Self-building seems to be an even bigger trend on the continent. In Germany, baugruppen, or building groups, are active all over, and reportedly account for 10 percent of new homes built in Berlin. baugruppe3These are groups of people who come together, often with something in common (they might be musicians, say, or share a political philosophy), and take responsibility for acquiring land, hiring architects and contractors, and creating their own housing. For a summary of how it works, click here, or another brief description, here.

The baugruppe is a well-established form of organization in Germany and apparently gets a good deal of institutional support, including financing from a state bank. Whether something like this could work in this country is an open question.

Mike Eliason, a designer who was author of a seven-part series on baugruppen, seems to think it could, at least in a place like Seattle. For the first article, on the website of a Seattle advocacy organization called The Urbanist, click here. As Eliason describes it, baugruppen projects cost less than traditional models because they do without developers and marketing, as well as real estate agents.baugruppe2

It all sounds reminiscent of cohousing, except that it’s commonly done in an urban setting — as the photos in this post reflect. It also sounds like a fairly middle-class phenomenon, considering how much of a personal investment it requires of its participants. Who has the time and energy necessary to do all the meeting and planning and hiring and so on? Probably not someone who holds down two minimum-wage jobs. Not that we don’t need affordable housing, sometimes called workforce housing, for middle-class professional types, too.

Sleeper issue snoozes on

affordable housing, Event, housing, housing crisis, middle class, News, presidential campaign, segregation, , , , ,

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.