By: Bob Burtman Miller-McCune Journal 12/28/2009
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks.
Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw from this office, are dressed in their everyday summer attire, T-shirts and shorts. But when they begin pulling maps off printers, Parnell and Joyner step decidedly out of the last century. "Our daughter tells people we work for the CIA, because what we do is so hard to describe," Parnell says, only half-joking.
Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race.
The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not.
The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.
But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked, says civil rights attorney Reed Colfax, who represented the Coal Run residents. "We could articulate the case in words," Colfax says. "But when you'd put up the maps, they'd stop listening to you and look at them [as if to] say, 'Is this really possible?'"
The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when residential discrimination was supported by law, have been reinforced under the cover of such contemporary land-use mechanisms as annexation, zoning and extra-territorial controls.
To produce the maps, the institute employs geographic information systems technology, a computer-based tool for organizing, analyzing and displaying data in a spatial or geographic context. While the maps seem simple, producing them is anything but. Data must be collected from a host of sources, including government databases, door-to-door surveys and Global Positioning System devices. The data is digitized, analyzed, converted to images and layered together in various combinations.
Once the exclusive province of government, industry and academia, GIS technology has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, paralleling exponential gains in computer power and capacity. Affordable, user-friendly GIS software, online-mapping systems and the explosion of government data available on the Web have combined to speed the spread of GIS into the public arena.
This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level. University of North Carolina School of Law Dean Jack Boger has worked with the institute on some of its municipal discrimination cases and concluded that the phenomenon of exclusion knows few geographic boundaries. "This is a problem of nationwide scope," Boger says. "The evidence is, in effect, irrefutable."
The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. "You're not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don't know how to use GIS maps," says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.
Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. "You say 'GIS' and people say, 'Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,'" Elwood says.
The dots on the GIS-awareness map may be sparse, but those who have experienced the transformative power of GIS mapping have no doubt that the technology will eventually become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. "People are jaded with statistics, and even more jaded with pie charts and graphs," says Keith Ernst, research director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, which has used maps to identify patterns of predatory lending in low-income communities. "But if you put the information on a map, people are more willing to hear what you say. We're visual creatures, and seeing is believing."
Allan Parnell recalls the day he first grasped the sweeping potential of GIS-based advocacy. Parnell was giving a talk at the University of North Carolina law school about the institute's first municipal discrimination case, which involved his hometown of Mebane, N.C. As in Zanesville, residents of largely minority neighborhoods outside Mebane's boundaries lacked water, sewer and other basic town services, despite decades of requests for relief.
Meanwhile, the town had annexed and provided services over the years to a hodgepodge of overwhelmingly white, affluent satellite developments that were farther away from the town center than the minority neighborhoods. This pattern of annexation and exclusion, dubbed "municipal underbounding" by University of Tennessee geography professor Charles Aiken, created virtual islands of poverty and neglect within the town.
After the presentation, a group of black students approached Parnell with similar stories of their own. "They told me, 'This is happening in my grandmother's town,'" he says. "That was the light-bulb moment: This isn't just one case; it's a pattern."
A geographer by training with advanced degrees in sociology and demographics, Parnell had used GIS in health-related studies for the National Academy of Sciences and other agencies beginning in the late 1980s. He and his wife, Ann Joyner, formed a company in 1999 that specialized in GIS-based health research. But Parnell, a self-described "conflict-avoiding academic," had had little opportunity or inclination to agitate on behalf of the disadvantaged.
One day in 2001, Parnell took a call from a community organizer in Mebane who was trying to stave off a highway bypass that would run through the heart of his neighborhood. Would Parnell assist him with a grant application? He met with the organizer, who detailed Mebane's methods of using town boundaries to disenfranchise the neighborhood while controlling its destiny through the use of extra-territorial jurisdiction, an area adjacent to city limits over which municipalities can exert some influence. "I just sat there with my jaw on the floor for three hours," Parnell says.
Parnell and Joyner agreed to create a visual and statistical profile of the town using standard GIS methodology. The first task was to gather the mountain of data that would be relevant. A former journalist and real estate developer, Joyner knew where to find comprehensive land-use and infrastructure information. Mebane's public works department provided the locations of water and sewer lines. From the planning department they obtained historical annexation documents. Federal census data broke out racial and economic variables at the block level. They reviewed city council meeting minutes for evidence of action and inaction on service and annexation requests.
Using stock GIS software, Parnell and Joyner digitized the mass of data in compatible formats — a major undertaking in itself — and analyzed it. To produce the maps, they enlisted Bucknell University GIS expert Ben Marsh, a former graduate school classmate of Parnell's. The three published a case study of Mebane in 2003 and shared it with Jack Boger, then-deputy director at the UNC Center for Civil Rights. "What was immediately apparent was how clear the relationship was between the exclusion of services and the racial makeup of the community," Boger says.
Inspired by the Mebane study and law school experience, Parnell and Joyner formed the nonprofit Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities and in 2004 won a foundation grant to map communities throughout North Carolina. They found patterns of exclusion similar to those identified in Mebane across the state.
The institute's maps of Moore County, home to some of the nation's most prestigious and affluent golfing communities, were among their most dramatic examples of underbounding. The maps show the boundaries of three county municipalities, Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen, a tortured maze of red lines that zigzag in all directions, creating angular amoebas.
A batch of dark brown blotches stand prominently outside the limits of all three towns, though they are hemmed in or virtually surrounded by the three towns. The blotches represent communities with overwhelmingly African-American populations and names — Lost City, Monroe Town and Jackson Hamlet — that evoke images of the Jim Crow era.
The maps also show the distribution of sewer lines in the county, which either stop at town borders or go through them but provide no hookups beyond, so the communities outside the town limits have no sewer service. Annexations over the years have swallowed acreage all around the three towns but carefully avoided the minority neighborhoods.
Parnell and Joyner add a sobering narrative to the maps that magnifies the extent of the exclusion of the communities outside town limits: Septic systems have routinely failed, spilling raw sewage next to homes. Residents lack the garbage service enjoyed by people who live in town and must instead pay for a costly private hauler or burn their trash at home. In the Midway community, neighbors watch garbage trucks cut through their main street to serve the citizens of Aberdeen, who live to either side. Police protection is provided by the county sheriff's department, which must travel as much as 15 miles to respond to emergencies — even though municipal police stations are much closer, in some cases just blocks away.
The maps became an integral part of a successful campaign to eliminate the most odious aspects of exclusion in Moore County, and not just in terms of educating decision-makers. For the community groups involved in the campaign, the maps offered a kind of external validation that their narrative alone could not provide. "For me, they were a verification of what I've always known," says Maurice Holland, president of the Midway Community Association and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.
Since then, the institute has extended its reach beyond state lines. Presentations at conferences and workshops have connected the institute with attorneys working on municipal discrimination cases in California, Virginia, New York, Florida and Texas. While some of the cases center on underbounding, others address additional ways by which municipalities discriminate. In the Florida case, Guatemalan residents in the city of Lake Worth demonstrated that selective code enforcement resulted in the targeting of Latinos for eviction. An analysis of redevelopment efforts in Portsmouth, Va., showed that white residents and developers were the primary beneficiaries of the city's largesse, while black communities were systematically wiped from the landscape to make way for land uses that generated more tax revenue.
And in Dallas, African-American and Latino residents in the inaptly named community of Cadillac Heights sued the city for using zoning regulations to segregate them in an industrial sector — a pattern that traced back to the 1940s, before the influx of Latinos to the city, when land records denoted minority residential areas with the letter "N." Living next to industrial facilities had predictable consequences for residents: chronic health problems, a dearth of public services and permanently depressed property values.
In each instance, GIS maps have proven instrumental in either making the case that discrimination had occurred or influencing the outcome of a government decision about the discrimination. The city of Dallas, for example, settled with the residents and agreed to relocate them to more hospitable environs. Attorney Mike Daniel, who represented the plaintiffs, credits the maps with tipping the balance. This was the second suit brought by residents for the same cause, he notes, but the first one had ended with a nominal settlement that did not remedy the problem. "The history of the two cases was the same," Daniel says. "The only difference was Cedar Grove's work."
Most of the Cedar Grove Institute's recent GIS work has been for attorneys in support of municipal discrimination lawsuits, but the law offers few remedies in such cases. Provisions in the federal Civil Rights, Fair Housing and Voting Rights acts prohibit discrimination based on race and other factors, but local circumstances don't often fit neatly into one of those provisions, and proving that the law was violated is no simple endeavor. Moreover, to win in court, plaintiffs must prove that the discrimination was intentional.
Only a handful of states offer similar protections against discrimination. Further constricting the playing field is a counterintuitive reality: Local government practices that result in exclusion and inequity are, for the most part, legal. Annexation laws, for example, usually permit municipalities to make annexation decisions based on economic considerations. If an annexation provides a net economic benefit, the city can move forward; if the costs of providing services to the annexed territory exceed new tax revenues, the city is free to say no.
And the time and expense of a legal case — often measured in years and millions — are prohibitive for the communities most likely to be the object of discrimination.
Because of these hurdles, some advocacy groups with a GIS focus deploy their maps in the service of less adversarial strategies. The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities.
In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions.
Healthy City was hired by the city to produce maps in conjunction with an initiative to shift the approach to gang violence from enforcement and suppression to prevention. Healthy City produced maps that showed gang hot spots as well as services available to young people; the maps helped the city target areas where services were in shortest supply for additional investment. "We don't only want to show problems," says John Kim, who has directed Healthy City since its inception in 2002. "We want to show ways to solve those problems."
Historians cite ancient cave paintings of migratory game routes as a primitive geographic information system, the superimposition of data on a geographic image. An English physician mapped the location of London residents sickened by cholera during an outbreak in 1857, which he analyzed to identify the source of the disease. Advancements in photographic processes in the early 20th century enabled the creation of translucent images of geographically ordered demographic data that could be layered atop a map, a technique pioneered by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.
Though these antecedents arguably combine geography and information into a kind of system, GIS is most commonly associated with sophisticated computer hardware and software, its origins dating back to the days of mainframes and punch cards. In 1962, the Canadian government unveiled the Canada Geographic Information System, a prototype that mapped select land-use variables throughout the country for planning purposes.
Private vendors began to sell off-the-shelf GIS software in the 1980s; a decade later, further refinements in those packages combined with a steady drop in hardware prices made GIS available to anyone with sufficient technical background and skill. The runway was clear for takeoff.
Commercial users were among the first to take advantage. Market researchers mapped demographic data on household income, population density and the location of competitors to choose optimal sites for retail expansion. Engineering firms mapped roads and infrastructure to streamline their projects.
Federal, state and local government agencies also found GIS an invaluable way to increase efficiencies. The time spent on planning, permitting and conducting environmental or health assessments could be cut to a sliver with accurate databases and maps. Law enforcement agencies mapped crime incidence; few government operations, in fact, did not benefit from a GIS application. One of the largest single repositories of government data, the U.S. Census, has likely launched more GIS maps than any other single data source.
Much of that government data has now been posted to the Web. For advocates using GIS, the flood of data has been a boon. Parnell says the Cedar Grove Institute would never have emerged from the conceptual phase without the ability to obtain government data. "We realized that there's a critical mass of data out there," he says. "Five years earlier, we couldn't have done it."
Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.
Mebane, the Cedar Grove Institute's first case study of municipal discrimination, passed an Infrastructure Information Security Policy shortly after the study was published; the policy limited infrastructure data access to qualified engineering firms and town agencies. The city of Modesto, Calif., locked in a legal underbounding battle, pulled its infrastructure data off the Internet after the lawsuit was filed, citing national security grounds. "There's no conceivable national security interest in where the traffic lights are in Modesto," scoffs Ben Marsh, the institute's chief mapmaker. A recent appellate ruling in California rejected a similar national-security rationale, as well as a copyright argument by Santa Clara County, but whether that opinion stands as precedent remains to be seen.
Though restrictions on access to government data could prove troublesome, advocacy groups that use GIS have already been finding data sources outside of government. In particular, data collected by community residents have become an effective supplement to the "official story," as University of Washington professor Sarah Elwood calls government data.
Elwood has used GIS not only to map problems but to build the capacity of underserved and disadvantaged communities to advocate on their own behalf. Simple walking surveys that catalogue infrastructural deficiencies — potholes in sidewalks, missing stop signs, burned-out streetlights — fill gaps in the public record that mask actual conditions on the ground. With locally produced data, Elwood says, "You can tell a very detailed and very current, compelling story about neighborhood needs."
One of the few brakes slowing the GIS freight train, at least from an advocacy perspective, is the shortage of people who understand it well. "Obviously, there is a much greater demand for GIS than there are practitioners," says attorney Eric Schultheis, who coordinates The Race Equity Project for Legal Services of Northern California and counts himself among the GIS crowd. "You could probably count the number of people who are actually doing this work on both hands."
But given the leaps that GIS technology and applications have taken in the political and legal advocacy sectors, it's hard to imagine the GIS trend reversing. By January of next year, Healthy City plans to cover the entire state of California, and Kim says he's received expansion requests from other cities. Healthy City uses free, open-source GIS software that can be customized as needed. The ready supply of cheap hardware and software can only hasten the arrival of the day when GIS mapping is as universal as photo or music editing.
"The technology will soon become ubiquitous," Kim says simply.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Disabled Woman Fights To Keep Therapy Dog
fyi...
SAN FRANCISCO—A woman suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome is suing to keep her therapy dog under Fair Housing and disability laws as she fights eviction from her mobile home park residence of 19 years.
Represented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Bay Area Legal Aid and solo attorney David Grabill, Concord’s Theresa Huerta has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the owners of Willow Pass Mobile Home Park who are attempting to evict her after 19 years of residence because her canine companion Manny’s breed is not approved by the mobile home park.
According to her doctors at Contra Costa County Health Services, 52-year-old Huerta suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other health impairments qualifying her as “disabled” as a result of being violently assaulted in 2007, and they assert that Manny’s companionship provides important treatment for her illnesses, removing stress and comforting her.
After recently reporting to governmental agencies certain conditions in the park which appeared to violate health and safety regulations, Huerta received a letter from the Willow Pass managers telling her she either had to get rid of Manny or be subject to eviction.
Huerta adopted Manny in January 2009, taking him into her home and nursing him back to health after he’d been abandoned by his owner and hit by a car, suffering serious injuries. His parentage is unknown, though the defendants claim he appears to be a mix that includes one of the several breeds colloquially referred to as a “pit bull.”
Manny has a very friendly disposition, is obedient to commands, and has never exhibited aggressive behavior towards people or other animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund spokespeople say. Most importantly, Manny is critical in relieving the effects of Huerta’s health impairments, allowing her to feel safe in her home and qualifying him as a “reasonable accommodation” for her disability. Huerta had owned another mixed breed dog who looked like Manny for 10 years prior to adopting Manny, and many other residents of the mobile home park own dogs of a range of breeds, including ones appearing to be “pit bulls.”
Huerta worked over 13 years as a bilingual instructor for the Oakland and Mount Diablo School Districts, but has been unable to work since her attack, and she will likely become homeless if she is evicted from her Willow Park home of 19 years. “Both Federal and California state fair housing and civil rights laws provide that Ms. Huerta should be allowed the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of her beloved companion Manny, who is providing her with crucial therapeutic value and helping her live with a sense of security, something she was so unfairly robbed of on the day she was assaulted,” says ALDF attorney Bruce Wagman, lead counsel in Huerta’s case.
“Our laws guarantee that disabled Americans must be protected from housing discrimination, and health care providers confirm that the support of a beloved animal companion like Manny can make the crucial difference in allowing disabled persons like Ms. Huerta to move forward with dignity.”
For more information, see www.aldf.org 11-12-09
If you have questions, contact news@northcountrygazette.org
SAN FRANCISCO—A woman suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome is suing to keep her therapy dog under Fair Housing and disability laws as she fights eviction from her mobile home park residence of 19 years.
Represented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Bay Area Legal Aid and solo attorney David Grabill, Concord’s Theresa Huerta has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the owners of Willow Pass Mobile Home Park who are attempting to evict her after 19 years of residence because her canine companion Manny’s breed is not approved by the mobile home park.
According to her doctors at Contra Costa County Health Services, 52-year-old Huerta suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other health impairments qualifying her as “disabled” as a result of being violently assaulted in 2007, and they assert that Manny’s companionship provides important treatment for her illnesses, removing stress and comforting her.
After recently reporting to governmental agencies certain conditions in the park which appeared to violate health and safety regulations, Huerta received a letter from the Willow Pass managers telling her she either had to get rid of Manny or be subject to eviction.
Huerta adopted Manny in January 2009, taking him into her home and nursing him back to health after he’d been abandoned by his owner and hit by a car, suffering serious injuries. His parentage is unknown, though the defendants claim he appears to be a mix that includes one of the several breeds colloquially referred to as a “pit bull.”
Manny has a very friendly disposition, is obedient to commands, and has never exhibited aggressive behavior towards people or other animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund spokespeople say. Most importantly, Manny is critical in relieving the effects of Huerta’s health impairments, allowing her to feel safe in her home and qualifying him as a “reasonable accommodation” for her disability. Huerta had owned another mixed breed dog who looked like Manny for 10 years prior to adopting Manny, and many other residents of the mobile home park own dogs of a range of breeds, including ones appearing to be “pit bulls.”
Huerta worked over 13 years as a bilingual instructor for the Oakland and Mount Diablo School Districts, but has been unable to work since her attack, and she will likely become homeless if she is evicted from her Willow Park home of 19 years. “Both Federal and California state fair housing and civil rights laws provide that Ms. Huerta should be allowed the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of her beloved companion Manny, who is providing her with crucial therapeutic value and helping her live with a sense of security, something she was so unfairly robbed of on the day she was assaulted,” says ALDF attorney Bruce Wagman, lead counsel in Huerta’s case.
“Our laws guarantee that disabled Americans must be protected from housing discrimination, and health care providers confirm that the support of a beloved animal companion like Manny can make the crucial difference in allowing disabled persons like Ms. Huerta to move forward with dignity.”
For more information, see www.aldf.org 11-12-09
If you have questions, contact news@northcountrygazette.org
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
'Humanure' Victory: Green Toilet Wins Austin City Approval
Composting commode is first to gain official stamp.
by Asher Price 11/9/2009 Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
It took more than four years of negotiations and construction, but this month an Austin Water Utility inspector gave final clearance to a glorified outhouse that is on the vanguard of down-and-dirty environmentalism.
Known as a composting toilet, the East Austin commode relies on the alchemy wrought by bacteria to transform human waste into a rich trove of soil. Specialists in so-called humanure have hailed the approval of the toilet as a watershed moment for common-sense environmentalism.
Users flush not with water but with a scoop of sawdust from a nearby bucket, saving the drinking-water-quality water used by conventional toilets, not to mention the energy and money required to pump and clean the wastewater.
"It's the ecologically sound thing to do," said David Bailey, 32, an itinerant carpenter and puppeteer who spearheaded the project. "Rather than using purified drinking water for a waste stream, we're using naturally occurring, ambient bacteria to create soil, one of Earth's least renewable resources. You have more water to drink and bathe in, and you end up with topsoil that's every gardener's dream."
The technology, simple as it is, is unlikely to become widespread. City code bars any property within 100 feet of a sewer line from having a composting toilet. There's also the "ick" factor. And despite issuing its first such permit, the city does not sound especially keen on composting commodes.
Austin Water Utility spokesman Kevin Buchman said the composting toilet is "not something! we're endorsing or even recommend. It's an option for people building homes and trying to do what they believe to be environmentally sound."
The state delegates regulatory power for on-site sewage facilities, which include composting toilets, to local authorities, said Terry Clawson, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The permitted outhouse sits about 4 feet off the ground on a 9.8-acre former landfill in the Montopolis neighborhood that belongs to the Rhizome Collective, a group that puts in practice off-the-grid sustainability, or living in ways that require little in the way of nonrenewable sources of energy.
There is no water hookup to the screened-in, cottage-like outhouse, which cost about $3,000 to build and has a small porch in front and a stall with two commodes inside. Only one functions at a time, for about a year; once the vault beneath it, which is matted with straw, is full, the vault and commode will be sealed for a year. Then the contents are usable as compost, Bailey said.
While one commode is sealed, the other will be used.
Mismanaged sewage and bad sanitation have been blamed for outbreaks of a variety of diseases, among them cholera. But heat created by bacteria in the vault destroys pathogens and coliforms, Bailey says, making the soil "totally benign, environmentally speaking."
The airy outhouse sports views of a pasture of cacti and smells mostly of sawdust. A small fan, powered by a solar panel affixed to the outhouse, keeps fumes moving through a PVC exhaust chimney. A hand-sanitizer dispenser sits beside the screen door. In keeping with the sympathies and orientation of the Rhizome Collective, the toilet-side books include "Malcom X Speaks," the Marxist sociological text "Society of the Spectacle" and the prison novel "Iron City."
The permitting and final approval for the outhouse took four years, but "it's a testament to the openness of the city to allow us to build it," said Bailey, who says he has built more than a dozen composting toilets in Texas, the Northeast and overseas.
At least a handful of composting toilets exist in Austin covertly, but Bailey said the Rhizome Collective wanted to win city recognition for the project to persuade officials to broaden the ways residents can cut their water use. On average, toilets use as much as 3 gallons per flush, Buchman said.
As part of the permit application, members of the Rhizome Collective included material from two of the seminal toilet-construction texts, "Lifting the Lid" and the "Humanure Handbook."
"I know of no other cities that officially recognize humanure toilets," said Joseph Jenkins, author of the "Humanure Handbook." "It is little understood by regulatory personnel, and it falls into a gray area - somewhere between what people typically consider 'sanitation' or 'waste treatment' and 'composting.' "
Benefits include the production of a valuable fertilizer, savings in water use, and the prevention of treated effluent, possibly laden with chemicals, from being discharged into waterways, said Lauren Ross, a civil engineer who worked on the project.
"In our current culture, it's not a technology for most people," she said. "But there is a significant part of Austin's community ready to take some radical steps for environmental protection. Composting toilets are no crazier than a lifestyle based on living somewhere in suburbia and commuting 15 miles for a downtown job. That's also not for everyone, but it gets planned for and is accepted as a normal, ordinary way of life."
Flush toilets also contribute to the enormous amounts of energy required to pull water out of the Colorado River, treat it to a drinkable standard, flush it through the sewage system, and treat it again before it can be discharged back into the river. Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined, not including Austin Energy, said David Greene, energy and resources engineer with the water utility.
"It's a major energy issue," Greene said.
Copyright 2009 The Austin American-Statesman
by Asher Price 11/9/2009 Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
It took more than four years of negotiations and construction, but this month an Austin Water Utility inspector gave final clearance to a glorified outhouse that is on the vanguard of down-and-dirty environmentalism.
Known as a composting toilet, the East Austin commode relies on the alchemy wrought by bacteria to transform human waste into a rich trove of soil. Specialists in so-called humanure have hailed the approval of the toilet as a watershed moment for common-sense environmentalism.
Users flush not with water but with a scoop of sawdust from a nearby bucket, saving the drinking-water-quality water used by conventional toilets, not to mention the energy and money required to pump and clean the wastewater.
"It's the ecologically sound thing to do," said David Bailey, 32, an itinerant carpenter and puppeteer who spearheaded the project. "Rather than using purified drinking water for a waste stream, we're using naturally occurring, ambient bacteria to create soil, one of Earth's least renewable resources. You have more water to drink and bathe in, and you end up with topsoil that's every gardener's dream."
The technology, simple as it is, is unlikely to become widespread. City code bars any property within 100 feet of a sewer line from having a composting toilet. There's also the "ick" factor. And despite issuing its first such permit, the city does not sound especially keen on composting commodes.
Austin Water Utility spokesman Kevin Buchman said the composting toilet is "not something! we're endorsing or even recommend. It's an option for people building homes and trying to do what they believe to be environmentally sound."
The state delegates regulatory power for on-site sewage facilities, which include composting toilets, to local authorities, said Terry Clawson, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The permitted outhouse sits about 4 feet off the ground on a 9.8-acre former landfill in the Montopolis neighborhood that belongs to the Rhizome Collective, a group that puts in practice off-the-grid sustainability, or living in ways that require little in the way of nonrenewable sources of energy.
There is no water hookup to the screened-in, cottage-like outhouse, which cost about $3,000 to build and has a small porch in front and a stall with two commodes inside. Only one functions at a time, for about a year; once the vault beneath it, which is matted with straw, is full, the vault and commode will be sealed for a year. Then the contents are usable as compost, Bailey said.
While one commode is sealed, the other will be used.
Mismanaged sewage and bad sanitation have been blamed for outbreaks of a variety of diseases, among them cholera. But heat created by bacteria in the vault destroys pathogens and coliforms, Bailey says, making the soil "totally benign, environmentally speaking."
The airy outhouse sports views of a pasture of cacti and smells mostly of sawdust. A small fan, powered by a solar panel affixed to the outhouse, keeps fumes moving through a PVC exhaust chimney. A hand-sanitizer dispenser sits beside the screen door. In keeping with the sympathies and orientation of the Rhizome Collective, the toilet-side books include "Malcom X Speaks," the Marxist sociological text "Society of the Spectacle" and the prison novel "Iron City."
The permitting and final approval for the outhouse took four years, but "it's a testament to the openness of the city to allow us to build it," said Bailey, who says he has built more than a dozen composting toilets in Texas, the Northeast and overseas.
At least a handful of composting toilets exist in Austin covertly, but Bailey said the Rhizome Collective wanted to win city recognition for the project to persuade officials to broaden the ways residents can cut their water use. On average, toilets use as much as 3 gallons per flush, Buchman said.
As part of the permit application, members of the Rhizome Collective included material from two of the seminal toilet-construction texts, "Lifting the Lid" and the "Humanure Handbook."
"I know of no other cities that officially recognize humanure toilets," said Joseph Jenkins, author of the "Humanure Handbook." "It is little understood by regulatory personnel, and it falls into a gray area - somewhere between what people typically consider 'sanitation' or 'waste treatment' and 'composting.' "
Benefits include the production of a valuable fertilizer, savings in water use, and the prevention of treated effluent, possibly laden with chemicals, from being discharged into waterways, said Lauren Ross, a civil engineer who worked on the project.
"In our current culture, it's not a technology for most people," she said. "But there is a significant part of Austin's community ready to take some radical steps for environmental protection. Composting toilets are no crazier than a lifestyle based on living somewhere in suburbia and commuting 15 miles for a downtown job. That's also not for everyone, but it gets planned for and is accepted as a normal, ordinary way of life."
Flush toilets also contribute to the enormous amounts of energy required to pull water out of the Colorado River, treat it to a drinkable standard, flush it through the sewage system, and treat it again before it can be discharged back into the river. Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined, not including Austin Energy, said David Greene, energy and resources engineer with the water utility.
"It's a major energy issue," Greene said.
Copyright 2009 The Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Blogs for a change
100 best blogs for those who want to change the world!
[thanks to Sabrina for passing this along to us from DC]
Monday, August 24, 2009
Attorney provides downtown Sacramento site for homeless camp
From the Sacramento Bee ( Nice try, but I hear the cops shut the site down yesterday - DG)
By Cynthia Hubert chubert@sacbee.com
Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3B
A Sacramento attorney who has championed the rights of homeless people is opening his private property to campers who need a place to sleep at night.
Mark Merin, who for years has challenged the city's and county's treatment of the homeless, is leasing a parcel of land in downtown Sacramento to an association of people seeking to establish a legal "safe ground" campsite. Three advocacy organizations are leading the "safe ground" effort.
Merin would not disclose terms of the lease but said the vacant lot is on C Street between 12th and 14th streets and should accommodate 20 to 30 tents. Campers had already begun to move in Friday.
The arrangement, Merin said, would prevent police from ticketing homeless people for trespassing and from seizing their property. It would not, however, stop officers from enforcing a city ordinance that prohibits camping in non-designated areas for longer than 24 hours.
Merin said he hopes police will look the other way on the camping ordinance, which is not strictly enforced against anyone other than homeless people. If they continue to enforce the ordinance, he said, he will challenge them in court.
Sgt. Norm Leong, a spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, said officers would "consider taking enforcement action" against campers only if the site was "unsafe or unsanitary" or if neighbors or others complained.
"We would step back and look at it," he said. "We wouldn't feel the need to jump in as soon as someone pitches a tent and break it down."
But Leong questioned why Merin and others would open a campsite on their own even as city and community leaders are working toward establishing a legal campground that would offer the homeless such services as garbage pickup, sanitation and social support.
"Why would you initiate it now, when the mayor is trying to figure out a legal solution?" he asked.
Joan Burke of Loaves & Fishes, which provides a variety of services to homeless people in a complex within walking distance of Merin's property, said Mayor Kevin Johnson's task force is doing potentially groundbreaking work. However, "we can't wait" for the political process to play out, she said.
"The winter is coming, and people have no place to sleep," said Burke, who served on the task force. "The current situation is intolerable."
Merin said he would like to see other private property owners offer vacant land so that several small campsites with basic services could be established, perhaps with the city's blessing.
"We need to take care of those less fortunate than us," said Merin, who lives in the area where the campsite is to be established. "It's as simple as that."
By Cynthia Hubert chubert@sacbee.com
Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3B
A Sacramento attorney who has championed the rights of homeless people is opening his private property to campers who need a place to sleep at night.
Mark Merin, who for years has challenged the city's and county's treatment of the homeless, is leasing a parcel of land in downtown Sacramento to an association of people seeking to establish a legal "safe ground" campsite. Three advocacy organizations are leading the "safe ground" effort.
Merin would not disclose terms of the lease but said the vacant lot is on C Street between 12th and 14th streets and should accommodate 20 to 30 tents. Campers had already begun to move in Friday.
The arrangement, Merin said, would prevent police from ticketing homeless people for trespassing and from seizing their property. It would not, however, stop officers from enforcing a city ordinance that prohibits camping in non-designated areas for longer than 24 hours.
Merin said he hopes police will look the other way on the camping ordinance, which is not strictly enforced against anyone other than homeless people. If they continue to enforce the ordinance, he said, he will challenge them in court.
Sgt. Norm Leong, a spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, said officers would "consider taking enforcement action" against campers only if the site was "unsafe or unsanitary" or if neighbors or others complained.
"We would step back and look at it," he said. "We wouldn't feel the need to jump in as soon as someone pitches a tent and break it down."
But Leong questioned why Merin and others would open a campsite on their own even as city and community leaders are working toward establishing a legal campground that would offer the homeless such services as garbage pickup, sanitation and social support.
"Why would you initiate it now, when the mayor is trying to figure out a legal solution?" he asked.
Joan Burke of Loaves & Fishes, which provides a variety of services to homeless people in a complex within walking distance of Merin's property, said Mayor Kevin Johnson's task force is doing potentially groundbreaking work. However, "we can't wait" for the political process to play out, she said.
"The winter is coming, and people have no place to sleep," said Burke, who served on the task force. "The current situation is intolerable."
Merin said he would like to see other private property owners offer vacant land so that several small campsites with basic services could be established, perhaps with the city's blessing.
"We need to take care of those less fortunate than us," said Merin, who lives in the area where the campsite is to be established. "It's as simple as that."
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Still more on the Westchester County Settlement
[This is an LTE from one of the attorneys in the Westchester County housing discrimination case settlement]
The Court Is Right About Westchester County Housing
Your description of the landmark settlement that emerged from the Anti-Discrimination Center's lawsuit against Westchester County as "the government deciding where it wants people to live" ("Color-Coding the Suburbs," Review & Outlook, Aug. 15) bears no relation to the actual terms of the agreement nor to the history of residential racial segregation in Westchester County.
Westchester is deeply, deeply residentially segregated. A dozen of its municipalities have African-American populations of less than 1%. Nine more municipalities have African-American populations of less than 2%. The principal indices of segregation show, remarkably, that Westchester was more segregated in 2000 than it was in 1950.
One should not be fooled into thinking that it is only poorer African-Americans who are living separately from whites. The most widely used measure of segregation has demonstrated that African-American households earning more than $150,000 per year are more segregated from whites than are African-American households earning less than $50,000 per year.
Recipients of federal community development funds have long been required to identify and act to overcome barriers to fair housing choice. Indeed, recipients can only receive grant funds if they represent that they have done so. From 2000 to 2006, Westchester received more than $50 million by making such representations. Earlier this year, a federal judge granted the Anti-Discrimination Center's motion for partial summary judgment, finding as a matter of law that Westchester had "utterly failed" to meet its affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing obligations, and finding as well that every one of Westchester's representations that it had done so was "false or fraudulent."
The only "social engineering" involved in the case was the evidence of Westchester County having perpetuated segregation by not using its authority to overcome artificial barriers to affordable housing development in its whitest municipalities while at the same time channeling such development into areas of concentrated African-American population.
The settlement is designed to overcome the rigid exclusionary zoning that has prevented both for-profit and not-for-profit developers from constructing the type of context-sensitive affordable housing in Westchester towns and villages that they have built elsewhere in the country. By creating these opportunities in communities where they have been absent, and by making it clear for the first time that people of all races and backgrounds are welcome throughout the county, the settlement both creates real consumer choice and, 41 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, takes an important step toward ending the legacy of "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."
Craig Gurian, Executive Director
Anti-Discrimination Center
New York
The Court Is Right About Westchester County Housing
Your description of the landmark settlement that emerged from the Anti-Discrimination Center's lawsuit against Westchester County as "the government deciding where it wants people to live" ("Color-Coding the Suburbs," Review & Outlook, Aug. 15) bears no relation to the actual terms of the agreement nor to the history of residential racial segregation in Westchester County.
Westchester is deeply, deeply residentially segregated. A dozen of its municipalities have African-American populations of less than 1%. Nine more municipalities have African-American populations of less than 2%. The principal indices of segregation show, remarkably, that Westchester was more segregated in 2000 than it was in 1950.
One should not be fooled into thinking that it is only poorer African-Americans who are living separately from whites. The most widely used measure of segregation has demonstrated that African-American households earning more than $150,000 per year are more segregated from whites than are African-American households earning less than $50,000 per year.
Recipients of federal community development funds have long been required to identify and act to overcome barriers to fair housing choice. Indeed, recipients can only receive grant funds if they represent that they have done so. From 2000 to 2006, Westchester received more than $50 million by making such representations. Earlier this year, a federal judge granted the Anti-Discrimination Center's motion for partial summary judgment, finding as a matter of law that Westchester had "utterly failed" to meet its affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing obligations, and finding as well that every one of Westchester's representations that it had done so was "false or fraudulent."
The only "social engineering" involved in the case was the evidence of Westchester County having perpetuated segregation by not using its authority to overcome artificial barriers to affordable housing development in its whitest municipalities while at the same time channeling such development into areas of concentrated African-American population.
The settlement is designed to overcome the rigid exclusionary zoning that has prevented both for-profit and not-for-profit developers from constructing the type of context-sensitive affordable housing in Westchester towns and villages that they have built elsewhere in the country. By creating these opportunities in communities where they have been absent, and by making it clear for the first time that people of all races and backgrounds are welcome throughout the county, the settlement both creates real consumer choice and, 41 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, takes an important step toward ending the legacy of "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."
Craig Gurian, Executive Director
Anti-Discrimination Center
New York
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
More on the Westchester settlement
Excepts from the U.S. District Court decision granting partial summary judgment to the Anti-Discrimination Center and against Westchester County in the housing discrimination case; the decision was the precusor to the settlement announced yesterday
o The court found as a matter of law that the county "made a claim, to the United States government, that was false or fraudulent, seeking payment from the Federal treasury." [Decision, p. 54]
o Given the "explicit statutory and regulatory scheme, it is easy to find that federal law conditioned payment of the housing and community development funds on compliance with the duty to AFFH [this refers to a required certification by the county that a grant recipient is "affirmatively furthering fair housing"] and that each time the County submitted a request for payment of those funds it made an impliedly false certification." [Decision, p. 43] Note: over six years, "Approximately 25 payment vouchers per month were approved for payment." [Decision, p. 26]
o "No reasonable jury could conclude...that the County appropriately analyzed race in conducting its AIs or that it maintained the required report of that analysis." [Decision p. 34]
o "[T]he County's AIs [this refers to a required 'analysis of impediments to fair housing choice] during the false claims period utterly failed to comply with the regulatory requirement that the County perform and maintain a record of its analysis of the impediments to fair housing choice in terms of race. This failure is only compounded by the County's failure to follow the guidance provided by HUD." [Decision, p. 35]
o "The AFFH certification was not a mere boilerplate formality, but rather was a substantive requirement, rooted in the history and purpose of the fair housing laws and regulations, requiring the County to conduct an AI, take appropriate actions in response, and to document its analysis and actions. The County's motion for summary judgment is therefore denied" [Decision, pp. 50-51]
o "Westchester was aware of the racial makeup of its municipalities (as reflected in the relevant censuses) when it prepared its 2000 and 2004 analyses of impediments to fair housing. According to the 2000 census, over half of the municipalities in the Consortium had African-American populations of 3% or less." [Decision, p. 24]
o "As a matter of logic, providing more affordable housing for a low income racial minority will improve its housing stock but may do little to change any pattern of discrimination or segregation. Addressing that pattern would at a minimum necessitate an analysis of where the additional housing is placed." [Decision, p. 39]
o "The County admits that it did not undertake an analysis of whether the production of affordable housing between January 1, 1992 and April 1, 2006, had the effect of increasing or decreasing racial diversity in the neighborhood in which the housing was built."
o The regulation "requires an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice, not to affordable housing." [Decision, p. 21, n.5] The County knew this: "[T]he County had its own internal documents from before the false claims period relating to its AFFH obligations and the preparation of AIs. One such document, which is an outline of the County's Fair Housing Plan ("FHP"), sets forth the requirements that the County conduct an AI, setout actions to be taken, and maintain records. The end of the outline contains the following reminder: 'Remember: This [the FHP] is not a report on affordable housing, but FAIR HOUSING!!!'"
o "[T]he statutes and regulations require not just any AI, but one that analyzes impediments to fair housing that are related to race." [Decision, p. 31]
o As in the 2000-2004 AI, the 2004-2008 AI "makes no explicit reference to race, or race discrimination or segregation as an impediment to fair housing other than as described above. Race discrimination or segregation are not identified as one of the thirteen obstacles to fair housing." [Decision, p. 23]
o "A review of the 2000 and 2004 AIs demonstrates that they were conducted through the lens of affordable housing, rather than fair housing and its focus on protected classes such as race. Both AIs are devoted entirely to the lack of affordable housing in the County and related obstacles...Despite the regulatory obligation to maintain records reflecting the AI, there is simply no evidence that either of the County's AIs during the false claims period analyzed race-based impediments to fair housing within its jurisdiction." [Decision, pp. 31-32]
o "The focus of the AI is to be on 'actions, omissions or decisions' which 'restrict housing choices or the availability of housing choices,' or which have the effect of doing so, based on 'race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, or national origin,' including '[p]olicies, practices, or procedures that appear neutral on their face,' and HUD suggests that the AI contain a housing profile describing 'the degree of segregation and restricted housing by race, ethnicity, disability status, and families with children; [and] how segregation and restricted housing supply occurred. (Emphasis supplied). There is no dispute that the County's AIs did not contain this analysis of segregation and the housing supply." [Decision, pp. 34-35].
o "Without a targeted analysis of race as a potential impediment to fair housing, the County was unprepared to grapple with the second component of its AFFH duty to take appropriate action to overcome the effects of any racial discrimination or segregation it might identify as an impediment." [Decision, pp. 32-33]
o "On July 13, 2007, this Court denied the County's motion to dismiss, rejecting its contention that it had no legal obligation to consider race when it analyzed impediments to fair housing in connection with its certifications." [Decision, p. 2]
o "While the County argues that the actions it took to address the barriers to affordable housing should be considered actions promoting fair housing and specifically redressing racial discrimination in housing, for the reasons already described, the County cannot defeat this summary judgment motion with this post-hoc analysis. It was required to maintain records reflecting that analysis and those actions and it did not." [Decision, p. 39, n.9]
o "The County weakly asserts that the AIs were not devoid of any analysis of race because the references in the 2000 and 2004 AIs to an obstacle described as 'local opposition' or 'NIMBY' should be understood to include local opposition to new affordable housing on several bases, including on the basis of race. ADC disputes that the County used the term NIMBY to refer to a municipality's opposition to integration or to anything other than an individual homeowner's opposition to low-income housing being built in her neighborhood. Even assuming the County's contention to be true, however, such a veiled reference, buried within a finding that local opposition was an obstacle to affordable' housing, does not reflect any analysis of how race-based opposition impeded fair housing, as distinct from other forms of local opposition. Nor does this reference reflect an analysis of how race-based local opposition might be an impediment to fair, and not just affordable, housing." [Decision, p. 32]
o_The County's argument that it did not have to conclude after an analysis of data that there were race-based impediments to fair housing "might carry more weight if it took the position that neither discrimination nor segregation nor any other race-based factor was an impediment to fair housing during the false claims period. Tellingly, it does not assert that. Instead, its brief in opposition to the ADC's motion for summary judgment asserts that the information it received 'did not reflect that racial discrimination constituted a significant barrier to fair housing and that it did not find that 'any race-based impediments wereamong the most challenging barriers to fair housing.' (Emphasis supplied.) Moreover, even if grant recipients were excused from the obligation to take actions to overcome the effects of minor impediments to fair housing, the County was still obligated to record its analysis of race-based impediments and it has been unable to point to any record of a contemporaneous analysis, much less one that embodies the conclusions recited in its summary judgment memorandum. Without such a contemporaneous analysis and record, the certification that one existed was false. (Decision, pp. 33-34, n. 8]
o "When the County considers where to acquire land for affordable housing, it seeks the concurrence of the municipality where the land is situated, and during the false claims period the County would not acquire any such land without the municipality's agreement. The County produced no documentation showing that during the false claims period it funded or assisted the production of affordable housing in any municipality where the municipality opposed such production." [Decision, pp. 25-26]
o "The County set a goal in a 1993 Affordable Housing Allocation Plan to create 5000 affordable housing units; however, as of July 2005, at least 16 municipal units in the County had not created a single affordable housing unit." [Decision, p. 26]
o "Westchester entered into Cooperation Agreements with municipalities participating in the Consortium. The agreements pertained to, inter alia, CDBG grants, and provided that the County is prohibited from expending community development block grant funds for activities in or in support of any local government that does not affirmatively further fair housing within its jurisdiction or that impedes the County's action to comply with its fair housing certifications." [Decision, p. 6] Nevertheless, "the County has not withheld any funds or imposed any sanctions on any participating municipalities for failure to AFFH." [Decision, p. 25]
o The False Claims Act "is intended to police the integrity of those claims submitted to the government for payment, and the materiality of statements made in those claims is tested as of the time of submission to the government and in the context of the regulatory requirements. Thus, the assertion that certain HUD bureaucrats reviewed the County's submissions and continued to grant the County funding cannot somehow make the false AFFH certifications immaterial, where the funding was explicitly conditioned on the certifications." [Decision, p. 53]
To read the settlement agreement, and the background of the case and Judge Denise Cote's February decision, see the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York's Web site, www.antibiaslaw.com
o The court found as a matter of law that the county "made a claim, to the United States government, that was false or fraudulent, seeking payment from the Federal treasury." [Decision, p. 54]
o Given the "explicit statutory and regulatory scheme, it is easy to find that federal law conditioned payment of the housing and community development funds on compliance with the duty to AFFH [this refers to a required certification by the county that a grant recipient is "affirmatively furthering fair housing"] and that each time the County submitted a request for payment of those funds it made an impliedly false certification." [Decision, p. 43] Note: over six years, "Approximately 25 payment vouchers per month were approved for payment." [Decision, p. 26]
o "No reasonable jury could conclude...that the County appropriately analyzed race in conducting its AIs or that it maintained the required report of that analysis." [Decision p. 34]
o "[T]he County's AIs [this refers to a required 'analysis of impediments to fair housing choice] during the false claims period utterly failed to comply with the regulatory requirement that the County perform and maintain a record of its analysis of the impediments to fair housing choice in terms of race. This failure is only compounded by the County's failure to follow the guidance provided by HUD." [Decision, p. 35]
o "The AFFH certification was not a mere boilerplate formality, but rather was a substantive requirement, rooted in the history and purpose of the fair housing laws and regulations, requiring the County to conduct an AI, take appropriate actions in response, and to document its analysis and actions. The County's motion for summary judgment is therefore denied" [Decision, pp. 50-51]
o "Westchester was aware of the racial makeup of its municipalities (as reflected in the relevant censuses) when it prepared its 2000 and 2004 analyses of impediments to fair housing. According to the 2000 census, over half of the municipalities in the Consortium had African-American populations of 3% or less." [Decision, p. 24]
o "As a matter of logic, providing more affordable housing for a low income racial minority will improve its housing stock but may do little to change any pattern of discrimination or segregation. Addressing that pattern would at a minimum necessitate an analysis of where the additional housing is placed." [Decision, p. 39]
o "The County admits that it did not undertake an analysis of whether the production of affordable housing between January 1, 1992 and April 1, 2006, had the effect of increasing or decreasing racial diversity in the neighborhood in which the housing was built."
o The regulation "requires an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice, not to affordable housing." [Decision, p. 21, n.5] The County knew this: "[T]he County had its own internal documents from before the false claims period relating to its AFFH obligations and the preparation of AIs. One such document, which is an outline of the County's Fair Housing Plan ("FHP"), sets forth the requirements that the County conduct an AI, setout actions to be taken, and maintain records. The end of the outline contains the following reminder: 'Remember: This [the FHP] is not a report on affordable housing, but FAIR HOUSING!!!'"
o "[T]he statutes and regulations require not just any AI, but one that analyzes impediments to fair housing that are related to race." [Decision, p. 31]
o As in the 2000-2004 AI, the 2004-2008 AI "makes no explicit reference to race, or race discrimination or segregation as an impediment to fair housing other than as described above. Race discrimination or segregation are not identified as one of the thirteen obstacles to fair housing." [Decision, p. 23]
o "A review of the 2000 and 2004 AIs demonstrates that they were conducted through the lens of affordable housing, rather than fair housing and its focus on protected classes such as race. Both AIs are devoted entirely to the lack of affordable housing in the County and related obstacles...Despite the regulatory obligation to maintain records reflecting the AI, there is simply no evidence that either of the County's AIs during the false claims period analyzed race-based impediments to fair housing within its jurisdiction." [Decision, pp. 31-32]
o "The focus of the AI is to be on 'actions, omissions or decisions' which 'restrict housing choices or the availability of housing choices,' or which have the effect of doing so, based on 'race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, or national origin,' including '[p]olicies, practices, or procedures that appear neutral on their face,' and HUD suggests that the AI contain a housing profile describing 'the degree of segregation and restricted housing by race, ethnicity, disability status, and families with children; [and] how segregation and restricted housing supply occurred. (Emphasis supplied). There is no dispute that the County's AIs did not contain this analysis of segregation and the housing supply." [Decision, pp. 34-35].
o "Without a targeted analysis of race as a potential impediment to fair housing, the County was unprepared to grapple with the second component of its AFFH duty to take appropriate action to overcome the effects of any racial discrimination or segregation it might identify as an impediment." [Decision, pp. 32-33]
o "On July 13, 2007, this Court denied the County's motion to dismiss, rejecting its contention that it had no legal obligation to consider race when it analyzed impediments to fair housing in connection with its certifications." [Decision, p. 2]
o "While the County argues that the actions it took to address the barriers to affordable housing should be considered actions promoting fair housing and specifically redressing racial discrimination in housing, for the reasons already described, the County cannot defeat this summary judgment motion with this post-hoc analysis. It was required to maintain records reflecting that analysis and those actions and it did not." [Decision, p. 39, n.9]
o "The County weakly asserts that the AIs were not devoid of any analysis of race because the references in the 2000 and 2004 AIs to an obstacle described as 'local opposition' or 'NIMBY' should be understood to include local opposition to new affordable housing on several bases, including on the basis of race. ADC disputes that the County used the term NIMBY to refer to a municipality's opposition to integration or to anything other than an individual homeowner's opposition to low-income housing being built in her neighborhood. Even assuming the County's contention to be true, however, such a veiled reference, buried within a finding that local opposition was an obstacle to affordable' housing, does not reflect any analysis of how race-based opposition impeded fair housing, as distinct from other forms of local opposition. Nor does this reference reflect an analysis of how race-based local opposition might be an impediment to fair, and not just affordable, housing." [Decision, p. 32]
o_The County's argument that it did not have to conclude after an analysis of data that there were race-based impediments to fair housing "might carry more weight if it took the position that neither discrimination nor segregation nor any other race-based factor was an impediment to fair housing during the false claims period. Tellingly, it does not assert that. Instead, its brief in opposition to the ADC's motion for summary judgment asserts that the information it received 'did not reflect that racial discrimination constituted a significant barrier to fair housing and that it did not find that 'any race-based impediments wereamong the most challenging barriers to fair housing.' (Emphasis supplied.) Moreover, even if grant recipients were excused from the obligation to take actions to overcome the effects of minor impediments to fair housing, the County was still obligated to record its analysis of race-based impediments and it has been unable to point to any record of a contemporaneous analysis, much less one that embodies the conclusions recited in its summary judgment memorandum. Without such a contemporaneous analysis and record, the certification that one existed was false. (Decision, pp. 33-34, n. 8]
o "When the County considers where to acquire land for affordable housing, it seeks the concurrence of the municipality where the land is situated, and during the false claims period the County would not acquire any such land without the municipality's agreement. The County produced no documentation showing that during the false claims period it funded or assisted the production of affordable housing in any municipality where the municipality opposed such production." [Decision, pp. 25-26]
o "The County set a goal in a 1993 Affordable Housing Allocation Plan to create 5000 affordable housing units; however, as of July 2005, at least 16 municipal units in the County had not created a single affordable housing unit." [Decision, p. 26]
o "Westchester entered into Cooperation Agreements with municipalities participating in the Consortium. The agreements pertained to, inter alia, CDBG grants, and provided that the County is prohibited from expending community development block grant funds for activities in or in support of any local government that does not affirmatively further fair housing within its jurisdiction or that impedes the County's action to comply with its fair housing certifications." [Decision, p. 6] Nevertheless, "the County has not withheld any funds or imposed any sanctions on any participating municipalities for failure to AFFH." [Decision, p. 25]
o The False Claims Act "is intended to police the integrity of those claims submitted to the government for payment, and the materiality of statements made in those claims is tested as of the time of submission to the government and in the context of the regulatory requirements. Thus, the assertion that certain HUD bureaucrats reviewed the County's submissions and continued to grant the County funding cannot somehow make the false AFFH certifications immaterial, where the funding was explicitly conditioned on the certifications." [Decision, p. 53]
To read the settlement agreement, and the background of the case and Judge Denise Cote's February decision, see the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York's Web site, www.antibiaslaw.com
Fair Housing Comes to Suburbs - NY Times
New York Times Editorial August 11, 2009
Fair Housing in the Suburbs
When one thinks about segregation, the suburbs of New York’s Westchester County don’t immediately come to mind. Unless, of course, you’re a minority resident searching in vain for an affordable place to live.
Westchester County has now announced an agreement to spend more than $50 million to build or acquire 750 affordable housing units — 630 in towns and villages where the black population is 3 percent or less, and the Latino population is less than 7 percent.
The agreement, which needs to be ratified by the county Board of Legislators, settles a 3-year-old federal lawsuit, filed by the Anti-Discrimination Center, accusing the county of taking tens of millions of dollars in federal housing grants while falsely certifying that it was living up to its legal requirement to provide affordable housing without reinforcing racial segregation.
At the time, the county called those accusations “garbage,” and said it was powerless to force communities to integrate. But in February, Judge Denise L. Cote ruled that between 2000 and 2006 the county had, indeed, misrepresented its actions and had made little or no effort to place affordable homes in overwhelmingly white communities where residents objected.
Those objections have been fierce. And we fear the battles are far from over. In the 1980s, Yonkers nearly bankrupted itself trying to fight a federal judge’s order to integrate public housing. There are currently 120,000 acres of land in Westchester where integration is lagging, including in Bedford, Bronxville, Eastchester, Hastings-on-Hudson, Harrison, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Castle, Pelham Manor and Scarsdale.
Westchester County officials insist that they have invested a lot of money and effort to identify potential affordable-housing sites and invite communities to do the right thing. But toothless plans setting community-by-community targets clearly will not be enough. With federal help and forceful oversight, the county must use all appropriate power, including lawsuits if necessary, to make sure that its communities work to solve a problem that has been too long ignored and resisted.
Fair Housing in the Suburbs
When one thinks about segregation, the suburbs of New York’s Westchester County don’t immediately come to mind. Unless, of course, you’re a minority resident searching in vain for an affordable place to live.
Westchester County has now announced an agreement to spend more than $50 million to build or acquire 750 affordable housing units — 630 in towns and villages where the black population is 3 percent or less, and the Latino population is less than 7 percent.
The agreement, which needs to be ratified by the county Board of Legislators, settles a 3-year-old federal lawsuit, filed by the Anti-Discrimination Center, accusing the county of taking tens of millions of dollars in federal housing grants while falsely certifying that it was living up to its legal requirement to provide affordable housing without reinforcing racial segregation.
At the time, the county called those accusations “garbage,” and said it was powerless to force communities to integrate. But in February, Judge Denise L. Cote ruled that between 2000 and 2006 the county had, indeed, misrepresented its actions and had made little or no effort to place affordable homes in overwhelmingly white communities where residents objected.
Those objections have been fierce. And we fear the battles are far from over. In the 1980s, Yonkers nearly bankrupted itself trying to fight a federal judge’s order to integrate public housing. There are currently 120,000 acres of land in Westchester where integration is lagging, including in Bedford, Bronxville, Eastchester, Hastings-on-Hudson, Harrison, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Castle, Pelham Manor and Scarsdale.
Westchester County officials insist that they have invested a lot of money and effort to identify potential affordable-housing sites and invite communities to do the right thing. But toothless plans setting community-by-community targets clearly will not be enough. With federal help and forceful oversight, the county must use all appropriate power, including lawsuits if necessary, to make sure that its communities work to solve a problem that has been too long ignored and resisted.
$65 million settlement in NY housing discrim case
Westchester Adds Housing to Desegregation Pact
By SAM ROBERTS
NY Times - August 11, 2009
Westchester County entered into a landmark desegregation agreement on Monday that would compel it to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City.
The agreement, if ratified by the county’s Board of Legislators, would settle a lawsuit filed by an antidiscrimination group and could become a template for increased scrutiny of local governments’ housing policies by the Obama administration.
“This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,” said Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of housing and urban development, which helped broker the settlement along with the Justice Department. “Until now, we tended to lay dormant. This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire.”
The agreement calls for the county to spend more than $50 million of its own money, in addition to other funds, to build or acquire 750 homes or apartments, 630 of which must be provided in towns and villages where black residents constitute 3 percent or less of the population and Hispanic residents make up less than 7 percent. The 120 other spaces must meet different criteria for cost and ethnic concentration.
The county, one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs, has seven years to complete the construction or acquisition of the affordable housing.
Affordable housing is defined by a complex formula, but generally it is meant to help working families keep from spending more than a third of their gross income on housing. A family of four could make up to $53,000 as a tenant and up to $75,000 as an owner and still qualify.
There is no minimum income level, “but it’s not going to be no-income,” said Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center, which filed the lawsuit. “This agreement is not focused on facilitating housing for the poorest of the poor.” The center is a nonprofit anti-bias advocacy and litigation group based in New York City.
Mr. Gurian said that while black and Hispanic residents have a disproportionate need for affordable housing, “this is an opportunity-creating agreement, not a guarantee” that the homes would go to minority members.
“Residential segregation underlies virtually every racial disparity in America, from education to jobs to the delivery of health care,” said Mr. Gurian.
No communities have been chosen to receive the homes, officials said. But according to the Anti-Discrimination Center, more than two dozen predominantly white towns or villages are eligible, including Bedford, Bronxville, Eastchester, Hastings-on-Hudson, Harrison, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Castle, Pelham Manor, Rye and Scarsdale.
A federal monitor, James E. Johnson, has been appointed to ensure that the county abides by the settlement. Given that 120,000 acres in the county meet the criteria, the monitor “should have no difficulty making sure that Westchester ends its policy of allowing affordable housing to be off-limits in the most highly white neighborhoods in the county,” Mr. Gurian said.
The lawsuit, filed under the federal False Claims Act, argued that when Westchester applied for federal Community Development Block Grants for affordable housing and other projects, county officials treated part of the application as boilerplate — lying when they claimed to have complied with mandates to encourage fair housing.
A Westchester official originally dismissed the suit as “garbage.” But the county was largely repudiated in February when Judge Denise L. Cote ruled in Federal District Court that between 2000 and 2006 it had misrepresented its efforts to desegregate overwhelmingly white communities when it applied for the federal housing funds.
Judge Cote concluded that Westchester had made little or no effort to find out where low-income housing was being placed, or to finance homes and apartments in communities that opposed affordable housing.
As part of Monday’s agreement, the county admitted that it has the authority to challenge zoning rules in villages and towns that in many cases implicitly discourage affordable housing by setting minimum lot sizes, discouraging higher-density developments or appropriating vacant property for other purposes. Westchester agreed to “take legal action to compel compliance if municipalities hinder or impede the county” in complying with the agreement.
It was unclear Monday to what extent localities could thwart the agreement, if any chose to do so. Mary Beth Murphy, the town supervisor of Somers, which is among the possible locales for new housing, said that while she was unaware of the agreement, “we certainly are committed to affordable housing and have amended our zoning legislation in recent years to create more opportunities.”
The agreement could spark challenges to suburban county governments across the country that have resisted pressure to undo decades of residential segregation.
Andrew J. Spano, the Westchester County executive, attributed the settlement to “a historic shift of philosophy” by federal housing officials. He said he had signed the agreement to avoid further litigation and possible penalties.
The county admitted no wrongdoing, attributed the judge’s ruling to a technicality and argued that since it had previously invested in affordable housing, “what is different is the locations where the housing must be built.”
“We are settling the lawsuit because we have no choice,” Mr. Spano said.
The suit by the Anti-Discrimination Center applied to towns and villages in Westchester. The federal government deals directly with the county’s larger cities, among them Yonkers, which nearly went bankrupt before capitulating in a housing segregation case that began in 1980 and dragged on for years. That city, which had concentrated public housing in its southwest, was forced to build on the east side, where more whites lived.
The agreement is subject to approval within 45 days by the county’s Board of Legislators, which is also required to approve a $32.9 million bond sale to help finance the housing. Without legislative approval, the litigation would resume and the county would be faced with having to prove at trial that it did not knowingly file false claims.
Most of the homes would be new construction, although some existing houses and apartments could qualify if the county made them permanently affordable.
The case was litigated by Mr. Gurian and the center’s lawyer, John Relman, and supported by testimony from Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Dr. Beveridge found that “racial isolation is increasing for blacks, falling slightly for whites” and that “income level has very little impact on the degree of residential racial segregation experienced by African-Americans.”
Mr. Gurian said that the 750 homes called for by the agreement “represents only a small percentage of need,” but that “it’s designed to be practical.”
By SAM ROBERTS
NY Times - August 11, 2009
Westchester County entered into a landmark desegregation agreement on Monday that would compel it to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City.
The agreement, if ratified by the county’s Board of Legislators, would settle a lawsuit filed by an antidiscrimination group and could become a template for increased scrutiny of local governments’ housing policies by the Obama administration.
“This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,” said Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of housing and urban development, which helped broker the settlement along with the Justice Department. “Until now, we tended to lay dormant. This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire.”
The agreement calls for the county to spend more than $50 million of its own money, in addition to other funds, to build or acquire 750 homes or apartments, 630 of which must be provided in towns and villages where black residents constitute 3 percent or less of the population and Hispanic residents make up less than 7 percent. The 120 other spaces must meet different criteria for cost and ethnic concentration.
The county, one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs, has seven years to complete the construction or acquisition of the affordable housing.
Affordable housing is defined by a complex formula, but generally it is meant to help working families keep from spending more than a third of their gross income on housing. A family of four could make up to $53,000 as a tenant and up to $75,000 as an owner and still qualify.
There is no minimum income level, “but it’s not going to be no-income,” said Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center, which filed the lawsuit. “This agreement is not focused on facilitating housing for the poorest of the poor.” The center is a nonprofit anti-bias advocacy and litigation group based in New York City.
Mr. Gurian said that while black and Hispanic residents have a disproportionate need for affordable housing, “this is an opportunity-creating agreement, not a guarantee” that the homes would go to minority members.
“Residential segregation underlies virtually every racial disparity in America, from education to jobs to the delivery of health care,” said Mr. Gurian.
No communities have been chosen to receive the homes, officials said. But according to the Anti-Discrimination Center, more than two dozen predominantly white towns or villages are eligible, including Bedford, Bronxville, Eastchester, Hastings-on-Hudson, Harrison, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Castle, Pelham Manor, Rye and Scarsdale.
A federal monitor, James E. Johnson, has been appointed to ensure that the county abides by the settlement. Given that 120,000 acres in the county meet the criteria, the monitor “should have no difficulty making sure that Westchester ends its policy of allowing affordable housing to be off-limits in the most highly white neighborhoods in the county,” Mr. Gurian said.
The lawsuit, filed under the federal False Claims Act, argued that when Westchester applied for federal Community Development Block Grants for affordable housing and other projects, county officials treated part of the application as boilerplate — lying when they claimed to have complied with mandates to encourage fair housing.
A Westchester official originally dismissed the suit as “garbage.” But the county was largely repudiated in February when Judge Denise L. Cote ruled in Federal District Court that between 2000 and 2006 it had misrepresented its efforts to desegregate overwhelmingly white communities when it applied for the federal housing funds.
Judge Cote concluded that Westchester had made little or no effort to find out where low-income housing was being placed, or to finance homes and apartments in communities that opposed affordable housing.
As part of Monday’s agreement, the county admitted that it has the authority to challenge zoning rules in villages and towns that in many cases implicitly discourage affordable housing by setting minimum lot sizes, discouraging higher-density developments or appropriating vacant property for other purposes. Westchester agreed to “take legal action to compel compliance if municipalities hinder or impede the county” in complying with the agreement.
It was unclear Monday to what extent localities could thwart the agreement, if any chose to do so. Mary Beth Murphy, the town supervisor of Somers, which is among the possible locales for new housing, said that while she was unaware of the agreement, “we certainly are committed to affordable housing and have amended our zoning legislation in recent years to create more opportunities.”
The agreement could spark challenges to suburban county governments across the country that have resisted pressure to undo decades of residential segregation.
Andrew J. Spano, the Westchester County executive, attributed the settlement to “a historic shift of philosophy” by federal housing officials. He said he had signed the agreement to avoid further litigation and possible penalties.
The county admitted no wrongdoing, attributed the judge’s ruling to a technicality and argued that since it had previously invested in affordable housing, “what is different is the locations where the housing must be built.”
“We are settling the lawsuit because we have no choice,” Mr. Spano said.
The suit by the Anti-Discrimination Center applied to towns and villages in Westchester. The federal government deals directly with the county’s larger cities, among them Yonkers, which nearly went bankrupt before capitulating in a housing segregation case that began in 1980 and dragged on for years. That city, which had concentrated public housing in its southwest, was forced to build on the east side, where more whites lived.
The agreement is subject to approval within 45 days by the county’s Board of Legislators, which is also required to approve a $32.9 million bond sale to help finance the housing. Without legislative approval, the litigation would resume and the county would be faced with having to prove at trial that it did not knowingly file false claims.
Most of the homes would be new construction, although some existing houses and apartments could qualify if the county made them permanently affordable.
The case was litigated by Mr. Gurian and the center’s lawyer, John Relman, and supported by testimony from Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Dr. Beveridge found that “racial isolation is increasing for blacks, falling slightly for whites” and that “income level has very little impact on the degree of residential racial segregation experienced by African-Americans.”
Mr. Gurian said that the 750 homes called for by the agreement “represents only a small percentage of need,” but that “it’s designed to be practical.”
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
You're Not an Environmentalist if You're Also a Nimby
From the July 1, 2009 East Bay Express:
Global warming is changing far more than just the climate. It's altering the way environmentalists view development. For years, city dwellers who consider themselves to be eco-conscious have used environmental laws and arcane zoning rules to block new home construction, especially apartments and condominiums. In the inner East Bay, liberals have justified their actions by railing against gentrification and portraying developers as profiteers. But the lack of urban growth in Berkeley and in parts of Oakland during the past few decades also has contributed to suburban sprawl and long commutes. And all those freeways choked with cars are now the single biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the region.
Environmentalists who think globally say suburban sprawl and the destruction of rural farmland must stop. Indeed, the threat of the coming global warming crisis makes the growth of urban areas an imperative. And some activists who have fought developers for years are now embracing them and calling for so-called "smart growth" or "infill development" — dense urban housing near mass transit. And they note that downtown Berkeley and Oakland, along with the major transportation corridors between the two cities, are nearly perfect for transit-oriented development. [Click Here to read full article -- highly recommended!]
Global warming is changing far more than just the climate. It's altering the way environmentalists view development. For years, city dwellers who consider themselves to be eco-conscious have used environmental laws and arcane zoning rules to block new home construction, especially apartments and condominiums. In the inner East Bay, liberals have justified their actions by railing against gentrification and portraying developers as profiteers. But the lack of urban growth in Berkeley and in parts of Oakland during the past few decades also has contributed to suburban sprawl and long commutes. And all those freeways choked with cars are now the single biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the region.
Environmentalists who think globally say suburban sprawl and the destruction of rural farmland must stop. Indeed, the threat of the coming global warming crisis makes the growth of urban areas an imperative. And some activists who have fought developers for years are now embracing them and calling for so-called "smart growth" or "infill development" — dense urban housing near mass transit. And they note that downtown Berkeley and Oakland, along with the major transportation corridors between the two cities, are nearly perfect for transit-oriented development. [Click Here to read full article -- highly recommended!]
Monday, July 13, 2009
SR Press Democrat: City seeks funding to develop foreclosure properties
By MIKE McCOY THE PRESS DEMOCRAT: 7/12/2009
Twenty acres once planned for market-rate housing in Santa Rosa’s southwest and southeast quadrants — projects now in foreclosure — are being targeted by city officials for potential development of nearly 400 low-income apartments.
The City Council on Tuesday is expected to apply for $80 million in federal stimulus funds to purchase the three parcels and provide builders with the bulk of money needed to construct affordable housing.
Besides providing housing for the city’s poorest residents, the proposal could generate 550 construction jobs, said David Gouin, the city’s economic development and housing director.
The $80 million is being sought from a $1.9 billion federal package established so that states and local governments could acquire and develop abandoned and foreclosed residential properties. Santa Rosa’s ambitious request represents 4 percent of the $1.9 billion available nationwide.
“What are our chances? We have no idea,” said Nancy Gornowicz, the city’s economic development and housing manager. “They could give us all of it, part of it or none of it.”
Gouin said California and a few other areas in the country may have a competitive edge because of loan default rates.
“We are suffering the most from foreclosures and we anticipate HUD (Housing and Urban Development) will consider that,” he said.
Since the stimulus package was passed by Congress in February, the city has been asking real estate agents, banks and land owners what foreclosed properties might become bank-owned, the criteria the city must meet to qualify for the federal funds.
The search has resulted in three properties being selected for the proposal. They are:
-- Kawana Terrace — 2.8 acres on Kawana Terrace once planned for 39 homes by Das Homes. The property has been taken back by Exchange Bank.
-- Village Gardens — 8.7 acres on the southwest corner of Sebastopol Road and Boyd Street once planned for 110 condominiums by Christopherson Homes. The lien-holder is Wells Fargo Bank.
-- Sundance Village — 8.3 acres at the western end of Sebastopol Road originally proposed for 51 homes by MetroPacific Properties. The lien-holder is Comerica Bank.
Gornowicz said the city does not know the asking prices for the properties.
Two of the properties are in the city’s southwest section, an area that some residents have complained is being forced to accommodate a excessive share of the city’s low-income housing.
“We are sensitive to that,” said Gornowicz.
But she also said that the two Sebastopol Road projects have roads and utilities installed, giving them a greater chance of meeting federal stimulus-spending deadlines.
“We looked at which projects would be the closest to shovel-ready,” she said, noting that the city would have to spend half the money within two years and all of it within three.
The amount of money allocated, if any, would determine whether the city proceeds with one, two or all three of the projects, or none at all.
The developments would be intended for the city’s lowest-income residents, individuals and families making between 30 and 60 percent of median income. For a family of four that would represent a combined $24,050 income for a family of four at the 30 percent level and $48,120 at the 60 percent level.
The possible addition of nearly 400 units for very-low income residents is critical to meeting state-mandated housing goals. These goals outline how many very-low, low and affordable residential units must be built in each city and county in the state.
From 1999 through 2006, nearly 4,100 lower-income units were built in the city, the third-highest total among the 101 cities in the nine-county Bay Area.
While Santa Rosa easily met its low- and moderate-income housing goals, it fell more than 900 units shorts of the amount of rentals to accommodate very-low income residents.
Community Development Director Chuck Regalia said the three parcels, which already have city-approved plans to develop 208 homes and condominiums, would have to be rezoned to accommodate the 396 apartments the city wants.
Twenty acres once planned for market-rate housing in Santa Rosa’s southwest and southeast quadrants — projects now in foreclosure — are being targeted by city officials for potential development of nearly 400 low-income apartments.
The City Council on Tuesday is expected to apply for $80 million in federal stimulus funds to purchase the three parcels and provide builders with the bulk of money needed to construct affordable housing.
Besides providing housing for the city’s poorest residents, the proposal could generate 550 construction jobs, said David Gouin, the city’s economic development and housing director.
The $80 million is being sought from a $1.9 billion federal package established so that states and local governments could acquire and develop abandoned and foreclosed residential properties. Santa Rosa’s ambitious request represents 4 percent of the $1.9 billion available nationwide.
“What are our chances? We have no idea,” said Nancy Gornowicz, the city’s economic development and housing manager. “They could give us all of it, part of it or none of it.”
Gouin said California and a few other areas in the country may have a competitive edge because of loan default rates.
“We are suffering the most from foreclosures and we anticipate HUD (Housing and Urban Development) will consider that,” he said.
Since the stimulus package was passed by Congress in February, the city has been asking real estate agents, banks and land owners what foreclosed properties might become bank-owned, the criteria the city must meet to qualify for the federal funds.
The search has resulted in three properties being selected for the proposal. They are:
-- Kawana Terrace — 2.8 acres on Kawana Terrace once planned for 39 homes by Das Homes. The property has been taken back by Exchange Bank.
-- Village Gardens — 8.7 acres on the southwest corner of Sebastopol Road and Boyd Street once planned for 110 condominiums by Christopherson Homes. The lien-holder is Wells Fargo Bank.
-- Sundance Village — 8.3 acres at the western end of Sebastopol Road originally proposed for 51 homes by MetroPacific Properties. The lien-holder is Comerica Bank.
Gornowicz said the city does not know the asking prices for the properties.
Two of the properties are in the city’s southwest section, an area that some residents have complained is being forced to accommodate a excessive share of the city’s low-income housing.
“We are sensitive to that,” said Gornowicz.
But she also said that the two Sebastopol Road projects have roads and utilities installed, giving them a greater chance of meeting federal stimulus-spending deadlines.
“We looked at which projects would be the closest to shovel-ready,” she said, noting that the city would have to spend half the money within two years and all of it within three.
The amount of money allocated, if any, would determine whether the city proceeds with one, two or all three of the projects, or none at all.
The developments would be intended for the city’s lowest-income residents, individuals and families making between 30 and 60 percent of median income. For a family of four that would represent a combined $24,050 income for a family of four at the 30 percent level and $48,120 at the 60 percent level.
The possible addition of nearly 400 units for very-low income residents is critical to meeting state-mandated housing goals. These goals outline how many very-low, low and affordable residential units must be built in each city and county in the state.
From 1999 through 2006, nearly 4,100 lower-income units were built in the city, the third-highest total among the 101 cities in the nine-county Bay Area.
While Santa Rosa easily met its low- and moderate-income housing goals, it fell more than 900 units shorts of the amount of rentals to accommodate very-low income residents.
Community Development Director Chuck Regalia said the three parcels, which already have city-approved plans to develop 208 homes and condominiums, would have to be rezoned to accommodate the 396 apartments the city wants.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Road to Ruin: Burned by Brokers
Economists, politicians, and pundits refer to "toxic assets" as if they are some unspeakable stew bubbling in a barrel behind an old warehouse. But "toxic assets" are actually mortgages and, by extension, houses and the people who live in them. Sandra Berrios is one of millions facing the prospect of ballooning loan payments forcing her and her family from their home. The bank that lent her the money is getting hundreds of millions in TARP money, but the federal dollars flowing to the bank show no sign of trickling down to Sandra's level.
Click here for more....
Click here for more....
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Santa Rosa's Draft Housing Element Lacking
All cities in the ABAG region ( 9 counties in the SF Bay area ) must revise and update the Housing Elements of their General Plans by July 1, 2009. Before adopting the revised plan, they must allow the California Department of Housing and Community Development ("HCD") to review and comment on the final draft.
HCD is currently reviewing a draft element submitted by Santa Rosa. HAG and the Non Profit Housing Association of Northern California ("NPH") have submitted comments to HCD pointing out some deficiencies in the draft. All this sounds rather dry and technical, but a good housing element vastly simplifies the job of building affordable housing in a community. And a weak housing element makes the process much more difficult.
HCD is currently reviewing a draft element submitted by Santa Rosa. HAG and the Non Profit Housing Association of Northern California ("NPH") have submitted comments to HCD pointing out some deficiencies in the draft. All this sounds rather dry and technical, but a good housing element vastly simplifies the job of building affordable housing in a community. And a weak housing element makes the process much more difficult.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Community Wins Affordable Housing Near Transit
First TOD Development Approved for San Leandro's Downtown
On March 2nd, after over a year of public meetings, the San Leandro (CALIF) City Council approved the construction of 100 units of affordable housing in the downtown. "The Alameda" is the first component of the first TOD development (called The Crossings) to be approved since the Station Area Plan was adopted in late 2007.
At full build-out, Phase I of The Crossings (a 5+ acre development that straddles the downtown BART station) will also include a 200-unit market rate condominium complex, a 324 space BART parking garage to replace spaces lost to the new development, a new pedestrian and bicycle pathway to eventually connect to the East Bay Greenway, and improved pedestrian and bicycle access to the downtown BART station from the East and West. Both residential projects will be built LEED certified and the landscaping will include bioswales to reduce pollution in the runoff from the buildings.
The Alameda will be the first affordable rental housing development geared toward very low income families built in over twenty years. The families will have incomes ranging from $22,000 to $46,000. And 40% of apartments will have 3 bedrooms, 35% will have 2 bedrooms and 24% will have1 bedroom. This housing is incredibly needed, as more than half of San Leandro residents cannot afford to purchase a median-priced home and an estimated 250-350 students attending San Leandro schools are currently living in overcrowded conditions, in home where families are doubled and tripled up.
While redevelopment funding still needs to be approved for The Alameda (vote on April 6th) and funding is yet to be secured for a child care center within the Alameda, we are confident that by this September, Bridge Housing, the developer, will be breaking ground on The Alameda.
Monday's vote was the culmination of two and a half years of organizing community support for a downtown transit-oriented development (TOD) plan that includes housing affordable to families of all incomes - particularly low-wage working families. Congregations Organizing for Renewal (COR), a faith-based, grassroots community organization made up of thirteen congregations representing 25,000 families across South Alameda County, has been working closely with Urban Habitat to educate, organize, and mobilize residents in support of the TOD plan and affordable housing. Most recently, COR held its own town hall meeting on February 24th with three City Council members and over 100 San Leandro residents to support The Alameda and ask that childcare be included in the project (photos seen here are from that event).
COR and UH have been joined by members of the Great Communities Collaborative- most notably Greenbelt Alliance and TransForm, as well as by social welfare and environmental groups such as the Interfaith Homelessness Network, Davis Street Family Resource Center and the Sierra Club's Northern Alameda County Group. Their support has proven invaluable to add legitimacy and weight to what San Leandro is undertaking with The Alameda, The Crossings and its entire TOD Plan.
COR and UH also continue to partner with Alameda County Building Trades to strategize ways to ensure that the construction of The Crossings and future TOD developments be done by union labor that maximizes employment for San Leandro residents and provides apprenticeship opportunities.
Thank you all who have played a role in Monday's victory. We have accomplished something major in a city that has never provided public funding for a family, rental housing development and a city that has produced 12x's more for-sale (mainly market-rate) housing than rental housing over the past 10 years.
The City Council will vote on providing a $9.1 million low-interest loan in Redevelopment Housing Set-Aside funds in early April.
Contact Lindsay Imai at: Lindsay(at)urbanhabitat.org or Chris Belluomini at chris(at)corcommunity.org for more information
For additional information, see the Sierra Club Yodeler's Article about The Crossings: http://sanfranciscobay.sierraclub.org/yodeler/html/2009/03/article13.htm
On March 2nd, after over a year of public meetings, the San Leandro (CALIF) City Council approved the construction of 100 units of affordable housing in the downtown. "The Alameda" is the first component of the first TOD development (called The Crossings) to be approved since the Station Area Plan was adopted in late 2007.
At full build-out, Phase I of The Crossings (a 5+ acre development that straddles the downtown BART station) will also include a 200-unit market rate condominium complex, a 324 space BART parking garage to replace spaces lost to the new development, a new pedestrian and bicycle pathway to eventually connect to the East Bay Greenway, and improved pedestrian and bicycle access to the downtown BART station from the East and West. Both residential projects will be built LEED certified and the landscaping will include bioswales to reduce pollution in the runoff from the buildings.
The Alameda will be the first affordable rental housing development geared toward very low income families built in over twenty years. The families will have incomes ranging from $22,000 to $46,000. And 40% of apartments will have 3 bedrooms, 35% will have 2 bedrooms and 24% will have1 bedroom. This housing is incredibly needed, as more than half of San Leandro residents cannot afford to purchase a median-priced home and an estimated 250-350 students attending San Leandro schools are currently living in overcrowded conditions, in home where families are doubled and tripled up.
While redevelopment funding still needs to be approved for The Alameda (vote on April 6th) and funding is yet to be secured for a child care center within the Alameda, we are confident that by this September, Bridge Housing, the developer, will be breaking ground on The Alameda.
Monday's vote was the culmination of two and a half years of organizing community support for a downtown transit-oriented development (TOD) plan that includes housing affordable to families of all incomes - particularly low-wage working families. Congregations Organizing for Renewal (COR), a faith-based, grassroots community organization made up of thirteen congregations representing 25,000 families across South Alameda County, has been working closely with Urban Habitat to educate, organize, and mobilize residents in support of the TOD plan and affordable housing. Most recently, COR held its own town hall meeting on February 24th with three City Council members and over 100 San Leandro residents to support The Alameda and ask that childcare be included in the project (photos seen here are from that event).
COR and UH have been joined by members of the Great Communities Collaborative- most notably Greenbelt Alliance and TransForm, as well as by social welfare and environmental groups such as the Interfaith Homelessness Network, Davis Street Family Resource Center and the Sierra Club's Northern Alameda County Group. Their support has proven invaluable to add legitimacy and weight to what San Leandro is undertaking with The Alameda, The Crossings and its entire TOD Plan.
COR and UH also continue to partner with Alameda County Building Trades to strategize ways to ensure that the construction of The Crossings and future TOD developments be done by union labor that maximizes employment for San Leandro residents and provides apprenticeship opportunities.
Thank you all who have played a role in Monday's victory. We have accomplished something major in a city that has never provided public funding for a family, rental housing development and a city that has produced 12x's more for-sale (mainly market-rate) housing than rental housing over the past 10 years.
The City Council will vote on providing a $9.1 million low-interest loan in Redevelopment Housing Set-Aside funds in early April.
Contact Lindsay Imai at: Lindsay(at)urbanhabitat.org or Chris Belluomini at chris(at)corcommunity.org for more information
For additional information, see the Sierra Club Yodeler's Article about The Crossings: http://sanfranciscobay.sierraclub.org/yodeler/html/2009/03/article13.htm
Monday, February 23, 2009
Gov shafts renters (again)
After defunding the renters' and homeowners' tax assistance program (known as the "renters' rebate") on grounds that the state could not afford to make any tax rebate payments to low-income senior, blind and disabled Californians, the Governor has signed legislation to give $100 million in new tax credits to people who buy homes between March 2009 and March 2010.
The Governor's move is another slap in the face to low-income Californians. The Governor prefers to give $10,000 each to individuals who are well off enough to be buying new homes in the current economy, rather than continue a program that provides an annual $347.50 payment to low-income senior, blind and disabled Californians.
Full story at www.RentsandRants.org
The Governor's move is another slap in the face to low-income Californians. The Governor prefers to give $10,000 each to individuals who are well off enough to be buying new homes in the current economy, rather than continue a program that provides an annual $347.50 payment to low-income senior, blind and disabled Californians.
Full story at www.RentsandRants.org
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Work
The workmen over and above the fence
fit bricks, lift mortar, slap it accurately
in place. Guilty by sitting idle, I
imagine they envy my luxury
of doing nothing until I remember
the days I had my hands full of shovel,
the dragline plowing the ditch of a sewer
through a future subdivision and how
I pitied those who walked by our work
with no apparent occupation,
denied the pleasure of making something,
piece by piece—even if it would soon
be buried—they would depend upon.
- Robert King (from www.rattle.com)
fit bricks, lift mortar, slap it accurately
in place. Guilty by sitting idle, I
imagine they envy my luxury
of doing nothing until I remember
the days I had my hands full of shovel,
the dragline plowing the ditch of a sewer
through a future subdivision and how
I pitied those who walked by our work
with no apparent occupation,
denied the pleasure of making something,
piece by piece—even if it would soon
be buried—they would depend upon.
- Robert King (from www.rattle.com)
Sunday, February 8, 2009
NY Times Urges Affordable Housing Funding in Stimulus Package
A Stimulus for the Poor
NY Times Editorial
The stimulus package taking shape in Congress does little to provide affordable housing for the country's poorest families. That is grim news. Affordable housing has been hard to find in recent years. It's even harder now that many Americans have lost their jobs and homes.
Congress could help low-income Americans find homes — and create jobs doing it — by providing money for the National Housing Trust Fund, a worthy program it created last summer but has so far failed to finance. The Senate and House versions of the stimulus bills do not now contain such money, but funds could and should be added in the conference committee that must reconcile the bills.
The trust fund was originally envisioned as a project that would encourage developers to build 1.5 million affordable housing units in mixed-income developments. The government-backed mortgage companies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, were to provide the money. Both, however, ran into financial trouble.
Congress can take up the slack. The need for affordable housing has increased dramatically in the last six months, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has already done a lot of advance planning.
Estimates by the National Low Income Housing Coalition suggest that a Congressional down payment of $10 billion for the fund, plus $3.5 billion in housing vouchers under the Section 8 program, could produce affordable housing for up to 400,000 people. New construction would, of course, spawn new jobs right away.
The Senate's stimulus bill would give home buyers a tax credit of 10 percent of the price of a primary residence, up to $15,000. This would help middle- and upper-income buyers, but not the elderly, poor and disabled who don't earn enough to qualify for this break. Congress can help them by reviving the National Housing Trust Fund.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
ADA Case vs Shelter Providers Settled in DC
(A settlement agreement in an ADA case brought in Washington DC by lawyers for the US Department of Justice [yes, the same DOJ that says it's OK to torture prisoners] has nationwide significance for shelters and homeless services providers. Here's some details.)
On December 10, 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a settlement agreement with the District of Columbia to improve the accessibility of D.C. homeless shelters for people with disabilities after numerous complaints about the District's widespread violations of Title II of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA). The agreement covers all severe weather, low barrier, and temporary shelters run directly or through contractual arrangement by D.C. The settlement will remain in effect for three years for all terms except the physical accessibility provisions, which will remain in effect for five years. The full settlement can be found at http://www.ada.gov/dc_shelter.htm#settlement.
The press releases from the Department of Justice and the D.C. Attorney General summarize the settlement as follows:
"The terms of the settlement require the District to increase the accessibility of its shelter program by:
- Developing a comprehensive plan to ensure that persons with disabilities have equal access to the District's homeless shelter facilities;
- Implementing specific policies, practices and training to ensure that individuals with disabilities have equivalent access to all services and activities of the shelter program;
- Improving notice and procedures to ensure that shelter applicants and residents are aware of their rights under the ADA;
- Enhancing effective communication with shelter applicants and residents who have disabilities related to speech, vision or hearing; and
- Enhancing oversight of private contractors and subcontractors that provide homeless shelter services in the District."
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/December/08-crt-1096.html; http://dc.gov/mayor/news/release.asp?id=1438&mon=200812.
Major findings and requirements contained within the settlement:
- D.C. must make changes to its policies and procedures to allow for greater programmatic accessibility, including the following:
- Notifying shelter applicants of their rights to request reasonable modifications to rules, policies, practices, or procedures because of a disability.
- Individuals are not required to use specific forms or procedures to make requests, and requests cannot be denied for failing to follow a preferred procedure.
- Shelter providers shall only request verification regarding the reasonable modification request if it is necessary and tailored to verifying the disability or the need for the request. Such verification can usually come from the requester or another person in the know.
- Shelter providers must respond promptly to requests for reasonable modifications. In addition: "Reasonable modification requests shall be granted immediately where the denial of the request is reasonably likely to cause serious harm to an individual with a disability." (Paragraph 21(a)(iii)).
- DOJ surveyed 15 shelters for physical accessibility, 10 of which D.C. claimed met ADA standards. DOJ found that none of the shelters complied with the ADA, thus D.C. does not operate a single homeless shelter that is accessible to persons with physical disabilities. There is a detailed appendix to the settlement listing the violations.
- D.C. must draft and implement an interim and comprehensive physical accessibility plan to bring the shelter system into compliance with the ADA. The first drafts of the plans are due no later than ninety (90) days from December 10th. The shelters must be brought into compliance within two (2) years of the completion of the comprehensive plan. The public will have an opportunity to comment on these plans in writing and at a public hearing.
- If the comprehensive physical accessibility plan does not require that every shelter be accessible, "it must ensure that:
- the locations of the accessible Shelters are at least equivalent to the locations of the inaccessible Shelters with regard to the Shelters' proximity to various forms of public transportation and non-Shelter services that are frequently used by individuals residing at Shelters including, but not limited to, meal programs, employment assistance programs, health clinics, legal clinics, and government offices that administer or distribute benefits to low-income residents of the District;
- individuals with physical disabilities are not subjected to Shelter rules or requirements more burdensome than those used at inaccessible Shelters;
- individuals with physical disabilities have access to the Shelter Program in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of such individuals; and
- individuals with physical disabilities otherwise have equivalent access to the services, programs, and activities of the Shelter Program." (Paragraph 20(c)).
- D.C. must develop the means to effectively communicate with shelter applicants and residents with speech, vision, or hearing-related disabilities, including acquiring necessary equipment, alternative formats, and oral and sign language interpretation services.
- D.C. must draft and implement a plan for accessible transportation among shelters and services.
- D.C. must have at least one ADA Coordinator to oversee ADA compliance in the shelter system, resolve complaints, and monitor the adherence to the terms of the settlement. Currently, Rhonda Stewart at DHS is the ADA Coordinator (671-4422).
- D.C. has to post notifications of ADA rights and complaint procedures in all shelters and places where shelter residents might use services.
- D.C. must develop and implement procedures to improve monitoring and oversight of the ADA compliance of its contractors and subcontractors to "include, but not necessarily be limited to:
- review of contractors' or subcontractors' written rules and procedures;
- scheduled and unscheduled visits to intake sites and Shelters. Such visits shall include inspection of clients' files and interviews with Shelter clients and applicants;
- review of Shelter denials;
- strict time limits for corrective action for any deficiencies discovered during monitoring; and
- sanctions for contractors or subcontractors." (Paragraph 24).
- D.C. must develop, through the D.C. Office of Disability Rights, a comprehensive training program for shelter staff on the ADA, reasonable modification policies and procedures and the requirements of the settlement.
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’(Germany)
DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
In Berthold Kaufmann's home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann's new "passive house" and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
"You don't think about temperature — the house just adjusts," said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents' home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants' bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.
"The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand," said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. "This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It's about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating."
There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.
The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
"Awareness is skyrocketing; it's hard for us to keep up with requests," Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. "This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people," Mr. Tahan said. "Why not reuse this heat you get for free?"
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met "green" building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. "When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way," he said.
Buildings that are certified hermetically sealed may sound suffocating. (To meet the standard, a building must pass a "blow test" showing that it loses minimal air under pressure.) In fact, passive houses have plenty of windows — though far more face south than north — and all can be opened.
Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn't cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.
Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.
Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). "We've found it's very important to people that they feel they can influence the system," Mr. Hasper said.
The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. "I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different," said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.
In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.
Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.
Dr. Feist's original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.
Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe.
Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.
And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.
Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.
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