Category Archives: Uncategorized

Housing Action Plan revisited

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The latest draft of Burlington’s Housing Action Plan, out last week, deserves a few pointed comments. Aside from two additional proposals (bringing the total to 20), there aren’t many substantial changes, but we noticed a few subtle revisions worth noting.

burlingtonapt

We all know there are no simple remedies for the housing affordability problem, which the action plan declares to be one of the city’s “most significant challenges.” The two new proposals certainly don’t qualify as silver bullets.

One is for Burlington to take the lead in “regional housing initiatives that strengthen transportation corridors.” Clustering new housing near transportation nodes or corridors makes sense and is being pushed in various metro areas around the country. Certainly, if any municipality around here is going to take the lead in this sort of planning, it might as well be Burlington. On the other hand, in the absence of county government or targeted oversight by the legislature, regional planning in these parts is largely a hand-waving exercise.

The other new proposal, to improve home energy efficiency of rental units, could help diminish some of the prevailing housing burden (58 percent of Burlingtonians are renters, and they pay an average of 44 percent of their income on housing, the report states), but not the lion’s share of that burden –monthly rents.

The new draft adds language in its first paragraph acknowledging the need to “continue supporting efforts to protect tenants’ rights, prevent displacement, and ensure fair housing” — a commendable revision. Granted, the action plan doesn’t have much to say about fair housing, but that’s OK, because Burlington will be giving fair housing a detailed look in its forthcoming “assessment” mandated by HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing regulation.

As before, the plan recommends considering revisions in the inclusionary zoning ordinance. The new draft adds “triggering thresholds” to the provisions to be rethought, but in any case, all the serious rethinking of this ordinance is being deferred to a consultancy-to-be-named later. Ultimately, we’ll be looking for recommendations on how the ordinance can produce affordable units at a higher rate than it has in the past (fewer than 250 units in 25 years).

Another pending review (or moving target) focuses on Plan BTV South End, which we mentioned in a previous post and is in a comment phase now.

Here’s one area where the action plan draft comes up short: addressing the housing burdens of middle-class people, including the proverbial young professionals. The plan’s introduction lays out the affordability “challenge” for “residents across much of the income spectrum, and in particular those who make enough money that they are not eligible for subsidized housing, but struggle to compete in an unhealthy housing market where demand has far outstripped available supply.” What does the plan offer for these residents in particular? Not much, beyond vague references to “workforce housing” and the familiar argument that increasing the housing supply (in part by pulling students out of the rental market and into new residence halls) will ameliorate upward pressure on rents.

 

There but for the grace of God go we

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A report is out from The Century Foundation that exposes interesting national demographic trends that appear, on their face, to have little to do with Vermont. We’re not so sure, though.

“The Architecture of Segregation,” by Paul Jargowsky, argues that the number of high-poverty neighborhoods nationally has increased significantly since 2000 and that poverty has become more concentrated – in part because of policy choices that could be changed to produce a different result. As is typical with national-scale reports like this, the focus is on major metropolitan areas, such as Detroit or St. Louis, so the Vermont reader is left wondering what any of this has to do with us – even if we do want to understand sociological trends around the country that help explain events in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. (Note of regional interest: the metro area with both the highest black concentration of poverty and the highest Hispanic concentration of poverty is a little more than a stone’s throw away: Syracuse, N.Y.)

Well, Vermont may not have poverty concentrations in the scale of the metro areas, but it’s still worth considering whether similar trends feeding disparate residential patterns have been at work here. For example, many suburbs have grown at the expense of cities they surround. Jargowosky’s word for that grown is “cannibalistic.”

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“In virtually all metropolitan areas, suburban rings grew much faster than was needed to accommodate metropolitan population growth,” he writes. That has a ring of familiarity around here. Burlington’s population has been fairly stagnant; the big housing growth is indeed in the suburbs. But to what extent does the new housing reflect the income distribution in the population? What share of the new rental complexes rising from the fields in Williston, for example, are “affordable”?

Jargowskyomes to two conclusions that could have some application here, or at least are worth thinking about:

“Our highly dispersed and profoundly unequal distribution of housing is not inevitable; indeed, it is not the norm around the world. The two main changes that need to occur are simple to state, but hard to bring about. First, the federal and state governments must begin to control suburban development so that it is not cannibalistic: new housing construction must be roughly in line with metropolitan population growth.”

Exactly how state government here (in the absence of county government) would attempt to assert such “control” is an open question.

“Second, every city and town in a metropolitan area should be required to ensure that the new housing built reflects the income distribution of the metropolitan area as a whole. To some, this suggestion may seem like a massive intervention in the housing market.  In fact, exclusionary zoning is already a massive intervention in the housing market that impedes a more equitable distribution of affordable housing.”

This brings us back to beating the drum for inclusionary zoning, which is sadly missing throughout the state, including the booming suburbs of Chittenden County.

 

Where can Section 8 families live?

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We’ve mentioned in several posts that low-income families benefit in various ways when they’re able to live in mixed-income, “high opportunity” neighborhoods. (And we contend that these inclusive neighborhoods benefit, too, in various ways – economically, socially and culturally.)

Here are two publications that document the benefits to low-income children. “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children,” which came out in May, found that children in poor families move to better neighborhoods before the age of 13, they wind up with higher educational attainment and higher salaries as adults.

Another paper, “Children and Housing Vouchers,” argued that public policy should promote locating families with housing choice vouchers under the Section 8 program — families who live predominantly in lower-income areas, nationally — in better neighborhoods. (Baltimore’s Housing Mobility Program was cited as an example with documented benefits.) This paper noted that HUD’s Section 8 program, in which voucher-holders rent from private landlords, is in a better position to spread voucher-holders among low-poverty areas than HUD’s project-based public housing program.

All of this got us thinking about housing choice vouchers in Vermont. According to Vermont’s 2015 Housing Needs Assessment, there are about 6,310 housing choice vouchers in this state, and about 3,100 households on the waiting list. To these numbers, add these, from the 2012 Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice: 23 of Vermont’s 184 census tracts had concentrations of low-to-moderate income people, as shown on this map:

map5lmi

So, here are our questions of the day, awaiting further research:

  • How many of these voucher holders live in the low-income zones, and how many live elsewhere? (Perhaps HUD’s new data analysis tools supplied under the AFFH rule will help answer this.)
  • What are policy-makers or housing officials doing, if anything, to encourage Section 8 voucher holders to move to low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods?

Granted, HUD’s subsidizable “fair market rents” may rule out units in some properties, particularly, one- or two-unit “non-conventional” housing that according to the Needs Assessment tends to be pricier in Vermont. Still, HUD’s Fair Market Rents for Chittenden County, according to the assessment, seem high enough to allow voucher holders a good deal of choice. They range from $1,003 for a one-bedroom apartment to $1,925 for 4 bedrooms.

 

‘Heated’ conflict over affordable housing?

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A provocative op-ed in the Times last week by Thomas Edsall has ruffled a few feathers. He took on the question of whether public housing subsidies should be directed to impoverished neighborhoods or to upscale areas.

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Pushing the former is something called the “poverty housing industry,” which he called “a de facto alliance of multimillion-dollar nonprofit housing companies, city politicians, state and local housing authorities” and others. Pushing the latter are those who advocate integration of poor minorities in more well-to-do neighborhoods. The result, Edsall wrote, is a heated conflict “within the affordable-housing community.”

He argued that some large nonprofit development companies benefit by confining their low-income housing developments to low-income areas. Bolstering the critique of that stance by the integrationists are three things: academic research that shows benefits to low-income children whose families are resettled in low-poverty areas; the Supreme Court decision upholding disparate impact; and HUD’s AFFH rule, which among other things calls for breaking up patterns of historic residential segregation.

A critical response to Edsall’s piece was soon in coming. A blog post on the website of the giant law firm Nixon Peabody took him to task for various alleged distortions and oversimplifications. Among other things, Edsall was said to have overlooked the obstacles to developing affordable housing in affluent areas – the high cost of land, the resistance by residents, and so on.

It’s also worth noting that Edsall, in citing the Supreme Court decision, did not mention the caveat in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion that left the door open to continuing to invest in poor neighborhoods:

“It would be paradoxical to construe the Fair Housing Act to impose onerous costs on actors who encourage revitalizing dilapidated housing in our Nation’s cities merely because some other priority might seem preferable,” Kennedy wrote, adding:

“The FHA does not decree a particular vision of urban development; and it does not put housing authorities and private developers in a double bind of liability, subject to suit whether choose to rejuvenate a city core or to promote new low-income housing in suburban communities.”

What does all this have to do with Vermont? Edsall’s primary targets are big, national nonprofits working in impoverished sections of major U.S. cities. His critique doesn’t seem to apply much in this rural state, although socioeconomic integration does present a challenge here.

Comments, anyone?

Real estate ad pitfalls

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Monday’s civil rights hearing covered a lot of ground on housing discrimination, but it never got around to advertising. Maybe that’s because illegal ads aren’t as pervasive as they used to be. Signs like this hard seldom seen nowadays:

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The newspaper staffers who oversee classified ads are generally savvy – they’ve been brow-beaten by fair housing activists enough over the years to have a pretty good idea what passes muster and what doesn’t. Then again, how much real estate advertising are newspapers getting these days, anyway? Not as much as they used to, sadly.

The most popular advertising venue that lacks editorial oversight, of course, is Craigslist. And that’s what the Fair Housing Project devotes most of its monitoring time to, in its capacity of advertising watchdog.

Craigslist, to its credit, puts a little blurb in each of the entries, “please flag discriminatory housing ads” with a link to a summary of what’s prohibited under the federal Fair Housing Act. Vermont’s Craigslist does not provide any info about Vermont-specific discrimination, however. “Receipt of public assistance” is a protected class in Vermont, which means ads can’t say “No Section 8.”

Very few do, though, even on unfiltered Craigslist. Over the last five months, browsing Vermont rental ads on Craigslist several times a week, we’ve found 30 ads with one or two violations (or probable violations – we’re not an enforcing agency, after all).

About two-thirds of the violations have pertained to familial status – a federally protected category. That means presence of kids. That is, the ads appear to discriminate against families with children.

Much of the discriminatory language might be characterized as subtle. Just about everybody, even the proverbial small-time landlord, knows better than to say “no children.” Instead, they say things like, “best for singles or couples” or “single occupant” or “college students only.”

Roughly one-third of the violations pertain to receipt of public assistance. Here again, the language is less than direct. “Professionals only” … other units “occupied by executives, business owners” … “located in a quiet, professional neighborhood.”

The great majority of real estate ads on Craigslist are fine, at least in fair housing terms. Most advertisers, intentionally or not, abide by this useful guideline for what to put in the ad: Describe the property, not who you want to live there.

Nuggets from Vermont’s civil rights hearing

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Monday’s half-day hearing on “housing issues” held in the Statehouse by the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights broke little new ground on the fair housing front. A few points worth highlighting:

  • Housing discrimination by race and national origin is still very much with us, as evidenced by Vermont Legal Aid’s 2014 testing. (White American renters received preferential treatment in 46 percent of the national origin tests and 36 percent of the race-based tests, for example.) The new Vermont NAACP chapter reported having received about 50 housing discrimination complaints since September; how many of those complaints were referred to investigators at the Human Rights Commission or Vermont Legal Aid was unclear, however. Parts of Burlington and Winooski, in part because of an influx of refugees, are becoming residentially segregated.
  • Race-based discrimination, often disguised with “a smile and a handshake,” tends to be more subtle than disability-based discrimination. The latter category regularly draws the most complaints to the commission and Vermont Legal Aid. Affordable housing accessible to people with disabilities is in chronically short supply.
  • Vermont’s low vacancy rate can exacerbate discrimination, as landlords have more latitude to be “choosey.”
  • Small-time landlords, who own one or just a few rentals, are more likely than their large-scale, professional counterparts to be ignorant of fair housing law; and the great majority of the state’s roughly 7,000 landlords are not members of the landlords’ association. One remedy is more education and outreach, to landlords and tenants.
  • One proposal that might ensure better fair-housing-law compliance, not to mention code enforcement: a state rental registry, coupled with mandatory fair-housing training for landlords.

 

Today’s Statehouse presentation

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Here’s the statement Ted Wimpey provided today to the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at a hearing in Montpelier on “Housing Issues”:

 

For nearly two decades, the Fair Housing Project of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity has worked on a variety projects aimed at eliminating or mitigating various aspects of illegal housing discrimination in Vermont. We have been involved, with Vermont Legal Aid as partners, in business practices fair housing audit testing, we have organized programs to educate housing consumers about their fair housing rights; conducted fair-housing trainings for landlords, realtors, municipal and state officials and the general public; received vetted and referred complaints regarding perceived fair housing violations; monitored real estate ads for fair housing violations; and published and distributed fair housing guidebooks in English and more than a dozen other languages.

FHP

While continuing to perform many of these functions, the Fair Housing Project has been focusing increasingly on addressing systemic barriers to fair housing choice which can take forms such as excessively restrictive or exclusionary planning, zoning or development policies. With funding from the US Department of HUD, we have in collaboration with a number of organizational partners, mounted a statewide campaign to promote inclusive and affordable development patterns – a campaign called “Thriving Communities: Building a Vibrant, Inclusive Vermont.” This campaign dovetails with a reinvigorated commitment by HUD to better “affirmatively further fair housing” (AFFH), such “affirmatively furthering…” is a mandate of the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 that for action purposes has been ill-defined and erratically observed. Just this summer HUD issued a much-anticipated AFFH rule that brings more clarity at least to the process of evaluating whether entities are effectively attempting to conduct programs and policies aimed at AFFH. We will not now dwell on details of the HUD AFFH rule, which has received a fair amount of popular attention and which essentially sets forth a new planning process for federal funding grantees. Suffice it to say here that the thrust of this initiative is to break down historic concentrations of poverty, and racial and ethnic segregation while proactively encouraging integrated development patterns that includes affordable housing in mixed income, higher-opportunity communities.

Residential racial segregation in U.S., while somewhat diminished – at least in some cities- since passage of the Federal Fair Housing Act 47 years ago, remains pervasive, and income segregation has become even more pronounced. Vermont is about 95 percent white, however, and while pockets of minority concentration exist (77 were identified in the state’s last Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice (AI) – 2012”). Vermont had no census tracts in 2010 where blacks exceeded 7 percent of the population. (Other minorities registered well below 5 percent in most tracts.)

So, while residential segregation by race does bear watching in Vermont – particularly with a significantly increasing number of refugees, immigrants of color, and African Americans typically from more urban areas of the country – it does not exist on the same scale as in many major metropolitan areas. Based on Dissimilarity Index Rankings, the 2012 analysis concluded that Vermont is “moderately segregated for Asians and Blacks and has low degrees of segregation for other minority groups.” It’s also worth noting that minorities in Vermont have lower median incomes and lower rates of home ownership, and that, based on testing results from Vermont Legal Aid’s studies, minorities face higher incidences of housing discrimination than the state’s formal complaint statistics might suggest.

In our Thriving Communities campaign, we’re advocating for broad-based residential inclusiveness – not just for ethnic minorities, but for all protected classes, which in Vermont include people receiving public assistance and which prohibits planning, zoning and permitting processes and decisions that are based on the income level of prospective residents.

In terms of policy and state law, Vermont has taken some positive steps against socioeconomic segregation. (Because of a disparate impact on a number of protected classes under federal and state fair housing law, socioeconomic exclusion effectively equals fair housing law violation especially as regards AFFH obligations.) “Receipt of public assistance” is a protected class under the state’s fair housing law. And Vermont’s law as of 2012 also makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of income in permitting housing or in making land-use decisions. Also under Vermont’s laws defining parameters for municipal planning and zoning, municipal plans must include “a recommended program for addressing low and moderate income persons’ housing needs.” Moreover, bylaws may not exclude housing that meets the needs of low or moderate income people, and multi-family housing or mobile home parks in particular.

But while the state potentially wields at least a small legal stick, for prohibiting income-exclusiveness, many local jurisdictions have a long way to go in providing carrots for more affordable-housing development and, in collaboration with fair and affordable housing advocates and developers, the state and its fair and affordable housing partners needs to keep educating, encouraging and, if necessary cajoling municipalities into more inclusive housing development policies.

Inclusionary zoning, for example, is becoming an increasingly used tool across the country to add to the affordable housing stock in mixed-income neighborhoods – but it is not yet at all common in Vermont. Inclusionary zoning requires or encourages a certain percentage of affordable units in new housing developments. As far as we know, only Burlington and a small hand full of other towns to lesser degrees, have adopted inclusionary zoning bylaws. We’d like to encourage other Vermont municipalities to give this approach serious consideration.

Other signs of municipal commitment to affordable housing development – density bonuses, or waivers/reductions of impact or permitting fees – are also rare exceptions in Vermont. Several years ago, in reviews of land-use regulations in Chittenden and Lamoille counties, the Fair Housing Project found that many towns still had predominantly large minimum lot sizes and that multifamily housing in many cases was a conditional, rather than a permitted use.

What we’d like to see is more Vermont municipalities’ taking steps to encourage multifamily housing developments near town centers, on sites with ready access to good services, schools and transit. In far too many Vermont towns, as is the case across much of the country, lower-wage workers cannot afford to live near their places of employment. Indeed, a recent review of Vermont’s larger employment centers shows that some are woefully short of subsidized housing.

Granted, the limited availability of public funding and tax credits is a constraint on affordable-housing development.   Municipalities nevertheless would do well to prepare the ground for development opportunities as they arise. Vermont’s population deserves no less. More than half Vermont’s renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and more than one-quarter pays more than 50 percent. Employers feel this burden in another way, when housing costs impede recruitment of workers.

An inclusive community, home to people of a wide range of incomes, backgrounds and skills, embraces fair housing opportunity. We believe this ideal is in keeping with Vermont’s communal character as embodied in its town meeting tradition. Thank you again to the Vermont Advisory Committee for the opportunity to address you on our hopes, fears and concerns regarding fair housing in Vermont.

Ferguson and beyond

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The Times had a story over the weekend on housing segregation in St. Louis region, including Ferguson. Focus was on African American holders of Section 8 vouchers who found themselves limited in where they could move. St. Louis County, it seems, does not have protection for them.

We note here that programs that have sent minority voucher holders to low-poverty areas, in suburban Chicago and Baltimore, for example, have brought benefits in education and employment. We also note that in Vermont, receipt of public assistance is a protected class, so refusing to rent to a Section 8 voucher holder is illegal.

 

 

 

A modest proposal: EB-5 affordable housing

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As public funding for affordable housing dwindles, perhaps it’s worth looking for major financial support elsewhere, as in … East Asia!

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but has it really come to this, trolling for investors in China willing to underwrite an underfunded public need in the United States?

We’ll leave it to others to judge how desperate Miami is for affordable housing. A headline in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal read:

“Miami Taps EB-5 Visa Program to Help Fund Affordable Housing.”

Hmm, we immediately thought, why not in Vermont? (If you need to brush up on Vermont’s own EB-5 program, which aims to draw economic-development backing from deep-pocketed foreign investors in exchange for green cards, click here, or check out Seven Days’ intriguing update on Bill Stenger’s  various projects in the Kingdom.)

The Journal story noted that Miami has lost affordable housing to upscale development since 2000 and paraphrased a local official as saying that

“it has been difficult for developers of moderate-income housing to compete with luxury developers for land and for financing. At the same time, federal funding for affordable housing has been reduced. In addition to conventional sources of funding a project, using EB-5 funds, which carry considerably lower interest rates than conventional bank loans, might help level the playing field.”

Well! It so happens that Vermont’s EB-5 regional center is headquartered in the Agency of Commerce and Economic Development, which happens also to be home to the Department of Community and Economic Development. DHCD’s advocacy of “strong communities” extends to affordable housing. Why don’t these two bureaucratic wings consider combining forces, or at least, put in a call to Miami?

As things stand, affordable housing isn’t in Vermont’s EB-5 mix. You can see all the projects if you click here.  Mount Snow is on board for construction of a pond and a ski lodge, and is inviting interest in “future projects” that could include hundreds of luxury units … with no mention of affordability, at least in the promotional blurb on the website.

Well, there’s plenty of room for affordable housing at Vermont’s ski areas, as we’ve pointed out in a previous post.  Surely there must be plenty of socially responsible investors in China hankering for U.S. residency who are willing to put up the capital, right?

Maybe the photo with the Journal article, of the Miami EB-5 program’s first project, will whet a few appetites:

miamitower

Oops, that first project isn’t affordable.