A wellspring of ideas in droughtland

September 10, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, California, gentrification, San Francisco, subsidized housing, VermontTed Wimpey

California sometimes seems like another world, and Vermonters can be forgiven for thinking it has nothing to do with us. But wait: crazy as the housing picture in California is, there are several reasons why we should keep an eye on what’s happening there.

Like it or not, California is a policy trend-setter, and its cutting-edge ideas have a way of filtering through the rest of the country.

Moreover, we’d argue that the housing problems California is facing are quantitatively different from what we have here, but not necessarily qualitatively — that is, affordable and fair housing challenges are pervasive in both states. (Here’s an example of the quantitative: 2-bedroom apartments in San Jose rent for an average of $2,917, which is affordable to someone with an income of $116,000. And you thought Burlington was bad!) Qualitatively, lower-income workers are priced out of the rental market in both states– and remember, Vermont is a low-wage state, which compounds housing unaffordability.

Anyway, here are three California housing ideas worth your notice:

A real estate fee to be used for funding affordable housing development. Assembly Bill 1335 would impose a fee of $75 to $225 on real estate transactions (with some exemptions) to build a fund for affordable housing development. The legislation reportedly has a good range of supporters.
Sue the Suburbs: A novel piece of litigation is in the works after a developer scrapped plans for moderately priced housing in favor of a smaller number of $1 million-plus homes. Click here for a contextual story and here for the website.
Gentrification vaccine: In egregiously expensive San Francisco, the storied Tenderloin District has apparently retained a healthy share of affordable housing in the face of market forces. That’s because nonprofits and housing activists have worked for years to ensure that a substantial share of the district’s housing is subsidized or permanently affordable. For an article that gives their collective efforts a catchy moniker, click here.

Here’s looking at you, HUD

September 9, 2015Uncategorized50th birthday, Fair Housing Act, George Romney, HUD, LBJ, Robert WeaverTed Wimpey

Today is HUD’s 50^th birthday – that is, it was 50 years ago today that President Johnson signed the legislation adding a Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Cabinet. Here’s a photo of LBJ presenting a ceremonial pen to Robert C. Weaver, who later became HUD’s first leader.

Of course, we’ll all mark this anniversary in our own ways. If you want to join HUD’s own celebration of “50 years of creating opportunity,” complete with video testimonials and public housing success stories, click here, for a mere chronology, here.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that HUD has come in for plenty of criticism over the last five decades for “straying from its mission” to promote residential integration. For a recent example that appeared as an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun after the recent turmoil in that city, click here. For a critical history of the department published by ProPublica in 2012, click here.

A couple of historical notes: Weaver, who held three Harvard degrees and had served as a New Deal presidential advisor, was the first African American Cabinet secretary. Romney, who served as secretary during Nixon’s first term, was such an ardent champion of affirmatively furthering fair housing that he ran afoul of the White House and was forced out.

Three years ago a reporter could write:

“ProPublica could find only two occasions since Romney’s tenure in which the department withheld money from communities for violating the Fair Housing Act. In several instances, records show, HUD has sent grants to communities even after they’ve been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

HUD has since stepped up its efforts, and the new AFFH rule is widely seen as a harbinger of more vigorous enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.

Here’s a video clip of LBJ’s remarks 50 years ago, including this nugget: “Our cities and our new urban age must not be symbols of a sordid society.”

Once more, with feeling

September 8, 2015UncategorizedAFFH, affirmatively furthering fair housing, Fair Housing Act, housing news, HUD, integration, New York Times, segregation, Walter MondaleTed Wimpey

It’s not every day that we can praise the New York Times editorial board for following in Thriving Communities’ wake. Saturday’s editorial, which borrows its headline, “The Architecture of Segregation,” from a study we posted about last month. The editorial, while noting this two summer’s “positive” developments – the Supreme Court’s disparate impact decision and HUD’s AFFH rule – rightly takes federal officials to task for failing, over many years, to enforce the Fair Housing Act. And the editorial invokes Walter Mondale’s comments at the HUD conference last week about how the act’s intent is “not fulfilled” by exclusionary land-use planning.

While government deserves a good share of the blame for the present state of residential racial segregation, there are those in the community of fair housing advocates who contend that the real estate industry has been at fault, too. How else to account for the fact that upper-middle-income black families don’t have comparable access to the neighborhoods where their upper-middle-income white family peers live.

Indeed, one factor that may have contributed to segregated patterns is the choice of many whites to opt out of integrated communities, as Stacy Seicshnaydre pointed out in a law journal article last year, “The Fair Housing Choice Myth.” And one way to address that, Seicshnaydre argued, is to defund exclusion — as application of the AFFH rule promises to do, at least in theory.

Meanwhile, HUD conferees were reminded last week, redlining is still with us, and new cases are in the pipeline.

Sleeper issue, Part II

September 4, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, campaign issues, Chris Christie, Democrats, Donald Trump, GOP, housing news, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, presidential campaign, Scott Walker, Ted CruzTed Wimpey

Last week we looked at what the official websites of Democratic presidential candidates had to say about affordable housing, or fair housing, or ANY kind of housing, and we came up empty. Affordable housing may be a national crisis, and residential segregation may be a national scourge and a key contributor to the unrest in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere, but these issues missing from the Democrats’ campaign discourse these days.

The same is true for the Republicans, but perhaps it’s just as well. A primary candidate in a crowded field benefits by mobilizing zealots and true believers, so the fact that housing is not a flashpoint for various segments of the Republican “base” might not be a bad thing.

HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) rule has been getting a rise out of conservative commentators, but the presidential candidates apparently don’t think flogging it will get them very far. They’re sticking with more familiar standbys, such as Obamacare and gun regulation.

In any case, just for the sake of balance, we looked at websites of the 17 Republican candidates. Many had “issues” tabs. (Donald Trump, interestingly, has a “positions” tab, and when you click on it there’s only one: Immigration Reform.)

Any mention on these sites of the housing problem in any form?

Jeb Bush: No

Ben Carson: No

Chris Christie: No

Ted Cruz: No

Carly Fiorina: No

Jim Gilmore: No

Lindsey Graham: No

Mike Huckabee: No

Bobby Jindal: No

John Kasich: No

George Pataki: No

Rand Paul: No

Rick Perry: No

Marco Rubio: No

Rick Santorum: No

Donald Trump: No

Scott Walker: No

HUD gets a pass from all of them, even those who inveigh against “regulation” and “big government.”

Hey, what about us backwaters?

September 3, 2015Uncategorizedaffirmatively furthering fair housing, affordable housing, Housing Assistance Council, housing data, housing news, HUD, rural states, VermontTed Wimpey

We’ve mentioned before that much of the literature on affordable housing and affirmatively furthering fair housing focuses on major metropolitan areas and their urban demographics. We’re not immune to all those gnarly issues here in Vermont, but we can’t help but wish for more analysis with a rural focus.

Help may be on the way from HUD, via its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Tool, which promises to provide maps, housing and demographic data for jurisdictions in all parts of the country, including the rural ones. We say “promises” because we can’t seem to get the tool, which is still in development but available for interim inspection, to work for Burlington or the rest of Vermont — the two jurisdictional options. The mapping tool does work on our desktop for New Hampshire and Maine, so it’s possible to get an idea of what sorts of data plots we’ll be able to see for Vermont one of these days.

You can try your luck by clicking here. Then click OK, choose one of the 12 maps you’d like to see (e.g., race/ethnicity, housing choice vouchers, demographics and transportation, etc.), then the state and jurisdiction. If you can get it to work for Vermont, great; if not, choose another place just to get an idea.

When this system is fully functional, it will be accessible to anyone and perhaps will spare HUD grantees the expense of hiring consultants to do the requisite fair-housing analysis.

Meanwhile, rural places like Vermont do have another helpful data source, the Housing Assistance Council, which provides interactive maps with data on the state and county level. Here’s what the Vermont map looks like:

The darker counties have higher poverty rates. We don’t know how to make the map interactive on this blog, so click here to explore it on the Council’s website. You can click on each county for a wealth of data. You’ll notice that the rural percentage of each county’s population is listed – 100 percent, in most cases, 0 percent in Chittenden County, our very own megalopolis.

Highlights from fair housing conference

September 2, 2015UncategorizedEconomic Policy Institute, fair housing, Fair Housing Act, HUD, Richard Rothstein, segregation, Walter MondaleTed Wimpey

Here’s Fritz Mondale, former VP and co-sponsor of the Fair Housing Act, speaking yesterday about what it took to get the bill through Congress. Among other things, it required support from “Lincoln Republicans” and a nudge from President Johnson.

The venue was HUD’s National Fair Housing Conference, in Washington, for which Mondale was the keynoter.

And here’s Richard Rothstein, of the Economic Policy Institute, debunking the national myth of “de facto segregation” — and explaining how residential racial segregation has been a result of conscious public policy on the part of federal, state and local governments.

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Show me a micocosm

September 1, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, David Simon, housing news, public housing, Show Me a Hero, YonkersTed Wimpey

If you never had the time or inclination to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21^st Century,” you could still learn a good deal about economic inequality simply by reading the reviews.

Similarly, if you haven’t seen the six-part TV series “Show Me a Hero,” which concluded recently on HBO, you can still learn a little something about affordable housing just by skimming the reviews. (Disclosure: We haven’t read Piketty in full or watched “Show Me.”)

The series – co-written by David Simon (of “The Wire,” which we have seen and can recommend) — depicts a political struggle in Yonkers during the ‘80s. The “Show Me” story resonates today with a plot-line driven by a maverick political leader and opposition to affordable housing that’s evocative of recent attacks on HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing rule.

You can get a pretty good sense of the show, and its topical currency, in this treatment in the Washington Post, or in this one in the Guard ian.

And lest you think the contesting attitudes and political battles are limited to the metropolis, think again. What the current director of public housing in Yonkers says , in this Slate interview, is true all over.

“There is always community resistance to affordable housing,” Joseph Shuldiner says. “People believe that affordable housing will bring down the value of their property and bring in people who are not desirable. I don’t think in most cases that’s proven to be the case. “

And he captures the dilemma of where to invest limited public resources:

“We really need to maximize the number of viable communities with affordable-housing opportunities. That means both getting affordable housing into already viable communities but it also means making the poverty concentrated areas viable so they will attract other-than low-income people.”

Tale of two cities

August 31, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, Ann Arbor, Burlington, housing news, Michigan, rental housing, student housing, VermontTed Wimpey

Consider Burlington times three. That’s Ann Arbor, sort of.

Ann Arbor, like Burlington, has a big student population and a big housing-affordability problem. But now all of a sudden, seemingly, it has something else that Burlington doesn’t: a rental housing glut. Thanks to a profusion of new housing, both on-campus and off, the vacancy rate is up, empty apartments are going begging at the start of another academic year, and some rents are coming down.

Let’s pause here to run the numbers: Ann Arbor’s population is 117,000; the University of Michigan’s enrollment is 43,625, or about 37 percent.

Burlington’s population is about 42,300; UVM’s enrollment is about 12,700, Champlain College’s about 2,000. So, students here comprise around 35 percent.

Ann Arbor’s rents look to be roughly in Burlington’s range. An older, four-bedroom home rents for $2,800, or $700 per bedroom, according to the Ann Arbor News.

Before the surplus in rental housing became apparent, Ann Arbor officials were talking about how to address the affordability problem. The idea of rent control was floated – as it is occasionally in Burlington – but remains impossible without legislative authorization. As things stand, thanks to a 1988 state law, Michigan’s towns and cities can’t do anything to control rent. That means inclusionary zoning is banned, too. Burlington at least has that.

How many of Ann Arbor’s new high-rise rental units are affordable? Probably very few – developers seemingly have no financial incentive to provide any. The good news, for renters, is that some rents are dropping because of all the housing that’s been built (including graduate-student housing by the university). That’s what officials in Burlington like to imagine happening here, too: more student housing plus more private housing development alleviating the upward pressure on rents.

Sounds promising, but Ann Arbor has paid what some might consider an unsightly price: a surfeit of luxury high-rises downtown:

Here a subsidy, there a subsidy

August 28, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, housing news, housing subsidies, mortgage interest deduction, real estate tax deductionTed Wimpey

Housing subsidies diminish income inequality, while the mortgage-interest deduction, together with the real-estate-tax deduction, has the opposite effect.

This makes intuitive sense: housing subsidies disproportionately benefit low-income people, and mortgage-interest/real-estate deductions, the well-to-do. We don’t need a study from the Urban Institute to convince us of that. “Housing Tax and Transfer Programs Decrease Inequality” goes further, though: it says that the equalizing effects of housing subsidies outweigh the disequalizing impact of the tax benefits.

There’s not much comfort in that, however. Only about one in four eligible families gets federal housing assistance. Low-income housing subsidies, totaling about $36 billion in rental vouchers, are less than half the combined total of mortgage-interest ($70 billion) and real-estate-tax ($28 billion) deductions.

Still, housing subsidies and housing tax breaks deserve to be mentioned in the same breath, as part of the same policy conversation. Members of Congress who support cuts in housing subsidies don’t necessarily go along with eliminating the mortgage-interest deduction – although getting rid of that deduction has periodically gained support variously as a form of tax-code simplification or as tax fairness.

Familiar struggles to the south

August 27, 2015Uncategorizedaffordable housing, density bonus, inclusionary zoning, VermontTed Wimpey

Fresh off yesterday’s post on single-family zoning comes this news out of Louisville: a proposal to allow developers to build multi-family housing in single-family zoned districts. Developers would also get to build denser projects if a percentage of the units are affordable – a variant of inclusionary zoning.

But alas, density bonuses aren’t enough, as this editorial out of Charlotte, N.C., makes clear. They resulted in zero affordable units from private developers in that city over the last couple of years, so other planning tools are needed to meet the massive affordable housing gap in that city.

Ostensibly these big cities to the south have little in common with any place in Vermont, but it’s worth noting that they’re both struggling with the same overall problem we face here – an acute affordable housing shortage – and that there are no silver bullets. It’s a complexity that requires a mix of policies to alleviate.