Tag Archives: HUD

New HUD AFFH rule – the Good & Some Devils in Details

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Okay dear readers, this is a wonky article but for those of you interested in HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule it is a good read. (Ted Wimpey)

The Devils in the Details: Key Issues in Implementing the New AFFH Rule

 by Dan Immergluck and Mindy Kao Rooflines post on July 5, 2016

“For most of the Fair Housing Act’s history, its requirement to “Affirmatively Further Fair Housing” has been largely dormant. With the advent of the new AFFH rules in July 2015, however, there is some promise that this provision might be taken more seriously.”

http://tinyurl.com/AFFH-rule-FHA-DetailDevils  Link to ROOFLINES, the Shelterforce Blog,

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Surprise! Some rents going down

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Burlington’s chronic housing-affordability problem is bad enough — more than a third of the city’s 9,500 renting households are paying more than half their income for rent and utilities, which puts them in the “severely burdened” category — but guess what? It’s getting arguably worse. burlingtonapt

HUD just came out with its 2016 fair market rents for the Burlington/South Burlington metro area, and they’re lower than they were for 2015. This despite the fact that actual rents in this area have been going up every year. (The 2016 numbers are up and down across the state, as Vermont Housing Finance Agency’s news blog helpfully details.)

If you really want to know why Burlington’s numbers went down, you can go to the HUD page to see the methodology. The unfortunate upshot, though, is that anyone with a Section 8 housing voucher is going to have less to choose from in 2016 than they do this year. That’s because apartments that cost more than the “fair market rent” are off-limits for subsidy. (If it makes you feel any better, remember that majority of Burlington’s “burdened” households don’t have vouchers anyway. Nationally HUD rental assistance extends to only about one-fourth of the people who are income-eligible.)

OK, let’s consider a two-bedroom apartment. The 2016 “fair market rent” is $1,172 (as compared to 2015’s $1,302). What are the offerings on Craigslist?

Here are the first 10 listed rents for two-bedroom apartments in Burlington and environs (South Burlington, Colchester) that we found at noon Monday. (Craigslist is constantly updated, so if you do the search the results will vary):

$2,500, $1,600, $2,500, $2,100, $1,425, $2,400, $2,025, $2,000, $2,000, $1,650.

How “fair” is that market? Now, perhaps Craiglist rents tend to be above average (are there studies that document this?), but there’s not much consolation in that, especially if you have a housing-choice voucher.

Burlington’s unaffordability update

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Yesterday was the due date for Burlington’s CAPER – that is, the Consolidated Annual Performance & Evaluation Report that the city has to file with HUD every year as a condition of receiving Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and HOME funds. (HOME is a federal program that supports the rehabilitation, acquisition and construction of rental housing.)

burlingtonapt

If you want to know more about the allocation of these funds, which amount to several million dollars, and about the beneficiaries, you can go to the report, which covers July 1, 2014 to June 30 , 2015. Here, we’re just going to refer to  three graphics that apply to housing.

The first two may look familiar to you. They’re in Appendix A, Pages 53 and 54. Rental vacancy rates in Chittenden County have been exceedingly low for at least two decades, as shown on the first graph, and still are. That’s one reason rents are as high as they are.

The vacancy rate here here is typically below 2 percent. That’s below  the “Balanced rate” of 4 percent supposedly the threshold for a healthy rental market, and its well below the rates for the Northeast and the U.S.

As for the housing wage – that is, the amount a person has to earn to be able to afford to rent an dwelling of average cost — well, no big surprises here, either. The graph on Page 25 shows four pillars, left to right, represent the costs of renting apartments: efficiency, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom. As you can see, a minimum-wage worker is out of luck, as is a median-wage worker who wants anything bigger than an efficiency.

By definition, you can “afford” an apartment if you spend no more than 30 percent of your income on housing. For context: According to the 2015 edition of “Out of Reach,” put out by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Vermont’s two-bedroom-apartment housing wage is $20.68 an hour, and the average wage for renters is $11.78.

OK, so how did Burlington fare for the year in its affordable housing program? It came up short, as you can see in the following table:

CR-20 – Affordable Housing 91.520(b)

Evaluation of the jurisdiction’s progress in providing affordable housing, including the number and types of families served, the number of extremely low-income, low-income, moderate-income, and middle-income persons served.

 

  One-Year Goal Actual
Number of Homeless households to be provided affordable housing units  

15

  

0
Number of Non-Homeless households to be provided affordable housing units  

76

  

46
Number of Special-Needs households to be provided affordable housing units  

0

  

0
Total 91 46

 

  One-Year Goal Actual
Number of households supported through Rental Assistance  

0

  

0
Number of households supported through The Production of New Units  

25

  

28
Number of households supported through Rehab of Existing Units  

6

  

6
Number of households supported through Acquisition of Existing Units  

60

  

12
Total 91 46

Granted, a single year is a rather arbitrary term to judge and overall program, given that affordable units might well be coming on line before or after. Such is the case here, the report notes, with the prospect of the Bright Street Co-op. You can read the city’s account of its affordable housing program on Pages 24-26, where the reader is assured that:

“Ensuring the availability of a continuum of housing, for all residents of Burlington, continues to be a top priority for the City.”

 

Here’s looking at you, HUD

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Today is HUD’s 50th 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.

lbjweaver2

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

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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.

Sunflower on fence

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.

 

Hey, what about us backwaters?

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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:

www_ruraldataportal

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

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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.

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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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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.