Tag Archives: housing news

Stuck in the middle

affordable housing, housing, housing crisis, housing subsidies, middle class, News, renters, workforce housing, , , , , , , , ,
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.

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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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NJ’s lessons for VT

affordable housing, density, fair housing, housing, housing crisis, integration, segregation, workforce housing, , , , , , ,

The Times’ Sunday editorial was a ringing endorsement of affirmatively furthering fair housing as put into practice in Mount Laurel, N.J. Mount Laurel, of course, was the epicenter of a fair housing lawsuit that resulted in state supreme court rulings in 1975 and 1983 known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine.

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Essentially, the doctrine held that every town must make room for people of all incomes and can’t legitimately exclude low or moderate income people through restricting planning and zoning policies. The Fair Share Housing Center, a primary litigant in the case that led to the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel that’s lauded by the editorial, calls it “one of the most significant civil rights cases in the United States since Brown v. Board of Education (1954).”

That statement might sound self-serving, but it has some credence, given that other states all over the country – including Vermont – have at least paid lip service to this principle. (For a quick summary of the Doctrine and how it resonates in Vermont, check out our previous blog post on this.

One thing that was missing from the editorial was any invocation of the incisive language in the New Jersey justices’ rulings. Like this, from Mount Laurel I:

“By way of summary, what we have said comes down to this. As a developing municipality, Mount Laurel must, by its land use regulations, make realistically possible the opportunity for an appropriate variety and choice of housing for all categories of people who may desire to live there, of course including those of low and moderate income. It must permit multi-family housing, without bedroom or similar restrictions, as well as small dwellings on very small lots, low cost housing of other types and, in general, high density zoning, without artificial and unjustifiable minimum requirements as to lot size, building size and the like, to meet the full panoply of these needs. Certainly when a municipality zones for industry and commerce for local tax benefit purposes, it without question must zone to permit adequate housing within the means of the employees involved in such uses…” (emphasis added)

Those guidelines are as apt today as when that opinion was written, in 1975 – 40 years ago!

Another thing missing from the editorial was anything more than a passing reference to complexities and controversies that attended efforts to implement the doctrine in municipalities across the state. It’s a long and tangled story, and while it’s true as the Times intones that “some local officials are working diligently to turn back the clock…” and that “Gov. Chris Christie and his allies in some of the state’s wealthy towns would like nothing more than to kill this remedy…” there is an added complication in many communities, and this one has resonance in Vermont, too.

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Some of the challenges New Jersey’ Sussex County faces in providing more affordable housing, according to this New Jersey Herald account, may sound familiar here:

“ ….a shortfall of utilities — sewer, water, electric — to accommodate more housing and population; and a lack of practical public transportation in the area that limits the ability for low- and moderate-income people to get to decent-paying jobs.

“But the most glaring problem is that with the population declining and the economy volatile, the county is not an ideal place for developers to invest.”

 

We’re full, so go somewhere else

affordable housing, density, high-rises, News, segregation, , , , , , ,

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.

 

Taller & brighter

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Once upon a time, believe it or not, planners of public housing in the United States believed high rises were a good thing. In the early ‘40s, we learn from J.A. Stoloff’s history of public housing, the thought high-rises “could provide a healthy, unique living environment that would contrast favorably with surrounding slum areas.”

Well, as we all know, high-rises for families didn’t work too well in the big metro areas. Two notorious examples in Chicago were Cabrini Green …

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and Robert Taylor Homes…

 

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
 

 

drab, unsightly, unlivable in many ways, they unfortunately tainted the popular conception of public housing. No public-housing high-rises were built after the early ‘70s, and by the ‘90s many of these buildings were being torn down.

As it turned out, though, some public-housing high-rises did work pretty well – for elderly residents. One such example, built in 1971, is the tallest building in Vermont – 11-story Decker Towers in Burlington, operated by the Burlington Housing Authority for elderly and disabled residents:

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Granted, construction of ANY public housing is passe in this country, sadly, but before you stop thinking about high-rises, look at some examples in Singapore, where public-housing high-rises are home to a majority of the population. These shots are by Peter Steinhauer, a photographer:

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These photos make two things really clear: (1) High rises don’t have to be drab and dreary…sing3

 

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… and (2) no one should have any trouble finding the street address of these places.

 

 

 

The bright colors bring to mind some of the buildings in Burlington’s Old North End, many of them owned or developed by Stu McGowan …

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Now that we’ve drawn your attention back to Vermont, let’s consider building height on a Vermont scale as we also consider how to add to the state’s affordable housing stock. High rises are out of the question, of course, especially in our small towns. But what about adding a third story to buildings in town centers, here and there, for family apartments? Is that such an outrageous idea? This three-story building in the photo below doesn’t look a bit out of place.

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What they didn’t talk about

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The Democratic presidential candidates had a fair amount to say last night about the disappearing middle class, but not about where all of those fallen people can afford to live. Housing unaffordability is a “crisis” throughout the country, judging from news accounts, but it was not among the “pressing issues” deemed worthy of discussion in the debate.

One likely reason is that “pressing issues” for the purpose of this debate were defined, in part, by the volume of traffic they generate on Facebook. Perhaps housing advocates need to devote themselves more devoutly to social media.

Another reason, as we’ve suggested in previous posts, is that any substantial solution to the affordability problem will require major federal investments, in the form of subsidies, public housing and so forth. To be sure, raising wages – as the candidates pledged to do – will help alleviate the problem, but even a minimum wage of $15 will leave millions of people house-poor.

Here’s an idea that might have been introduced during the debate’s back-and-forths about capitalism, but wasn’t: Housing, like education and health care, is basic human need that requires major governmental intervention and that can’t simply be left to market forces. Don’t take our word for it –check out what an establishmentarian magazine, The Economist, has to say about housing as one of capitalism’s unmet challenges.

Another housing topic the candidates bypassed was the pronounced racial segregation that still marks residential settlement patterns in metropolitan areas all over the country, 47 years after the passage of a Fair Housing Act that was intended to undo that segregation.

They had opportunities to discuss this, when they were invited to talk about “issues of race in America” or the unrest in Baltimore, but the focus remained on reforming the criminal justice system, improving educational opportunities, and so forth. Not that these aren’t important, but there’s another perspective on the events of Baltimore and Ferguson that deserves attention. Consider this analysis by the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, published soon after the Baltimore riots:

“Whenever young black men riot in response to police brutality or murder, as they have done in Baltimore this week, we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality—training officers not to use excessive force, implementing community policing, encouraging police to be more sensitive, prohibiting racial profiling, and so on. These are all good, necessary, and important things to do. But such proposals ignore the obvious reality that the protests are not really (or primarily) about policing.

“Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population. A legacy of these policies is the rioting we have seen  ….Whether after the 1967 wave of riots that led to the Kerner Commission report, after the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, or after the recent wave of confrontations and vandalism following police killings of black men, community leaders typically say, properly, that violence isn’t the answer and that after peace is restored, we can deal with the underlying problems. We never do so.

“Certainly, African American citizens of Baltimore were provoked by aggressive, hostile, even murderous policing, but … (w)ithout suburban integration, something barely on today’s public policy agenda, ghetto conditions will persist, giving rise to aggressive policing and the riots that inevitably ensue. Like Ferguson before it, Baltimore will not be the last such conflagration the nation needlessly experiences.”

Signs of desperation

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desparation

The housing affordability problem, which sometimes seems intractable in the current political climate, is generating some novel ideas around the country – would-be solutions and would-be explanations, among them:

  • A school district in the San Francisco Bay area is contemplating building housing for teachers who otherwise can’t afford to live there. Imagine that: A school board going into the development business just so it can hold on to the faculty.
  • NIMBYism apparently pervades wealthier suburbs outlying Chicago, which have less than their share of tax-credit supported low-income housing, according to a regional analysis. Advocates of “affordable housing” admit that the term itself can draw discriminatory, responses and that they might have more success if they called it something else. But alas, resistance to inclusiveness is more than a public relations problem.
  • Further signs of desperation in California: One county is considering a tax on Airbnb to help fund affordable housing development. Another is contemplating rent control. And a renters’ federation is complaining that the Sierra Club (the Sierra Club!) is standing in the way of needed housing density.
  • Denver’s housing crisis has been exacerbated by marijuana legalization, or so some surmise. That seems like a stretch, but the argument goes like this: (a) Legalization has pulled in a surfeit of millennials, driving up rents. (b) Growers are snapping up old industrial areas and driving out the artists who inhabit them. Mercifully, artists seem to have other options in Colorado.

Racial disparity: here we go again

civil rights, fair housing, home ownership, segregation, , , , , , , ,

debt

ProPublica has a fine expose on racial disparities in debt-collection litigation. Reporters examined court judgments in St. Louis, Chicago and Newark and found that court judgments were twice the size in predominantly black neighborhoods compared to predominantly white neighborhoods – even controlling for income. African Americans significantly more likely than whites to be sued by debt collectors.

So what, you might ask, does this have to with housing, or more particularly, housing discrimination (AKA fair housing)?

Two things:

  • One inference from the findings is that blacks tend to have less resources – less wealth – to fall back on in hard times. Specifically, they have less wealth in the form of home equity to pass on one from one generation to the next, and that’s a legacy of housing racial discrimination that was promoted and enforced by governments at all levels – and notably, by the federal government from the 1930s on.

As the ProPublic article puts it:

“Experts cite many reasons why blacks might face more lawsuits, foremost among them the immense gap in wealth between blacks and whites in the U.S. It’s a gap that extends back to the institution of slavery and, more recently, to 20th century policies that promoted white homeownership while restricting it for blacks.”

That gap has even widened since the Great Recession, according to the Pew Foundation. The typical black household has a net worth more than 10 times less that of the typical white household:

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  • The other connection to fair housing is that the racial disparity in debt-litigation cases runs parallel to the racial disparity in predatory lending that was revealed during the housing bubble years of the early 2000s. In many areas, blacks were steered to expensive home loans even when they could have qualified for standard mortgage loans. The debt collectors insist they’re treating everyone the same and not screening cases by race. That may be true, but the mass effect is similar to that produced when minorities were are targeted by predatory lenders in the years leading up to the Great Recession.

For a brief description of how a bank was called to account under the Fair Housing Act, check out this synopsis of a case that the civil rights law form Relman, Dane & Colfax filed against Wells Fargo in Baltimore, or this summary in the Baltimore Sun.

More housing-crisis dispatches

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Another of our occasional samplers on the unaffordability epidemic:

  • As Seattle wrestles with housing unaffordability, an op-ed in the local paper recommends looking to Berlin!

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Germany’s largest city, newly flooded by young people and immigrants, has a population of 85 percent renters and has introduced a new form of rent control — the “rental price brake,” which seeks to rein in rent increases. (Median rents have gone up 50 percent in six years, by one account.) And government has imposed other constraints – on renovations (can’t be too fancy without approval) and on conversion to vacation homes. Well, that may sound promising, but to what effect? Protesters are in the streets, we learn in the Wall Street Journal, as “Berlin’s Housing Problems Boil Over.”

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  • In Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, 96 percent of the housing stock is unaffordable to a family of four earning $43,000 annually. So, the City Council is considering a form of inclusionary zoning with a buy-out provision. New developments would have to include 10 percent affordable units, or that requirement could be waived if the developer pays $220,000 per unit into a city fund to support affordable housing. Now, that’s not a new idea, but the buy-out figure looks rather high (Burlington’s is $100,000 per unit), and of course, there’s the concern that any new housing developed by the city not lump all the lower-income people together in their own blighted enclave.
  • In Columbus, Ohio’s Franklin County, more than 24,000 people applied for Section 8 vouchers from an agency that is prepared to give out … 200, followed by 70 a month. That’s in a county where 13,000 vouchers are in use.
  • In Miami, old people camped out overnight just so they could file applications to live in an affordable senior housing complex.
  • In Portland, Ore., the newly declared “housing emergency” is expected to last at least a year.
  • And in Palo Alto – we know, we know, this is Silicon Valley and expected to be unaffordable beyond  imagining – a local man and college graduate who earns a “decent salary” is living with his parents because he can’t afford an apartment. He graduated from Palo Alto High 20 years ago, so he’s too old to be a Millennial! Here’s what he told the City Council about himself and his cohorts:

“All of us went to great colleges, great grad schools, and not one of us can live in the city.”

 

So much for artists’ affordable housing

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When Burlington’s mayor announced that he would not support housing in the South End’s Enterprise Zone, he won cheers from artists who feared gentrification. While the mayor’s isn’t necessarily the last word in “Plan BTV South End,” the product of extensive public input (or so the city proudly insists), it does stack the odds against any kind of housing in the zone.

Too bad. One of the more intriguing prospects raised in the draft plan was to create work/live spaces – aka, affordable housing – for artists. Could that be done deftly in some of those South End warehouses without gussying up the surrounding neighborhood and driving up rents for everyone else? Maybe, maybe not, but it seems a shame not to consider this. A blanket ban on housing seems to foreclose the possibility.

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Well, it’s a possibility that’s being embraced elsewhere, all around the country – in little towns and big cities, both. “Colorado’s affordable artist housing efforts catching on quickly,” read a headline in Saturday’s Denver Post. Artspace, out of Minneapolis, has been developing work/live artists’ lofts for more than 20 years – but apparently none yet in New England.

If Burlington’s artists aren’t interested, perhaps their counterparts in other warehouse-rich Vermont towns might be. Bellows Falls, Springfield, Rutland, Brattleboro, among many others? Here’s the view in Colorado, according to the Post article:

“The hope is that some rural projects will have the added advantage of preserving historic structures in need of attention. That makes Trinidad, with its excess of significant, and underused, buildings, a good candidate for the pilot program…”

Check out what’s been done in Fergus Falls, Minn. (pop. 13,300)…

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or  Hastings, Minn. (22,400).

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If you’re looking for an example of a dreary warehouse transformed, look at Council Bluffs, Iowa …

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or even Memphis – which is fashioning an arts district around its project.

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Now, it may be that some of projects, the affordable housing notwithstanding, have contributed to surrounding gentrification. But if so, did it have to be that way? Municipal planners take note.

 

 

Fascinating notes from all over

affordable housing, housing, News, , ,

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.

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  • 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.