BUSINESS DAY | December 04, 2010
Talking Business: A Happy Ending to a Raw, but Common, Tale
By JOE NOCERA
Lilla Roberts fell behind on her mortgage for a while over a paying history of around 20 years. But her modification was so sloppily handled, she could have lost her home.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
HAG Endorses Haenel, Jacobi and Gorin for Santa Rosa City Council
The Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group (“HAG”) seeks to promote affordable housing and housing for persons with special needs such as farmworkers, seniors, persons with disabilities and the homeleess. Occasionally we make endorsements in local elections when we candidates who are extremely well qualified and who support our affordable housing goals.
In this year’s election for the Santa Rosa City Council, we are pleased to endorse Larry Haenel, Veronica Jacobi and Mayor Susan Gorin.
As a member of the Santa Rosa School Board for the past six years, Larry Haenel has been a strong and effective voice for excellence and equity in the City’s schools. He taught at Montgomery High School for 32 years where he was chair of the English Department, and he continues to mentor student teachers for Dominican University. He is a regular volunteer peer counselor at the Family Service Agency. He’s a real estate agent and understands the complexities of affordable housing development.
Veronica Jacobi has been a consistent and strong voice for affordable housing on the Santa Rosa City Council for the past four years. Her passion is protecting the environment for the people of Santa Rosa and for future generations. She understands that an essential component of environmental protection is social equity - affordable housing, shelters, transitional housing and programs to ensure that Santa Rosa addresses the needs of all its residents, regardless of their economic status.
Susan Gorin has been the City’s Mayor for the past two years, and has been an effective leader of the City Council. She has generally supported affordable housing efforts. As Mayor, she has consistently sought to find common ground with other members of the City Council, and to build consensus among competing interest groups in the City. We believe she deserves a second term of office, and HAG heartily endorses her candidacy.
In this year’s election for the Santa Rosa City Council, we are pleased to endorse Larry Haenel, Veronica Jacobi and Mayor Susan Gorin.
As a member of the Santa Rosa School Board for the past six years, Larry Haenel has been a strong and effective voice for excellence and equity in the City’s schools. He taught at Montgomery High School for 32 years where he was chair of the English Department, and he continues to mentor student teachers for Dominican University. He is a regular volunteer peer counselor at the Family Service Agency. He’s a real estate agent and understands the complexities of affordable housing development.
Veronica Jacobi has been a consistent and strong voice for affordable housing on the Santa Rosa City Council for the past four years. Her passion is protecting the environment for the people of Santa Rosa and for future generations. She understands that an essential component of environmental protection is social equity - affordable housing, shelters, transitional housing and programs to ensure that Santa Rosa addresses the needs of all its residents, regardless of their economic status.
Susan Gorin has been the City’s Mayor for the past two years, and has been an effective leader of the City Council. She has generally supported affordable housing efforts. As Mayor, she has consistently sought to find common ground with other members of the City Council, and to build consensus among competing interest groups in the City. We believe she deserves a second term of office, and HAG heartily endorses her candidacy.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Santa Rosa Budget Cuts Threaten Homeless Services
To: Mayor Susan Gorin and Members of the Santa Rosa City Council
September 13, 2010
The City Council agenda for Tuesday (tomorrow) includes a proposal for reduced homeless shelter funding for 2010-2011. It's hard to figure out what's going on from the agenda materials, but the City appears to be reducing funding by about $40,000. We heard about this a couple months ago and learned that Catholic Charities, the shelter operator, was planning to close the Homeless Services Center on Morgan Street, supposedly in response to the City's funding cut. We learned later that the City will receive an an additional $15k in Federal CDGB funding for homeless services for the coming year, and Catholic Charities is getting about $1.3 million in "Homeless Prevention and Rehousing Program" funding - that's exactly what their Homeless Services Center does and does well. But the fate of the Homeless Services Center is still unclear.
The Homeless Services Center provides essential and even lifesaving services for homeless persons. These include showers, hearty breakfasts, job counseling and placement, mail boxes, guidance with social services, drug/alcohol counseling, occasional legal assistance, transitional housing, health care and respite beds for homeless who are seriously ill but not so ill that they have to be hospitalized.
We met recently with Larry Lakes, Director of Catholic Charities. He was cordial but vague about their plans, saying that they were considering moving the Center from Morgan Street to Samuel Jones Hall out on Fulton Avenue, but would probably keep Morgan Street as a "drop off and pick up" site, with actual "services" provided out at the Samuel Jones Hall on Fulton Avenue.
When asked why, he said 1) the "consolidation" would save money; and 2) some neighbors were opposed to the Homeless Services Center at its current location, although it’s been there for more than 20 years. But Fulton Avenue is a long way from downtown, where hundreds of homeless people spend their days (and nights). Mr. Lakes insisted that it would not be a problem for homeless persons to get out to Samuel Jones, and said Catholic Charities would provide shuttle bus service. He didn't explain how Catholic Charities could afford to buy/maintain a shuttle bus and pay a driver, but were having difficulty finding $25,000 to offset the amount of the city's proposed cut.
Funding is available to continue the services provided at the Homeless Services Center at its current location - from the business community that depends on the Center staff to help address problems in the downtown area when they arise; from other non-profits that have historically supported homeless services like the Community Foundation; and from various state/federal programs such as the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Resettlement Act ("HPRP") which is providing $1.3 million to Catholic Charities for 2010 and 2011. We're not aware of any efforts by Catholic Charities to seek additional funding to offset the $25,000 cut by the City. If funding is not the problem, why would the City Council be so callous and uncaring as to allow the Homeless Services Center to shut down on Morgan Street? The City closed the 40+ bed downtown shelter on Brookwood last year. Samuel Jones has been filled to capacity all summer. One homeless client of mine says he thinks the "progressive" City Council wants to curry favor with the NIMBY's who've been trying to force the Center to leave the Morgan Street location for years.
According to HUD, homelessness across the country has been increasing at an annual rate of over 10%. The annual homeless count showed an even greater increase in Sonoma County. Cutbacks in mental health services, high unemployment, foreclosures, and large numbers of veterans returning from the war(s) mean the numbers will continue to increase.
We hope the City will reconsider cutting the $25,000 from its homeless services budget so that Catholic Charities won’t have a convenient reason to shut down the Center, and we hope Catholic Charities will look a little harder for ways to offset any cuts the City has to make. Other cities, including Rohnert Park, have tapped their redevelopment funds to support homeless programs during the current budget crisis. Santa Rosa's spending millions on the AT&T building; millions on developing the Railroad Square area; millions on a cosmetic reconfiguration of Courthouse Sqare and more millions on "upgrading" the Coddingtown Mall. Surely they can find a measly $25,000 to provide essential services at the Homeless Services Center for another year. A few NIMBY votes shouldn’t be a factor in this. Surely the City and its largest charitable organization can find a way here.
September 13, 2010
The City Council agenda for Tuesday (tomorrow) includes a proposal for reduced homeless shelter funding for 2010-2011. It's hard to figure out what's going on from the agenda materials, but the City appears to be reducing funding by about $40,000. We heard about this a couple months ago and learned that Catholic Charities, the shelter operator, was planning to close the Homeless Services Center on Morgan Street, supposedly in response to the City's funding cut. We learned later that the City will receive an an additional $15k in Federal CDGB funding for homeless services for the coming year, and Catholic Charities is getting about $1.3 million in "Homeless Prevention and Rehousing Program" funding - that's exactly what their Homeless Services Center does and does well. But the fate of the Homeless Services Center is still unclear.
The Homeless Services Center provides essential and even lifesaving services for homeless persons. These include showers, hearty breakfasts, job counseling and placement, mail boxes, guidance with social services, drug/alcohol counseling, occasional legal assistance, transitional housing, health care and respite beds for homeless who are seriously ill but not so ill that they have to be hospitalized.
We met recently with Larry Lakes, Director of Catholic Charities. He was cordial but vague about their plans, saying that they were considering moving the Center from Morgan Street to Samuel Jones Hall out on Fulton Avenue, but would probably keep Morgan Street as a "drop off and pick up" site, with actual "services" provided out at the Samuel Jones Hall on Fulton Avenue.
When asked why, he said 1) the "consolidation" would save money; and 2) some neighbors were opposed to the Homeless Services Center at its current location, although it’s been there for more than 20 years. But Fulton Avenue is a long way from downtown, where hundreds of homeless people spend their days (and nights). Mr. Lakes insisted that it would not be a problem for homeless persons to get out to Samuel Jones, and said Catholic Charities would provide shuttle bus service. He didn't explain how Catholic Charities could afford to buy/maintain a shuttle bus and pay a driver, but were having difficulty finding $25,000 to offset the amount of the city's proposed cut.
Funding is available to continue the services provided at the Homeless Services Center at its current location - from the business community that depends on the Center staff to help address problems in the downtown area when they arise; from other non-profits that have historically supported homeless services like the Community Foundation; and from various state/federal programs such as the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Resettlement Act ("HPRP") which is providing $1.3 million to Catholic Charities for 2010 and 2011. We're not aware of any efforts by Catholic Charities to seek additional funding to offset the $25,000 cut by the City. If funding is not the problem, why would the City Council be so callous and uncaring as to allow the Homeless Services Center to shut down on Morgan Street? The City closed the 40+ bed downtown shelter on Brookwood last year. Samuel Jones has been filled to capacity all summer. One homeless client of mine says he thinks the "progressive" City Council wants to curry favor with the NIMBY's who've been trying to force the Center to leave the Morgan Street location for years.
According to HUD, homelessness across the country has been increasing at an annual rate of over 10%. The annual homeless count showed an even greater increase in Sonoma County. Cutbacks in mental health services, high unemployment, foreclosures, and large numbers of veterans returning from the war(s) mean the numbers will continue to increase.
We hope the City will reconsider cutting the $25,000 from its homeless services budget so that Catholic Charities won’t have a convenient reason to shut down the Center, and we hope Catholic Charities will look a little harder for ways to offset any cuts the City has to make. Other cities, including Rohnert Park, have tapped their redevelopment funds to support homeless programs during the current budget crisis. Santa Rosa's spending millions on the AT&T building; millions on developing the Railroad Square area; millions on a cosmetic reconfiguration of Courthouse Sqare and more millions on "upgrading" the Coddingtown Mall. Surely they can find a measly $25,000 to provide essential services at the Homeless Services Center for another year. A few NIMBY votes shouldn’t be a factor in this. Surely the City and its largest charitable organization can find a way here.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Letter to Santa Rosa re Density Bonus Ordinance
The City of Santa Rosa's updating its density bonus ordinance, supposedly to comply with state requirements set out in Government Code Sec. 65915. That section says, in a nutshell, that a developer who includes some affordable units in its residential development is entitled to a density bonus and various "concessions and incentives" to help recoup the cost of providing the affordable units. It's a great program to generate some affordable housing at no cost to taxpayers, while helping to integrate new developments with families of different incomes, etc. But the draft that the City's looking at adopting makes it really difficult or impossible for developers to get a density bonus or to qualify for concessions and incentives. Why? What are they thinking? Click here to see a letter that HAG recently sent to the City about the proposed ordinance.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Urbanist Thinking at Burning Man
From Planetizen
By Nate Berg, Staff writer 9/5/10
It's already disappearing. The temporary city that forms during the annual Burning Man event is fading away, as the tens of thousands of people who traveled out to live in the desert of northwestern Nevada for the past week have filed out of the void and returned back to the rest of the world. The event's organizers and volunteers are still erasing the traces of the event, from demolishing structures to removing fencing to picking up trash. Within another week or so, the entire city will have disappeared.
It's an interesting way for a city to exist -- just a few weeks at a time, once a year. But it's been working for Burning Man and Black Rock City, the name of that temporary city that forms and disbands almost as soon as it comes to full life. On top of what's already a unique experiment in citymaking, the theme of this year's event was Metropolis, which spurred the tens of thousands of people and artists who make up the city to think a little more about how their "party in the desert" is actually a little city and community (the fourth largest city in Nevada during its run), and how it relates to their world beyond the desert.
51,515 people had driven themselves into the far-off Black Rock Desert for the event by midnight last Friday, a new attendance record for the event, which has taken place every year in one form or another since 1986. The population has steadily increased over the years, a reality that has gradually turned the artist/anarchist/bohemian event into a temporary but perennial small-scale city. The Metropolis theme offered an interesting chance for attendees to think a little more about Burning Man's cityness, and the event's relation to real life in the "default world". Yeah, it's a party in the desert, but it's also an event that takes very seriously the community and civic experience it creates.
This year's theme was definitely an appropriate one for the event, and it inspired many city- and architecture-based art works and installations.
[See http://www.planetizen.com/node/45856 for some interesting photo's]
The art is a major part of the event, and its breadth and detail is almost overwhelming. It's visual saturation that makes grasping the entirety of the event almost impossible. That some of the art at this year's event was related to cities was interesting, but that recognition of the event as a city is not something unique to 2010. How Burning Man functions as a city, and how that function evolved, is what makes Burning Man so interesting to me. It's a topic I'll be exploring in much further detail in a future article, and something touched upon in various places, including this piece from the January 2009 issue of Architect Magazine, more recently by Greg Scruggs writing on this year's event for Next American City, the Burning Man organization's own Metropol blog series, and in this blog post from The Architect's Newspaper looking at some of the architecture-related artworks on display this year.
It was an especially interesting year to be at Burning Man because of the theme. Conversations with half-naked people about infill in the camping areas and pedestrian-scaled design were an unexpected departure from the typical desert camp conversation. Whether it's this year's theme that got those conversations going is hard to say. The event itself is becoming a metropolis, and it seems that people are increasingly drawing that conclusion and a connection to the cities they regularly experience. The good thing about this year's Metropolis theme is that the urbanist discourse on Burning Man -- and its impact on actual cities and communities beyond the event -- is likely to continue.
Nate Berg is a contributing editor for Planetizen and freelance journalist.
By Nate Berg, Staff writer 9/5/10
It's already disappearing. The temporary city that forms during the annual Burning Man event is fading away, as the tens of thousands of people who traveled out to live in the desert of northwestern Nevada for the past week have filed out of the void and returned back to the rest of the world. The event's organizers and volunteers are still erasing the traces of the event, from demolishing structures to removing fencing to picking up trash. Within another week or so, the entire city will have disappeared.
It's an interesting way for a city to exist -- just a few weeks at a time, once a year. But it's been working for Burning Man and Black Rock City, the name of that temporary city that forms and disbands almost as soon as it comes to full life. On top of what's already a unique experiment in citymaking, the theme of this year's event was Metropolis, which spurred the tens of thousands of people and artists who make up the city to think a little more about how their "party in the desert" is actually a little city and community (the fourth largest city in Nevada during its run), and how it relates to their world beyond the desert.
51,515 people had driven themselves into the far-off Black Rock Desert for the event by midnight last Friday, a new attendance record for the event, which has taken place every year in one form or another since 1986. The population has steadily increased over the years, a reality that has gradually turned the artist/anarchist/bohemian event into a temporary but perennial small-scale city. The Metropolis theme offered an interesting chance for attendees to think a little more about Burning Man's cityness, and the event's relation to real life in the "default world". Yeah, it's a party in the desert, but it's also an event that takes very seriously the community and civic experience it creates.
This year's theme was definitely an appropriate one for the event, and it inspired many city- and architecture-based art works and installations.
[See http://www.planetizen.com/node/45856 for some interesting photo's]
The art is a major part of the event, and its breadth and detail is almost overwhelming. It's visual saturation that makes grasping the entirety of the event almost impossible. That some of the art at this year's event was related to cities was interesting, but that recognition of the event as a city is not something unique to 2010. How Burning Man functions as a city, and how that function evolved, is what makes Burning Man so interesting to me. It's a topic I'll be exploring in much further detail in a future article, and something touched upon in various places, including this piece from the January 2009 issue of Architect Magazine, more recently by Greg Scruggs writing on this year's event for Next American City, the Burning Man organization's own Metropol blog series, and in this blog post from The Architect's Newspaper looking at some of the architecture-related artworks on display this year.
It was an especially interesting year to be at Burning Man because of the theme. Conversations with half-naked people about infill in the camping areas and pedestrian-scaled design were an unexpected departure from the typical desert camp conversation. Whether it's this year's theme that got those conversations going is hard to say. The event itself is becoming a metropolis, and it seems that people are increasingly drawing that conclusion and a connection to the cities they regularly experience. The good thing about this year's Metropolis theme is that the urbanist discourse on Burning Man -- and its impact on actual cities and communities beyond the event -- is likely to continue.
Nate Berg is a contributing editor for Planetizen and freelance journalist.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
5th Anniversary of Katrina - A Tale of 2 Recoveries
By Michael A. Fletcher Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 27, 2010; A13
IN NEW ORLEANS The massive government effort to repair the damage from
Hurricane Katrina is fostering a stark divide as the state governments
in Louisiana and Mississippi structured the rebuilding programs in
ways that often offered the most help to the most affluent residents.
The result, advocates say, has been an uneven recovery, with whites
and middle-class people more likely than blacks and low-income people
to have rebuilt their lives in the five years since the horrific
storm.
"The recovery is really the tale of two recoveries," said James Perry,
executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action
Center. "For people who were well off before the storm, they are more
likely to be back in their homes, back in their jobs and to have
access to good health care. For those who were poor or struggling to
get by before the storm, the opposite is true."
Louisiana's program to distribute grants to property owners whose
homes were damaged or destroyed by Katrina was found by a federal
judge this month to discriminate against black homeowners.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, state officials refused to offer rebuilding
grants to property owners who suffered wind damage, explaining that
the property owners should have carried private insurance. That rule
hit low-income and black homeowners particularly hard, advocates say,
because many of them were uninsured, often because they owned property
that was passed down through the generations.
The $143 billion federally funded reconstruction effort, one of the
largest such projects in the country's history, fortified vulnerable
levees, rebuilt hundreds of public buildings, reconstructed miles of
roads and bridges, and provided tens of thousands of residents with
money to help piece together their shattered lives.
But there is a sharp disparity in how residents view the pace of
recovery. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that
while seven in 10 New Orleans residents say the rebuilding process is
"going in the right direction," a third say their lives are still
disrupted by the storm.
African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to say they
have not yet recovered after Katrina, the survey found. And blacks in
the city are 2 1/2 times as likely to be low-income than whites.
"I just knew we had a rotten deal," said Edward Randolph, a disabled
Vietnam veteran who with his wife, Angela, has been struggling to
rebuild their duplex in New Orleans East. "We know we have a lot to
do, but we just do not have the money to do it."
The storm propelled them on a years-long odyssey through Port Arthur,
Tex., Houston and Arkansas. They did not return to their still-damaged
home until 2008.
The federally funded rebuilding program established by Louisiana
officials - called Road Home - offered homeowners grants of up to
$150,000. But homeowners could not collect more than the pre-storm
value of their homes, regardless of the cost of repairs.
The Randolph home was valued at just $135,000, although repair costs
were estimated by the state to be $308,000. The Randolphs were awarded
a grant of $16,649, to supplement just over $100,000 they received in
insurance payments.
This month, a federal judge ruled that the program's formula for
calculating grants discriminates against black homeowners, who tend to
live in neighborhoods with lower home values.
"We obviously disagree with the judge's action, which has stopped us
from paying out some grants, and already have appealed it," said
Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for the Road Home program. "I think
it is worth noting that the state did not create this program in a
vacuum - the federal government signed off on the design of the
program and any major changes we made along the way."
She added that the state has modified the program to pay out an
additional $2 billion to more than 45,000 low-income homeowners.
Overall, Road Home paid $8.6 billion to more than 127,000 homeowners.
Many of these simmering issues will not be visible when President
Obama arrives here Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of the storm
that killed more than 1,800, uprooted more than 1 million Gulf Coast
residents, and left 80 percent of this city submerged.
The visit is expected to underscore the president's support for a
region still reeling not just from Katrina but from the largest oil
spill in the nation's history, which is threatening the region's
immediate economic future. A regional group of business and political
leaders formed a coalition this week aimed at holding Obama to his
promise to restore the Gulf Coast.
Obama's visit will also underscore the strides made since the breached
floodwalls and overtopped levees left people here camping on highway
overpasses, cowering in attics and retreating to the squalor of the
Superdome and the Convention Center to escape the deadly waters.
The surreal landscape of grounded boats, washed-up appliances and
mud-choked streets is long gone, and many of the most obvious scars
from the catastrophe are healing. The Army Corps of Engineers has
rebuilt 220 miles of levees and floodwalls.
The school system, widely viewed as one of the nation's worst before
the storm, has been reborn with many charter schools. Though activists
have filed a lawsuit alleging that special-needs students are being
underserved by the new education structure, 59 percent of city
students are in schools that meet state academic standards - more than
double the number who attended such schools before Katrina.
The storm ravaged the city's hospital system, leaving many residents
in the largely black eastern part of the city a long ambulance ride
from emergency health care. At the same time, more than 90
neighborhood health clinics opened and are showing promise at
delivering preventive care and helping people manage chronic diseases
such as diabetes and hypertension.
But there is concern that many of the health centers, funded with
federal grant money that is winding down, are struggling to draw
enough insured patients to become self-sufficient.
"Everyone now has to transition to a more sustainable model of health
care," said Sarat Raman, associate medical director of Daughters of
Charity Services of New Orleans, which operates three clinics that
serve 15,000 patients in the area. "You have to have a balance of
patients."
Along Mississippi's Gulf Coast, where the violent winds and an
unprecedented storm surge overwhelmed homeowners, sheared off roofs
and splintered houses, the scene has also improved.
The waterfront casinos that provide a large chunk of this state's
revenue are humming. The vast majority of residents are back in their
rebuilt homes, although thousands are still struggling to find
affordable housing because their recovery checks did not cover the
cost of the damage.
Despite the improvements, many gaps remain.
The New Orleans area has regained more than 90 percent of its
pre-Katrina population, according to the Greater New Orleans Community
Data Center.
But in the city itself, just 78 percent of the population has
returned, and a growing share of the region's poor now reside in the
suburbs. The city's population drop has been most severe in black
neighborhoods, many of which absorbed Katrina's most brutal blows.
Despite well-publicized recovery efforts, including a plan led by
actor Brad Pitt to build 150 solar-powered homes, just 24 percent of
the Lower Ninth Ward's pre-storm population has returned. There, newly
rebuilt homes stand next to vacant lots or crumbling houses. Entire
blocks remain desolate five years after the storm.
In middle-class Pontchartrain Park, not far from historically black
Dillard University, just 55 percent of households have rebuilt,
according to the data center.
Beyond the problems with Road Home, New Orleans has experienced a
dramatic spike in rental costs since the storm.
"Many low-cost apartments are gone with the wind and the water," said
Laura Tuggle, the outgoing managing attorney of Southeast Louisiana
Legal Services. "Now, we're left with New York rents on New Orleans
wages."
In Mississippi, where Katrina severely damaged more than 101,000
housing units, many residents face what advocates call a similar
inequity. Praised in the aftermath of Katrina for his can-do attitude,
Gov. Haley Barbour (R) received a series of waivers from the Bush
administration that largely freed Mississippi from the requirement to
spend at least half of his state's $5.5 billion in federal block grant
money on low- and moderate-income residents. Barbour successfully
argued that the waivers were necessary to give the state flexibility
to deal effectively with the widespread devastation.
That allowed the state to divert close to $1 billion to help
devastated utilities rebuild, to subsidize residents' insurance
premiums and to help fund the port and other economic development
projects. Meanwhile, advocates say that more than 5,000 low-income
Mississippi families have yet to settle in permanent housing since the
storm.
State officials say they are expanding the number of public housing
units beyond pre-Katrina levels and establishing programs to encourage
development of affordable rental housing.
Still, advocates say the more than $3 billion distributed by the
state's housing recovery program went disproportionately to
more-affluent residents. The plan paid up to $150,000 to homeowners
whose properties were damaged by the unprecedented storm surge spawned
by Katrina, but nothing to those whose homes suffered wind damage.
To be eligible for the initial grants, families had to have homeowners
insurance, although the state later devised a program that paid grants
of up to $100,000 to low-income, uninsured homeowners whose properties
were damaged by the storm surge.
The rationale, state officials said, was that responsible homeowners
had no way to know that they should have flood insurance in areas that
federal experts deemed to be outside the flood plain.
"The storm surge was the priority," said Lee Youngblood,
communications director of the Mississippi Development Authority.
"Mississippi had no intention of compensating people who chose, for
whatever reason, not to have wind insurance."
That formula struck some advocates as discriminatory. "The criteria
discriminated against black storm victims, who more likely than not
were renters, or, if homeowners, more likely than not lacked
insurance," said Reilly Morse, co-director of housing policy for the
Mississippi Center for Justice.
The state's formula had the effect of freezing out people whose homes
were destroyed by the wind, which along much of the Mississippi coast
meant black residents who often lived in paid-off homes that had been
handed down through the generations. The expensive waterfront property
was mostly owned by whites, while inland property, which suffered more
wind damage, was owned largely by blacks.
In Gulfport, a railroad embankment that has long served as an informal
racial demarcation line became a levee when Katrina hit.
As the surging waters crashed through their patio door and rose five
feet in their home, a white couple, Ernest and Doreen Chamberlain,
gathered their family and sought refuge on the black side of the
tracks.
Coming upon an old, wood-frame house he thought was abandoned, Ernest
Chamberlain began trying to break the door down, only to be surprised
when it was opened by Irene Walker, an elderly black woman.
"She was like, 'Mister, what are you doing?' " he recalled. "Then she
invited us in."
That's where the Chamberlains rode out the storm, even as raw sewage
backed up into the Walker home.
Five years later, the Chamberlains are back in their sunny home.
Although they had to fight with insurers and contractors, they secured
a $150,000 grant from the state to help repair the flood damage, which
totaled nearly $200,000.
Meanwhile, the Walker home sits abandoned. A church group installed a
new roof, but the interior remains untouched. The 82-year-old Walker,
meanwhile, is living with family members a few miles away.
"She hasn't gotten any help from the government for the house," said
Occelletta Norwood, Walker's niece. "She got a little money from FEMA
at the start, but that was it."
fletcherm@washpost.com Research editor Alice R. Crites contributed to
this report.
Friday, August 27, 2010; A13
IN NEW ORLEANS The massive government effort to repair the damage from
Hurricane Katrina is fostering a stark divide as the state governments
in Louisiana and Mississippi structured the rebuilding programs in
ways that often offered the most help to the most affluent residents.
The result, advocates say, has been an uneven recovery, with whites
and middle-class people more likely than blacks and low-income people
to have rebuilt their lives in the five years since the horrific
storm.
"The recovery is really the tale of two recoveries," said James Perry,
executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action
Center. "For people who were well off before the storm, they are more
likely to be back in their homes, back in their jobs and to have
access to good health care. For those who were poor or struggling to
get by before the storm, the opposite is true."
Louisiana's program to distribute grants to property owners whose
homes were damaged or destroyed by Katrina was found by a federal
judge this month to discriminate against black homeowners.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, state officials refused to offer rebuilding
grants to property owners who suffered wind damage, explaining that
the property owners should have carried private insurance. That rule
hit low-income and black homeowners particularly hard, advocates say,
because many of them were uninsured, often because they owned property
that was passed down through the generations.
The $143 billion federally funded reconstruction effort, one of the
largest such projects in the country's history, fortified vulnerable
levees, rebuilt hundreds of public buildings, reconstructed miles of
roads and bridges, and provided tens of thousands of residents with
money to help piece together their shattered lives.
But there is a sharp disparity in how residents view the pace of
recovery. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that
while seven in 10 New Orleans residents say the rebuilding process is
"going in the right direction," a third say their lives are still
disrupted by the storm.
African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to say they
have not yet recovered after Katrina, the survey found. And blacks in
the city are 2 1/2 times as likely to be low-income than whites.
"I just knew we had a rotten deal," said Edward Randolph, a disabled
Vietnam veteran who with his wife, Angela, has been struggling to
rebuild their duplex in New Orleans East. "We know we have a lot to
do, but we just do not have the money to do it."
The storm propelled them on a years-long odyssey through Port Arthur,
Tex., Houston and Arkansas. They did not return to their still-damaged
home until 2008.
The federally funded rebuilding program established by Louisiana
officials - called Road Home - offered homeowners grants of up to
$150,000. But homeowners could not collect more than the pre-storm
value of their homes, regardless of the cost of repairs.
The Randolph home was valued at just $135,000, although repair costs
were estimated by the state to be $308,000. The Randolphs were awarded
a grant of $16,649, to supplement just over $100,000 they received in
insurance payments.
This month, a federal judge ruled that the program's formula for
calculating grants discriminates against black homeowners, who tend to
live in neighborhoods with lower home values.
"We obviously disagree with the judge's action, which has stopped us
from paying out some grants, and already have appealed it," said
Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for the Road Home program. "I think
it is worth noting that the state did not create this program in a
vacuum - the federal government signed off on the design of the
program and any major changes we made along the way."
She added that the state has modified the program to pay out an
additional $2 billion to more than 45,000 low-income homeowners.
Overall, Road Home paid $8.6 billion to more than 127,000 homeowners.
Many of these simmering issues will not be visible when President
Obama arrives here Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of the storm
that killed more than 1,800, uprooted more than 1 million Gulf Coast
residents, and left 80 percent of this city submerged.
The visit is expected to underscore the president's support for a
region still reeling not just from Katrina but from the largest oil
spill in the nation's history, which is threatening the region's
immediate economic future. A regional group of business and political
leaders formed a coalition this week aimed at holding Obama to his
promise to restore the Gulf Coast.
Obama's visit will also underscore the strides made since the breached
floodwalls and overtopped levees left people here camping on highway
overpasses, cowering in attics and retreating to the squalor of the
Superdome and the Convention Center to escape the deadly waters.
The surreal landscape of grounded boats, washed-up appliances and
mud-choked streets is long gone, and many of the most obvious scars
from the catastrophe are healing. The Army Corps of Engineers has
rebuilt 220 miles of levees and floodwalls.
The school system, widely viewed as one of the nation's worst before
the storm, has been reborn with many charter schools. Though activists
have filed a lawsuit alleging that special-needs students are being
underserved by the new education structure, 59 percent of city
students are in schools that meet state academic standards - more than
double the number who attended such schools before Katrina.
The storm ravaged the city's hospital system, leaving many residents
in the largely black eastern part of the city a long ambulance ride
from emergency health care. At the same time, more than 90
neighborhood health clinics opened and are showing promise at
delivering preventive care and helping people manage chronic diseases
such as diabetes and hypertension.
But there is concern that many of the health centers, funded with
federal grant money that is winding down, are struggling to draw
enough insured patients to become self-sufficient.
"Everyone now has to transition to a more sustainable model of health
care," said Sarat Raman, associate medical director of Daughters of
Charity Services of New Orleans, which operates three clinics that
serve 15,000 patients in the area. "You have to have a balance of
patients."
Along Mississippi's Gulf Coast, where the violent winds and an
unprecedented storm surge overwhelmed homeowners, sheared off roofs
and splintered houses, the scene has also improved.
The waterfront casinos that provide a large chunk of this state's
revenue are humming. The vast majority of residents are back in their
rebuilt homes, although thousands are still struggling to find
affordable housing because their recovery checks did not cover the
cost of the damage.
Despite the improvements, many gaps remain.
The New Orleans area has regained more than 90 percent of its
pre-Katrina population, according to the Greater New Orleans Community
Data Center.
But in the city itself, just 78 percent of the population has
returned, and a growing share of the region's poor now reside in the
suburbs. The city's population drop has been most severe in black
neighborhoods, many of which absorbed Katrina's most brutal blows.
Despite well-publicized recovery efforts, including a plan led by
actor Brad Pitt to build 150 solar-powered homes, just 24 percent of
the Lower Ninth Ward's pre-storm population has returned. There, newly
rebuilt homes stand next to vacant lots or crumbling houses. Entire
blocks remain desolate five years after the storm.
In middle-class Pontchartrain Park, not far from historically black
Dillard University, just 55 percent of households have rebuilt,
according to the data center.
Beyond the problems with Road Home, New Orleans has experienced a
dramatic spike in rental costs since the storm.
"Many low-cost apartments are gone with the wind and the water," said
Laura Tuggle, the outgoing managing attorney of Southeast Louisiana
Legal Services. "Now, we're left with New York rents on New Orleans
wages."
In Mississippi, where Katrina severely damaged more than 101,000
housing units, many residents face what advocates call a similar
inequity. Praised in the aftermath of Katrina for his can-do attitude,
Gov. Haley Barbour (R) received a series of waivers from the Bush
administration that largely freed Mississippi from the requirement to
spend at least half of his state's $5.5 billion in federal block grant
money on low- and moderate-income residents. Barbour successfully
argued that the waivers were necessary to give the state flexibility
to deal effectively with the widespread devastation.
That allowed the state to divert close to $1 billion to help
devastated utilities rebuild, to subsidize residents' insurance
premiums and to help fund the port and other economic development
projects. Meanwhile, advocates say that more than 5,000 low-income
Mississippi families have yet to settle in permanent housing since the
storm.
State officials say they are expanding the number of public housing
units beyond pre-Katrina levels and establishing programs to encourage
development of affordable rental housing.
Still, advocates say the more than $3 billion distributed by the
state's housing recovery program went disproportionately to
more-affluent residents. The plan paid up to $150,000 to homeowners
whose properties were damaged by the unprecedented storm surge spawned
by Katrina, but nothing to those whose homes suffered wind damage.
To be eligible for the initial grants, families had to have homeowners
insurance, although the state later devised a program that paid grants
of up to $100,000 to low-income, uninsured homeowners whose properties
were damaged by the storm surge.
The rationale, state officials said, was that responsible homeowners
had no way to know that they should have flood insurance in areas that
federal experts deemed to be outside the flood plain.
"The storm surge was the priority," said Lee Youngblood,
communications director of the Mississippi Development Authority.
"Mississippi had no intention of compensating people who chose, for
whatever reason, not to have wind insurance."
That formula struck some advocates as discriminatory. "The criteria
discriminated against black storm victims, who more likely than not
were renters, or, if homeowners, more likely than not lacked
insurance," said Reilly Morse, co-director of housing policy for the
Mississippi Center for Justice.
The state's formula had the effect of freezing out people whose homes
were destroyed by the wind, which along much of the Mississippi coast
meant black residents who often lived in paid-off homes that had been
handed down through the generations. The expensive waterfront property
was mostly owned by whites, while inland property, which suffered more
wind damage, was owned largely by blacks.
In Gulfport, a railroad embankment that has long served as an informal
racial demarcation line became a levee when Katrina hit.
As the surging waters crashed through their patio door and rose five
feet in their home, a white couple, Ernest and Doreen Chamberlain,
gathered their family and sought refuge on the black side of the
tracks.
Coming upon an old, wood-frame house he thought was abandoned, Ernest
Chamberlain began trying to break the door down, only to be surprised
when it was opened by Irene Walker, an elderly black woman.
"She was like, 'Mister, what are you doing?' " he recalled. "Then she
invited us in."
That's where the Chamberlains rode out the storm, even as raw sewage
backed up into the Walker home.
Five years later, the Chamberlains are back in their sunny home.
Although they had to fight with insurers and contractors, they secured
a $150,000 grant from the state to help repair the flood damage, which
totaled nearly $200,000.
Meanwhile, the Walker home sits abandoned. A church group installed a
new roof, but the interior remains untouched. The 82-year-old Walker,
meanwhile, is living with family members a few miles away.
"She hasn't gotten any help from the government for the house," said
Occelletta Norwood, Walker's niece. "She got a little money from FEMA
at the start, but that was it."
fletcherm@washpost.com Research editor Alice R. Crites contributed to
this report.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Op Ed: Local prosperity is ADC's agenda
HAG is a founding member of the Accountable Development Coalirion. This Op Ed is from the 7/24/10 Press Democrat.
_______________________________
GUEST OPINION: Local prosperity is ADC's agenda
By DENNIS ROSATTI
and JACK BUCKHORN
The Accountable Development Coalition has been in the news lately, and we recognized the need to clarify who we are, and what we stand for.
The ADC was formed in 2006 as a coalition of environmental, land use, labor, housing and social justice organizations to represent community interests in the important land use and development decisions that shape the economic life and environmental quality of our community.
Three key concerns dominated the formation of the coalition:
We want the community to be involved in setting good public policy and to participate in the earliest stages of planning in order to develop great neighborhoods and communities.
For example, we received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to engage the local community in creating Santa Rosa's Railroad Square Station Area Plan. The community spoke out and persuaded the city to approve a plan that will create a friendlier environment for pedestrians and bicyclists, support public transit users and provide more affordable housing near shops and incentives for better-paying jobs.
We've also advocated for green building standards, which is the wave of the future as we cope with climate change.
As a growing coalition of 14 diverse local organizations and committed professional members, we are big enough to attract the interest of developers. We offer to work in collaboration with developers to make better plans that meet more of the community's needs.
For example, we collaborated with Sonoma Mountain Village to improve a re-use project to create good local jobs and strengthen green building standards, while providing a better sense of community with a mix of housing types close to shops and work. Three years of working together is documented in a community benefits agreement that acknowledges our support.
The current Wall Street business model, favoring out-of-state, corporate-owned retail stores harms our local small business retailers.
We believe in community prosperity. We go to bat for locally owned businesses that are active in our community, support local charities and are the drivers of local economic development. We cannot support big-box stores that do not embrace smart growth principles, which pay low wages and minimal benefits to their workers and siphon money out of the local economy to pay their corporate executives millions.
We helped fight off an effort to rezone land designated for affordable housing for yet another unnecessary big-box store near Santa Rosa Avenue. This victory will help retain Friedman's Home Improvement, a family-owned local business that pays living wages, built a prominent community center and continues to be a leader supporting local charities.
The ADC established the following seven founding principles for accountable development to describe a sustainable and equitable development path that will serve the common good and create shared prosperity.
• Create and enforce community standards through development that meets local and regional needs.
• Build mixed-income neighborhoods through the inclusion of affordable housing for all incomes in all residential developments.
• Promote good jobs through family-supporting wages and benefits, job security, the right to organize, job training and local hire.
• Ensure community health and safety through accessible health care, safe working and housing conditions and a healthy neighborhood environment.
• Be environmentally sustainable through good community design, particularly through pedestrian and transit-oriented development, by using green building and environmentally conscious design.
• Build participation and encourage meaningful community involvement and representation in decisions about development.
• Be smart growth and transit-oriented by directing development toward existing communities, creating bike-able, walk-able neighborhoods and providing a range of transportation options.
This is the agenda of the ADC. We are part of a national movement of accountable development advocates that represents an evolutionary advance in public policy we hope to see implemented across the region.
Our goal is to create a policy platform that informs the next generation of public officials and planning staff and helps broaden civic discourse on public policy issues.
Dennis Rosatti, executive director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, and Jack Buckhorn, business manager of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 551, are co-chairmen of the Accountable Development Coalition.
_______________________________
GUEST OPINION: Local prosperity is ADC's agenda
By DENNIS ROSATTI
and JACK BUCKHORN
The Accountable Development Coalition has been in the news lately, and we recognized the need to clarify who we are, and what we stand for.
The ADC was formed in 2006 as a coalition of environmental, land use, labor, housing and social justice organizations to represent community interests in the important land use and development decisions that shape the economic life and environmental quality of our community.
Three key concerns dominated the formation of the coalition:
We want the community to be involved in setting good public policy and to participate in the earliest stages of planning in order to develop great neighborhoods and communities.
For example, we received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to engage the local community in creating Santa Rosa's Railroad Square Station Area Plan. The community spoke out and persuaded the city to approve a plan that will create a friendlier environment for pedestrians and bicyclists, support public transit users and provide more affordable housing near shops and incentives for better-paying jobs.
We've also advocated for green building standards, which is the wave of the future as we cope with climate change.
As a growing coalition of 14 diverse local organizations and committed professional members, we are big enough to attract the interest of developers. We offer to work in collaboration with developers to make better plans that meet more of the community's needs.
For example, we collaborated with Sonoma Mountain Village to improve a re-use project to create good local jobs and strengthen green building standards, while providing a better sense of community with a mix of housing types close to shops and work. Three years of working together is documented in a community benefits agreement that acknowledges our support.
The current Wall Street business model, favoring out-of-state, corporate-owned retail stores harms our local small business retailers.
We believe in community prosperity. We go to bat for locally owned businesses that are active in our community, support local charities and are the drivers of local economic development. We cannot support big-box stores that do not embrace smart growth principles, which pay low wages and minimal benefits to their workers and siphon money out of the local economy to pay their corporate executives millions.
We helped fight off an effort to rezone land designated for affordable housing for yet another unnecessary big-box store near Santa Rosa Avenue. This victory will help retain Friedman's Home Improvement, a family-owned local business that pays living wages, built a prominent community center and continues to be a leader supporting local charities.
The ADC established the following seven founding principles for accountable development to describe a sustainable and equitable development path that will serve the common good and create shared prosperity.
• Create and enforce community standards through development that meets local and regional needs.
• Build mixed-income neighborhoods through the inclusion of affordable housing for all incomes in all residential developments.
• Promote good jobs through family-supporting wages and benefits, job security, the right to organize, job training and local hire.
• Ensure community health and safety through accessible health care, safe working and housing conditions and a healthy neighborhood environment.
• Be environmentally sustainable through good community design, particularly through pedestrian and transit-oriented development, by using green building and environmentally conscious design.
• Build participation and encourage meaningful community involvement and representation in decisions about development.
• Be smart growth and transit-oriented by directing development toward existing communities, creating bike-able, walk-able neighborhoods and providing a range of transportation options.
This is the agenda of the ADC. We are part of a national movement of accountable development advocates that represents an evolutionary advance in public policy we hope to see implemented across the region.
Our goal is to create a policy platform that informs the next generation of public officials and planning staff and helps broaden civic discourse on public policy issues.
Dennis Rosatti, executive director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, and Jack Buckhorn, business manager of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 551, are co-chairmen of the Accountable Development Coalition.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Mayor Squashes Affordable Housing Agreement
Remember this when Newsom claims he supports affordable housing. He quashed an agreement between developers and affordable housing advocates that would have provided $50 million per year for From the 7/9/10 New York Times (Bay Area edition)...
THE BAY CITIZEN
Despite a Rare Pedigree, Plan for Affordable Housing Collapses
By ZUSHA ELINSON
Published: July 8, 2010
The deal was brokered recently in private by an unusual team of rivals, including one of San Francisco’s most prominent developers and a vociferous housing activist. The result, by all accounts, was unprecedented: an estimated $50 million for affordable housing in the city each year.
Enlarge This Image
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
Calvin Welch says politics was Mr. Newsom’s prime consideration.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times.
Enlarge This Image
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Mayor Gavin Newsom scuttled a plan to provide money for affordable housing, saying it lacked broad support.
One developer who participated in the negotiations, which took place over the last six weeks in a City Hall annex, described the agreement as a “once-every-50-years alignment of the planets.”
Last week, however, the ambitious deal — which would have provided financing for affordable-housing projects, and would also have helped developers by subsidizing an affordable-housing requirement — came apart after running into opposition from an unlikely source: Mayor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.
The scuttled initiative, which has not been publicized, left a trail of bitterness and recrimination, much of it directed at Mr. Newsom, whose own aides had helped broker the deal. Three participants who were involved in the discussions said they understood that Mr. Newsom was reluctant to support what amounted to a new tax as he makes a run for statewide office.
“We came up with a plan that addressed a critical need,” said Calvin Welch, the housing advocate who helped broker the deal. “But the only thing that’s critical to Gavin Newsom is becoming lieutenant governor.”
Mr. Newsom, in an interview earlier this week, denied that politics played a role in his decision. The mayor said that he had tentatively supported the initiative, which would have been put before voters in November, as a “serious shift in the way we deal with affordable housing” but that proponents had failed to generate the kind of broad support necessary to gain approval.
“I’m just a convenient excuse right now,” Mr. Newsom said.
The crumbling of the innovative housing initiative underscores a tumultuous relationship between Mr. Newsom and the Board of Supervisors over several new tax measures its members have proposed — as Mr. Newsom campaigns for a statewide office, according to people who participated in meetings about the deal.
The talks, which were spurred by the recession’s crippling effect on new housing, began in May, several months after Mr. Newsom proposed a stimulus package to get development projects restarted.
Mr. Welch, the housing advocate known for his caustic criticism of gentrification, came to the negotiations seeking a fixed stream of financing for affordable housing, which has largely dried up during the recession.
One of city’s largest nonprofit developers, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, has suspended four big projects for low-income families because of a lack of financing.
Oz Erickson, the chief executive of the Emerald Fund, one of the largest developers in San Francisco, came to the negotiations seeking a break from the city’s requirement that developers designate at least 15 percent of all new units to below-market-rate housing.
Mr. Erickson argued that the cost of “inclusionary zoning” — a policy he and Mr. Welch had hammered out in the 1990s, the last time they worked together on legislation — was too burdensome for builders in a recession.
“Right now, it’s terribly difficult to get any financing, and the affordable-housing component is a significant charge,” said Mr. Erickson, whose condominium projects include One Rincon Hill and the Bridgeview Tower.
During the meetings, according to several participants, Mr. Welch thundered about the urgent need for affordable housing, according to participants. As he held forth, Mr. Erickson continually worked his fingers over his ubiquitous HP 12c calculator, crunching the numbers.
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Urban Planning and Research Association, a moderate public policy institute, said negotiators reached “an agreement that would’ve solved both problems.”
The complicated deal would have substantially raised the transfer tax — the tax paid when property is bought or sold — for any building over $875,000. For example, the transfer tax on a home sold for $1.1 million is currently $8,250. With the proposed increase, it would have been $12,650.
That money would have gone into a permanent fund dedicated to affordable housing: Half would have been used for affordable-housing projects, and the other half would have gone to ease the burden on developers by subsidizing the affordable-housing requirement.
The mayor said it was a political rarity for these two rival factions to work together.
“These are strange bedfellows, and they don’t always agree,” Mr. Newsom said. “What was intriguing was that there was a willingness to work this through.”
The negotiations took place in the Mayor’s Office of Housing, two blocks from City Hall, and were mediated by Doug Shoemaker, the office’s director.
Mr. Newsom acknowledged that some of his top aides supported the deal. In the end, he said, he did not believe the measure had enough broad support to succeed. Notably, efforts to placate groups representing landlords and Realtors failed.
“Folks were so consumed with getting something on the ballot for November,” Mr. Newsom said. “But in order to do this we have to build a broad coalition, and, with respect to my friends in the room, they’re not the whole city.”
But Mr. Welch and others familiar with the negotiations said the politics of the moment also weighed heavily. Since announcing earlier this year his entry into the race for lieutenant governor, Mr. Newsom has continued to oppose raising taxes, most recently a series of measures put forward by progressive members of the Board of Supervisors.
Mr. Newsom’s electoral success in November — and perhaps beyond — will depend in part on his ability to broaden his appeal to voters outside San Francisco.
“The mayor’s office sponsored the whole thing, and ultimately the mayor could have stepped up to make it happen,” said Lou Vasquez, a developer with Build, Incorporated, who was in the talks.
“The mechanics seemed to be working out,” Mr. Vasquez said, “but the politics seemed to get in the way.”
Last week, with Mr. Newsom still withholding his support, the deadline to place the affordable-housing measure on the November ballot passed quietly — with the public unaware of the potential deal.
There is now one other proposal from the Board of Supervisors intended to raise money for affordable housing, but it does not have the support of the mayor, the developers or their friends. Sponsored by Supervisor Chris Daly, who has been trying for years to get a permanent source of affordable-housing money, the measure is headed for the ballot in November.
Mr. Newsom said he hoped this idea for a permanent source of financing came back — whether or not he was in office.
“We were up against a deadline, and it wasn’t ready,” Mr. Newsom said. “This idea is not dead.”
His hopes were echoed by Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Welch and others who had tried to make the deal. But they said it had been a rare moment when everything seemed aligned: a recession hurting housing activists and developers enough to bring them both to the bargaining table.
“I personally will work to try to put this deal together again,” Mr. Metcalf said, “but you never know when your window of opportunity for social change will open, and you never know when it will close.”
THE BAY CITIZEN
Despite a Rare Pedigree, Plan for Affordable Housing Collapses
By ZUSHA ELINSON
Published: July 8, 2010
The deal was brokered recently in private by an unusual team of rivals, including one of San Francisco’s most prominent developers and a vociferous housing activist. The result, by all accounts, was unprecedented: an estimated $50 million for affordable housing in the city each year.
Enlarge This Image
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
Calvin Welch says politics was Mr. Newsom’s prime consideration.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times.
Enlarge This Image
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Mayor Gavin Newsom scuttled a plan to provide money for affordable housing, saying it lacked broad support.
One developer who participated in the negotiations, which took place over the last six weeks in a City Hall annex, described the agreement as a “once-every-50-years alignment of the planets.”
Last week, however, the ambitious deal — which would have provided financing for affordable-housing projects, and would also have helped developers by subsidizing an affordable-housing requirement — came apart after running into opposition from an unlikely source: Mayor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.
The scuttled initiative, which has not been publicized, left a trail of bitterness and recrimination, much of it directed at Mr. Newsom, whose own aides had helped broker the deal. Three participants who were involved in the discussions said they understood that Mr. Newsom was reluctant to support what amounted to a new tax as he makes a run for statewide office.
“We came up with a plan that addressed a critical need,” said Calvin Welch, the housing advocate who helped broker the deal. “But the only thing that’s critical to Gavin Newsom is becoming lieutenant governor.”
Mr. Newsom, in an interview earlier this week, denied that politics played a role in his decision. The mayor said that he had tentatively supported the initiative, which would have been put before voters in November, as a “serious shift in the way we deal with affordable housing” but that proponents had failed to generate the kind of broad support necessary to gain approval.
“I’m just a convenient excuse right now,” Mr. Newsom said.
The crumbling of the innovative housing initiative underscores a tumultuous relationship between Mr. Newsom and the Board of Supervisors over several new tax measures its members have proposed — as Mr. Newsom campaigns for a statewide office, according to people who participated in meetings about the deal.
The talks, which were spurred by the recession’s crippling effect on new housing, began in May, several months after Mr. Newsom proposed a stimulus package to get development projects restarted.
Mr. Welch, the housing advocate known for his caustic criticism of gentrification, came to the negotiations seeking a fixed stream of financing for affordable housing, which has largely dried up during the recession.
One of city’s largest nonprofit developers, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, has suspended four big projects for low-income families because of a lack of financing.
Oz Erickson, the chief executive of the Emerald Fund, one of the largest developers in San Francisco, came to the negotiations seeking a break from the city’s requirement that developers designate at least 15 percent of all new units to below-market-rate housing.
Mr. Erickson argued that the cost of “inclusionary zoning” — a policy he and Mr. Welch had hammered out in the 1990s, the last time they worked together on legislation — was too burdensome for builders in a recession.
“Right now, it’s terribly difficult to get any financing, and the affordable-housing component is a significant charge,” said Mr. Erickson, whose condominium projects include One Rincon Hill and the Bridgeview Tower.
During the meetings, according to several participants, Mr. Welch thundered about the urgent need for affordable housing, according to participants. As he held forth, Mr. Erickson continually worked his fingers over his ubiquitous HP 12c calculator, crunching the numbers.
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Urban Planning and Research Association, a moderate public policy institute, said negotiators reached “an agreement that would’ve solved both problems.”
The complicated deal would have substantially raised the transfer tax — the tax paid when property is bought or sold — for any building over $875,000. For example, the transfer tax on a home sold for $1.1 million is currently $8,250. With the proposed increase, it would have been $12,650.
That money would have gone into a permanent fund dedicated to affordable housing: Half would have been used for affordable-housing projects, and the other half would have gone to ease the burden on developers by subsidizing the affordable-housing requirement.
The mayor said it was a political rarity for these two rival factions to work together.
“These are strange bedfellows, and they don’t always agree,” Mr. Newsom said. “What was intriguing was that there was a willingness to work this through.”
The negotiations took place in the Mayor’s Office of Housing, two blocks from City Hall, and were mediated by Doug Shoemaker, the office’s director.
Mr. Newsom acknowledged that some of his top aides supported the deal. In the end, he said, he did not believe the measure had enough broad support to succeed. Notably, efforts to placate groups representing landlords and Realtors failed.
“Folks were so consumed with getting something on the ballot for November,” Mr. Newsom said. “But in order to do this we have to build a broad coalition, and, with respect to my friends in the room, they’re not the whole city.”
But Mr. Welch and others familiar with the negotiations said the politics of the moment also weighed heavily. Since announcing earlier this year his entry into the race for lieutenant governor, Mr. Newsom has continued to oppose raising taxes, most recently a series of measures put forward by progressive members of the Board of Supervisors.
Mr. Newsom’s electoral success in November — and perhaps beyond — will depend in part on his ability to broaden his appeal to voters outside San Francisco.
“The mayor’s office sponsored the whole thing, and ultimately the mayor could have stepped up to make it happen,” said Lou Vasquez, a developer with Build, Incorporated, who was in the talks.
“The mechanics seemed to be working out,” Mr. Vasquez said, “but the politics seemed to get in the way.”
Last week, with Mr. Newsom still withholding his support, the deadline to place the affordable-housing measure on the November ballot passed quietly — with the public unaware of the potential deal.
There is now one other proposal from the Board of Supervisors intended to raise money for affordable housing, but it does not have the support of the mayor, the developers or their friends. Sponsored by Supervisor Chris Daly, who has been trying for years to get a permanent source of affordable-housing money, the measure is headed for the ballot in November.
Mr. Newsom said he hoped this idea for a permanent source of financing came back — whether or not he was in office.
“We were up against a deadline, and it wasn’t ready,” Mr. Newsom said. “This idea is not dead.”
His hopes were echoed by Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Welch and others who had tried to make the deal. But they said it had been a rare moment when everything seemed aligned: a recession hurting housing activists and developers enough to bring them both to the bargaining table.
“I personally will work to try to put this deal together again,” Mr. Metcalf said, “but you never know when your window of opportunity for social change will open, and you never know when it will close.”
Thursday, July 8, 2010
YES IN MY BACK YARD! (From Mother Jones)
ONE OF THE hottest pieces of real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area is a 1,500-acre expanse of concrete, landfill, and asbestos-stuffed warehouses. Shuttered since 1997, the Alameda Naval Air Station occupies one-third of Alameda, an island next door to downtown Oakland known as a time warp to 1950s architecture and Kiwanis Club folksiness. For nearly a decade, the well-heeled enclave has had its eyes on the old air base, now dubbed Alameda Point. And why not? It's smack on the eastern edge of the bay, with spectacular views of the San Francisco skyline, and just minutes from the cities to which suburbanites commute for an hour or more. It's a developer's dream—all the more so because building there would displace little more than a gigantic monthly flea market.
In 2007, developers announced a billion-dollar-plus plan to rebuild Alameda Point. SunCal Companies envisioned a complex featuring 1,000 detached single-family homes, 2,000 townhomes, and 1,000 condos in three-story buildings built with the latest in energy-efficient design: passive solar, geothermal heat pumps, and gray-water systems. Historic buildings would be preserved, and 25 percent of the units would be set aside as affordable housing. There would be 150 acres of parks, miles of trails, shops, and offices, and dedicated ferry and bus lines to Oakland and San Francisco. The local chapter of the Greenbelt Alliance endorsed it, calling it "the epitome of smart growth."
Yet despite its green bona fides—and the promise of adding desperately needed affordable housing in the heart of the Bay Area—environmental activists, the local historic preservation society, and even Alameda's mayor came out against the plan. They argued that the deal gave the developer too much power, could release toxic chemicals, and would "change the character of Alameda." Driving his BMW past the naval base's peeling hangars, David Howard, a 41-year-old Internet marketer and the head of Save Our City! Alameda, stressed that he's "not anti-everything about high density." But he felt that the Alameda Point project didn't go far enough environmentally. Instead, he envisioned transforming the base into a "green technolopolis" that would invent a silver-bullet solution to the climate crisis. His plan didn't include any housing, but there'd be a wind farm, a solar power plant, a factory for the electric carmaker Tesla Motors, and an "ecobranch" of the cash-strapped University of California. "It's a wonderful location," he concluded. "It's a problem that needs to be solved. Why not do it here, in Alameda?"
Advertise on MotherJones.com
The Alameda Point project also brushed up against a nearly 40-year-old density ban, which the Oakland Tribune has called "the 'third rail' of Alameda politics." The popular measure, which effectively caps growth on the island, has helped preserve the city's small-town feel; its population has hovered around 75,000 for decades. To get built, Alameda Point would need an exemption. When the matter was put before Alameda voters this February, an overwhelming 85 percent rejected it.
More than just another triumph of NIMBYism, the failure of Alameda Point is also a lesson in how fighting local growth can undermine the larger environmental values that many NIMBYs believe in. By 2050, the United States can expect to add as many as 200 million people. Demographers predict that they'll require 90 million houses and 140 billion square feet of office and other nonresidential space—the equivalent of replacing all the country's existing buildings. If we keep building in the way we do now, suburbs will gobble up a New Mexico-size amount of open space in the next 40 years. More suburbs mean more freeways and more cars, which means that by mid-century, Americans will clock 7 trillion miles per year—twice as much mileage as we do now. The alternative to this metastasizing, car-dependent sprawl is population density. And that means squeezing more people into cities and inner suburbs like Alameda. According to the Greenbelt Alliance, the Bay Area could absorb another 2 million residents by 2035 without expanding its physical footprint.
Cities are also essential to stemming climate change. As Kaid Benfield, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Smart Growth program explains, "The city is inherently energy efficient. Even the greenest household in an outlying location can't match an ordinary household downtown." Heating an apartment uses as much as 20 percent less energy than heating a single-family home of the same size. Promoting infill development—the practice of filling empty urban space or replacing older buildings with bigger ones—instead of building more subdivisions could effectively conserve the amount of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent some 26 trillion miles of driving. All told, if the United States focuses on increasing urban density, our greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could be as much as 20 percent lower than they'd be in the sprawl scenario.
Yet infill development is often rejected by environmental and sustainability advocates. The chief opponent of a proposal to build taller buildings in downtown Berkeley also heads a group that urges cities "to take real action to address the causes of global warming." The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' hyperliberal wing recently proposed banning new high rises downtown—never mind that these mixed-use buildings would help finance a new public transit hub and a park that the same supervisors support. Last year, wealthy Seattle residents allied with an affordable-housing advocate to scuttle a plan to build new housing next to a light-rail line. Such knee-jerk NIMBYism isn't limited to the West Coast: New York's Long Island Pine Barrens Society is opposing a plan to build a compact, $4 billion "mini-city" on unused hospital grounds that would preserve one-third of its 460 acres as open space.
Walking the anti-density, pro-environment line can be tricky. "Our group is not the most progressive group out there in terms of promoting infill development," concedes Kent Lewandowski, chair of the Northern Alameda County Group of the Sierra Club, which declined to support Alameda Point. "But our group does get it in terms of climate change and the impact of sprawl. It's like we want everything. There is definitely—I won't say hypocrisy—but there is a contradiction of sorts."
ENVIRONMENTALISTS have long had an uneasy relationship with urban density. In what may be the first screed against infill development, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens are cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there." The Sierra Club was born of a desire to escape what John Muir called "the death exhalations that brood in the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves," where "we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves." That ethos fueled the "back to the land" movement, but a less-crunchy variation of it also drove the explosion of commuter suburbs that environmentalists love to hate. A postwar ad for a New York suburb invited buyers to "escape from cities too big, too polluted, too crowded, too strident to call home."
Determined to make cities more livable, environmentalists have promoted parks and public transit, fought freeways and factories, and portrayed developers as the ultimate bad guys. But these well-intentioned efforts to curb the Robert Moses-style excesses of urban development had unintended consequences. Strict limits on building height and attempts to squeeze ever-larger concessions from urban developers (but not suburban ones) drove up the cost of housing in many cities—sending builders and home buyers looking for open space. "It's a situation that has unfairly favored sprawl," says NRDC's Benfield. SunCal developer Pat Keliher says that many of his colleagues simply avoid the cost of battling urban skeptics by building on out-of-town farmland: "It's the old adage—cows don't talk."
Filling in cities instead of building suburbs could save the amount
of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent 26 TRILLION
miles of driving.
In the early '90s, a new movement of architects and planners known as the New Urbanism targeted sprawl by recognizing that cities should grow—but smartly and sustainably. In an effort to bridge the divide between developers and environmentalists, they replaced parking lots and tract houses with compact apartments and pedestrian-friendly streets. Yet some of the most vocal critics of sprawl have been reluctant to embrace this vision. Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz and the Jeremiah of suburban Los Angeles, says, "What the New Urbanists tend to produce are projects that lack one of the pivotal elements of their whole philosophy—that there is no minority, or there is no economic heterogeneity, or there's no mass transit, or there are no jobs."
Holding infill projects to impossibly high standards is an easy way to block them. But NIMBYs' feel-good environmental objections to development can be proxies for less politically correct fears about traffic, low-income neighbors, and falling property values, says Jeremy Madsen, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance. In the case of Alameda Point, he adds, "That's frankly why we wanted to come out with a strong statement of support."
Still, some cities and states have begun to recognize that urban development—even when it's imperfect—is inherently better than the alternative. Since 2007, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has sued or sent warnings to 45 cities for not following a law requiring them to account for their development plans' carbon footprints. He's forced San Bernardino County to mitigate its sprawl with green building technologies and gotten the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton to lift a cap on new housing. In 2008, California passed a landmark law that provides incentives for municipal planners to promote climate-friendly land uses such as building apartments around transit stops. A two-tier permitting system that encourages building in more densely developed areas while increasing oversight on the suburban fringe is in use in Florida, Cape Cod, and Portland, Oregon. New York City now requires its planning commission to approve or deny new buildings in less than seven months, preventing costly, protracted showdowns.
"If true environmentalists do not reject the NIMBYs that are preventing the densification and building of cities," says Andres Duany, the architect who designed Seaside, Florida, a project credited with launching the New Urbanism, "environmentalism itself is going to become questionable." Ultimately, the challenge is figuring out how to address NIMBYs' legitimate local concerns while encouraging them to see the bigger picture. "People have seen such crappy development for so many decades now that they have every right to demand that new development be as sensitive and green as possible," says Benfield. "But I do think the opposition is often misplaced."
By the time David Howard and I wrapped up our tour of the naval base, his green technolopolis pitch had given way to a sort of greatest hits of anti-development arguments: Alameda Point would increase crime and block views. It would displace the rabbits who live by the runway. It was racist, because increased traffic on the island would blow exhaust into minority neighborhoods on the mainland. Not to mention that the whole thing might be wiped out by a New Orleans-style deluge precipitated by our carbon-intensive lifestyle. The polar ice caps are melting, he explained, threatening low-lying areas like Alameda Point. "All the people in there—the low-income people—they're gonna be flooded out!"
Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones.
In 2007, developers announced a billion-dollar-plus plan to rebuild Alameda Point. SunCal Companies envisioned a complex featuring 1,000 detached single-family homes, 2,000 townhomes, and 1,000 condos in three-story buildings built with the latest in energy-efficient design: passive solar, geothermal heat pumps, and gray-water systems. Historic buildings would be preserved, and 25 percent of the units would be set aside as affordable housing. There would be 150 acres of parks, miles of trails, shops, and offices, and dedicated ferry and bus lines to Oakland and San Francisco. The local chapter of the Greenbelt Alliance endorsed it, calling it "the epitome of smart growth."
Yet despite its green bona fides—and the promise of adding desperately needed affordable housing in the heart of the Bay Area—environmental activists, the local historic preservation society, and even Alameda's mayor came out against the plan. They argued that the deal gave the developer too much power, could release toxic chemicals, and would "change the character of Alameda." Driving his BMW past the naval base's peeling hangars, David Howard, a 41-year-old Internet marketer and the head of Save Our City! Alameda, stressed that he's "not anti-everything about high density." But he felt that the Alameda Point project didn't go far enough environmentally. Instead, he envisioned transforming the base into a "green technolopolis" that would invent a silver-bullet solution to the climate crisis. His plan didn't include any housing, but there'd be a wind farm, a solar power plant, a factory for the electric carmaker Tesla Motors, and an "ecobranch" of the cash-strapped University of California. "It's a wonderful location," he concluded. "It's a problem that needs to be solved. Why not do it here, in Alameda?"
Advertise on MotherJones.com
The Alameda Point project also brushed up against a nearly 40-year-old density ban, which the Oakland Tribune has called "the 'third rail' of Alameda politics." The popular measure, which effectively caps growth on the island, has helped preserve the city's small-town feel; its population has hovered around 75,000 for decades. To get built, Alameda Point would need an exemption. When the matter was put before Alameda voters this February, an overwhelming 85 percent rejected it.
More than just another triumph of NIMBYism, the failure of Alameda Point is also a lesson in how fighting local growth can undermine the larger environmental values that many NIMBYs believe in. By 2050, the United States can expect to add as many as 200 million people. Demographers predict that they'll require 90 million houses and 140 billion square feet of office and other nonresidential space—the equivalent of replacing all the country's existing buildings. If we keep building in the way we do now, suburbs will gobble up a New Mexico-size amount of open space in the next 40 years. More suburbs mean more freeways and more cars, which means that by mid-century, Americans will clock 7 trillion miles per year—twice as much mileage as we do now. The alternative to this metastasizing, car-dependent sprawl is population density. And that means squeezing more people into cities and inner suburbs like Alameda. According to the Greenbelt Alliance, the Bay Area could absorb another 2 million residents by 2035 without expanding its physical footprint.
Cities are also essential to stemming climate change. As Kaid Benfield, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Smart Growth program explains, "The city is inherently energy efficient. Even the greenest household in an outlying location can't match an ordinary household downtown." Heating an apartment uses as much as 20 percent less energy than heating a single-family home of the same size. Promoting infill development—the practice of filling empty urban space or replacing older buildings with bigger ones—instead of building more subdivisions could effectively conserve the amount of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent some 26 trillion miles of driving. All told, if the United States focuses on increasing urban density, our greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could be as much as 20 percent lower than they'd be in the sprawl scenario.
Yet infill development is often rejected by environmental and sustainability advocates. The chief opponent of a proposal to build taller buildings in downtown Berkeley also heads a group that urges cities "to take real action to address the causes of global warming." The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' hyperliberal wing recently proposed banning new high rises downtown—never mind that these mixed-use buildings would help finance a new public transit hub and a park that the same supervisors support. Last year, wealthy Seattle residents allied with an affordable-housing advocate to scuttle a plan to build new housing next to a light-rail line. Such knee-jerk NIMBYism isn't limited to the West Coast: New York's Long Island Pine Barrens Society is opposing a plan to build a compact, $4 billion "mini-city" on unused hospital grounds that would preserve one-third of its 460 acres as open space.
Walking the anti-density, pro-environment line can be tricky. "Our group is not the most progressive group out there in terms of promoting infill development," concedes Kent Lewandowski, chair of the Northern Alameda County Group of the Sierra Club, which declined to support Alameda Point. "But our group does get it in terms of climate change and the impact of sprawl. It's like we want everything. There is definitely—I won't say hypocrisy—but there is a contradiction of sorts."
ENVIRONMENTALISTS have long had an uneasy relationship with urban density. In what may be the first screed against infill development, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens are cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there." The Sierra Club was born of a desire to escape what John Muir called "the death exhalations that brood in the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves," where "we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves." That ethos fueled the "back to the land" movement, but a less-crunchy variation of it also drove the explosion of commuter suburbs that environmentalists love to hate. A postwar ad for a New York suburb invited buyers to "escape from cities too big, too polluted, too crowded, too strident to call home."
Determined to make cities more livable, environmentalists have promoted parks and public transit, fought freeways and factories, and portrayed developers as the ultimate bad guys. But these well-intentioned efforts to curb the Robert Moses-style excesses of urban development had unintended consequences. Strict limits on building height and attempts to squeeze ever-larger concessions from urban developers (but not suburban ones) drove up the cost of housing in many cities—sending builders and home buyers looking for open space. "It's a situation that has unfairly favored sprawl," says NRDC's Benfield. SunCal developer Pat Keliher says that many of his colleagues simply avoid the cost of battling urban skeptics by building on out-of-town farmland: "It's the old adage—cows don't talk."
Filling in cities instead of building suburbs could save the amount
of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent 26 TRILLION
miles of driving.
In the early '90s, a new movement of architects and planners known as the New Urbanism targeted sprawl by recognizing that cities should grow—but smartly and sustainably. In an effort to bridge the divide between developers and environmentalists, they replaced parking lots and tract houses with compact apartments and pedestrian-friendly streets. Yet some of the most vocal critics of sprawl have been reluctant to embrace this vision. Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz and the Jeremiah of suburban Los Angeles, says, "What the New Urbanists tend to produce are projects that lack one of the pivotal elements of their whole philosophy—that there is no minority, or there is no economic heterogeneity, or there's no mass transit, or there are no jobs."
Holding infill projects to impossibly high standards is an easy way to block them. But NIMBYs' feel-good environmental objections to development can be proxies for less politically correct fears about traffic, low-income neighbors, and falling property values, says Jeremy Madsen, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance. In the case of Alameda Point, he adds, "That's frankly why we wanted to come out with a strong statement of support."
Still, some cities and states have begun to recognize that urban development—even when it's imperfect—is inherently better than the alternative. Since 2007, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has sued or sent warnings to 45 cities for not following a law requiring them to account for their development plans' carbon footprints. He's forced San Bernardino County to mitigate its sprawl with green building technologies and gotten the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton to lift a cap on new housing. In 2008, California passed a landmark law that provides incentives for municipal planners to promote climate-friendly land uses such as building apartments around transit stops. A two-tier permitting system that encourages building in more densely developed areas while increasing oversight on the suburban fringe is in use in Florida, Cape Cod, and Portland, Oregon. New York City now requires its planning commission to approve or deny new buildings in less than seven months, preventing costly, protracted showdowns.
"If true environmentalists do not reject the NIMBYs that are preventing the densification and building of cities," says Andres Duany, the architect who designed Seaside, Florida, a project credited with launching the New Urbanism, "environmentalism itself is going to become questionable." Ultimately, the challenge is figuring out how to address NIMBYs' legitimate local concerns while encouraging them to see the bigger picture. "People have seen such crappy development for so many decades now that they have every right to demand that new development be as sensitive and green as possible," says Benfield. "But I do think the opposition is often misplaced."
By the time David Howard and I wrapped up our tour of the naval base, his green technolopolis pitch had given way to a sort of greatest hits of anti-development arguments: Alameda Point would increase crime and block views. It would displace the rabbits who live by the runway. It was racist, because increased traffic on the island would blow exhaust into minority neighborhoods on the mainland. Not to mention that the whole thing might be wiped out by a New Orleans-style deluge precipitated by our carbon-intensive lifestyle. The polar ice caps are melting, he explained, threatening low-lying areas like Alameda Point. "All the people in there—the low-income people—they're gonna be flooded out!"
Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones.
Monday, June 14, 2010
HUD: Worst Case Housing Needs
14 June 2010
Worst Case Housing Needs in 2007 The twelfth in a series of annual HUD reports to Congress, Worst Case Housing Needs 2007 finds that in that year, 5.91 million unassisted very low-income households ― or almost 13 million individuals ― paid more than half their monthly income for rent, lived in severely substandard housing, or both. Although relatively stable from 2005 to 2007, there was a 19.6% increase in worst case needs (WCN) households between 2001 and 2005. These families were located in all regions of the country and across central cities, suburbs, and nonmetropolitan areas. The report shows that the supply of affordable and available rental units was insufficient for meeting the housing needs of extremely low-income (below 30% of the area median income) renters.
Follow us on:
93% (5.48 million) experienced severe rent burden; 73% (4.33 million) had extremely low incomes; 37% (2.19 million) had at least one child under 18. Nearly half of these were working the equivalent of full-time and earning at least minimum wage. 404,000 of families with children had an adult with a disability; 20.5% (1.21 million) were elderly, 10% (602,000) were non-elderly disabled, and 32% (1.9) million were classified as other; 2.92 million were non-Hispanic white, 1.35 million were non-Hispanic black, and 1.23 million were Hispanic; and More than 40% of the city dwellers lived in higher poverty neighborhoods, while those living in suburbs and nonmetropolitan areas were in low-poverty neighborhoods. 
You were sent this HUD USER News update because you expressed interest in receiving a weekly email to stay informed of new HUD research and resources. If you no longer wish to receive this email, please send an email to hudusernews@huduser.org with "unsubscribe" as the SUBJECT.
HUD USER
P.O. Box 23268, Washington, DC 20026-3268
1-800-245-2691 | 1-800-927-7589 (TDD) | 202-708-9981 (fax)
HUD USER | P.O. Box 23268 | Washington D.C | DC | 20026-3268
FYI - NY Times Editorial
Excellent editorial in today's NY Times:
Washington too often looks the other way as state governments rob low-income victims of their fair share of federal disaster aid. The Department of Housing and Urban Development did the right thing recently in forcing Texas to revise a $3 billion spending plan for aid provided in the wake of the 2008 hurricanes Ike and Dolly.The storms ravaged the coastal and near-coastal counties, especially Harris, Orange and Galveston. They destroyed thousands of homes, including a large number owned by poor families that didn't have the money to rebuild. Instead of directing the aid to the most-damaged regions and the people with the fewest resources, the Texas plan spread it across the state and gave local planning agencies near carte blanche on how to spend it.Two prominent fair housing groups, Texas Appleseed and the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, filed a complaint with HUD charging that the plan did not adhere to the most basic condition of federal disaster aid, which requires that half of the money be used to benefit low- and moderate-income people. They also argued that it would violate federal civil rights and fair housing laws.After the HUD secretary, Shaun Donovan, took the extraordinary but justified step of rejecting the initial proposal, the state negotiated an agreement with the advocates. The new plan will ensure that 55 percent of the money will be spent to help low- and moderate-income families. More than half the fund will be spent on rebuilding homes, with a fair share allocated to the poorest residents.The state will rebuild all of the desperately needed public housing units that were destroyed in Galveston. Local opposition groups had pressured the city not to rebuild. As part of the agreement, Texas will also create new programs to help low-income and minority residents find housing in less-segregated or storm-vulnerable areas.Thanks to tough bargaining by Secretary Donovan, hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent as Congress intended and fairness requires: helping to rebuild devastated communities and helping the most vulnerable residents rebuild their lives.
David Grabill
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Backyard Cottages as Affordable Housing?
Seattle's backyard cottages make a dent in housing need
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY 5/31/2010
SEATTLE — John Stoeck is building a one-bedroom, 437-square-foot cottage on the spot where his garage stood before a tree fell on it. Construction costs: about $50,000. When the cottage is finished this summer, he plans to rent it for at least $900 a month, which will make a nice dent in his mortgage payments.
His is just one of about 50 tiny cottages sprouting in backyards across the city as it tries to expand affordable housing options in established neighborhoods without resorting to high rises and apartment complexes. The city changed zoning rules to allow cottages in single-family neighborhoods citywide, rejected a proposed cap of 50 cottages a year and helped organize a design competition to spur creation of reasonably priced plans. The point is not just to allow the cottages, but to encourage them.
"I want to preserve rural areas around Seattle, and I don't want the suburbs continuing to march on without any limits. One way to do that is to add more density to these inner-city neighborhoods," says Stoeck, 47, an architect.
Backyard cottages are a promising way to address the need for affordable housing without diminishing the character of urban neighborhoods, and they're creating more options for families who want to live near an elderly parent or adult child. "It's harder and harder for working people to live in the city," says former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, now a fellow at the Harvard University Institute of Politics.
The backyard homes, he says, also help ease traffic jams and reduce pollution.
Seattle tested the backyard cottages initiative in the southeast part of the city starting in 2006, resulting in 28 cottages. It was expanded citywide in December, and 22 more building permits have been issued.
Other cities such as Denver and Faribault, Minn., are allowing for the first time or expanding programs that encourage backyard residences to accommodate growing demand for affordable housing in the wake of the recession and foreclosure crisis.
Unlike attached "granny flats" or basement apartments, backyard cottages are separate buildings, often just a few feet from owners' homes. Once built, owners such as Stoeck either rent out the cottage or rent out their main home and move into the cottage.
Besides expanding housing options, backyard cottages have another benefit: "It's really a way to help people hang on to their homes," says Andrea Petzel, senior urban planner for the city of Seattle. She expects about 40 to be built each year.
The Denver City Council votes next month on a zoning code that for the first time would allow "accessory dwelling units," including detached cottages, in some residential areas.
It would "balance our housing opportunities and at the same time add density" in areas where affordable rentals are scarce, says Peter Park, community planning and development manager.
Faribault, Minn., which has a rental housing shortage, began allowing freestanding backyard dwellings in October.
"It can be a good thing if you have the proper controls in place," zoning administrator Greg Kruschke says.
Santa Cruz, which has some of California's highest housing prices, encourages backyard cottages citywide, and about 40 are built each year. Santa Cruz "did not want to price people out of living here," says Carol Berg, the city's housing and community development manager.
The concept evolved from the carriage houses where employees or extended families lived near grand homes in the early 1900s, says Dana Cuff, professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA. That changed in the 1950s, she says, when the American dream meant owning a single-family home on a big lot.
"We need to adapt our living environment to the kinds of families we have now," Cuff says.
"We have two people working in nearly every household now, so people don't need as big a yard," she says.
Other benefits: Owners' rental income can help fend off foreclosure, and aging parents can move into cottages to maintain their independence, she says.
Backyard cottages "don't suit everyone, but they're really right for some people," Cuff says.
Her view is borne of personal experience: A decade ago, she and her husband moved into one on their property in Santa Monica.
Critics cite privacy concerns
Seattle needs room to grow: Almost two-thirds of the city is zoned for single-family homes. Its population rose from 563,374 in 2000 to 602,000 last year.
Houses are pricey here. The median cost in the fourth quarter of 2009 was $305,500, compared with the national median price of $172,900, the National Association of Realtors says.
Nickels had been intrigued by the idea of backyard cottages for decades before he became Seattle's mayor in 2002 and made it a priority. Opponents argued that it would double the city's density, he recalls, but he felt "there was no excuse other than political cowardice not to move forward."
After the first batch of cottages was built in southeast Seattle, a survey of people who lived near them turned up a surprise: More than half the neighbors didn't know they were there, he says.
Some critics of the Seattle initiative still worry that backyard cottages will clutter neighborhoods, clash with existing homes, create parking shortages and attract irresponsible renters.
Seattle architect and developer Marty Liebowitz says the cottages could rob neighbors of the privacy they want to "barbecue, entertain guests and walk around naked if they're kinky."
Seattle arborist Michael Oxman has another concern: If the idea catches on and many cottages are built, he says, they "would decimate the urban forest of Seattle." Inevitably, he says, trees will be removed to make room for cottages and parking spaces for owners and tenants.
Chuck Cady, who has sold Seattle real estate for 30 years, says cottages probably increase the value of lots where they're built but might hurt the value of homes adjacent to them.
"If you've got a lovely backyard that's totally private, it's worth more than one with a two-story, butt-ugly addition looking down on your backyard," he says.
In Seattle, "none of the worst-case scenarios happened," Petzel says. Getting city permits for a typical single-family home can take about three months, but for cottages the turnaround time can be as short as six weeks, she says.
Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark, a proponent of the initiative, says design standards were written to help ensure neighbors' privacy.
Backyard cottages can be built only on lots of 4,000 or more square feet, height is limited based on lot width, and entrances must face away from neighbors. At least one property owner must live in the main house or cottage.
"Sometimes they actually improve the neighborhood," says Diane Sugimura, Seattle's director of planning and development. "We don't believe the majority of homeowners will choose to do this, but it really provides another option … and it allows you an income source."
'A great spot'
College student Laura Chamberlain, 20, would love to live in a backyard cottage. She's tired of overpriced apartments near campus, and the expansion of Seattle's light rail system makes living away from school more practical, she says.
"A cottage would be a great spot for me while I save enough money to buy a house, and unlike condo living, I might be able to grow my own vegetables," she says.
Stoeck, who shares the main house with his wife, Jennifer, and son Colin, 9, says that because the cottage is just steps from his back door, choosing the right tenant is important. So is keeping his neighbors happy: He gave them a tour of the cottage and assured the people who live next door that his tenant won't be able to see into their home.
"You have to be careful about the context and scale of the neighborhood, but I think the idea is great, and I'd do it again in a second," Stoeck says.
Clark says the economy helped prove cottages' value.
"In a recession people are definitely looking for ways to pay the bills and for lower-cost housing options," she says. "Seattle had an overheated rental market, so folks who had backyard cottages had something that was desirable."
Patrick Leigh, 57, took a different approach to the cottage initiative. He built a bigger new house in front of an existing tiny one on the back of his lot in West Seattle. The houses are for sale. "If people want affordable housing," says Leigh, a land surveyor, "this is one way to help.
"There are tough choices to be made as population increases. Do we really want to keep building out where people have to commute? I think we're better off getting more density in the city."
Less is more for some
Yolinda Ward and Lynn Watkins bought a four-bedroom Craftsman-style house in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood four years ago after falling in love with its architectural details and expansive yard. Soon, the couple decided the house was too big, so they built a 600-square-foot cottage behind and over the existing garage and moved into it. They rent the "big house" to Ward's godson, Erik Norwood, his wife Rebecca and their two children. A friend rents the basement.
Although Watkins, 60, had to forfeit part of her garden space to build the cottage, she loves living in it. "It's easier to clean and everything's right here," she says. The bedroom is on the ground level; upstairs there's a kitchen and living room.
Original designs for the cottage included big windows facing the back door and deck of the "big house," says Ward, 61. They decided to move the windows to overlook the garden and eliminated them on the wall with a view of the big house.
Privacy is important, but being close to her godson's family is part of the appeal, Ward says. She can open a window near her desk and chat with almost-3-year-old Jaeda when she's playing outside. There's a big family meal every other Wednesday.
The cottage cost about $135,000, Ward says, and added about $200 to their mortgage payment — an increase covered by the rent they receive, which also covers increased property taxes. The property, appraised at $560,000 before the cottage was added, now is worth $710,000.
The only drawback the couple can think of is that they don't have room for overnight guests. Watkins still has room for a garden, and the "green" elements they added — including extra insulation, a water heater that kicks in only when hot water is needed and the recycling of runoff water — keep expenses low.
"It's a very easy way to get regular income, and it will pay for itself," Ward says. Strangers sometimes knock on their door to ask about the cottage — and how they can build one, too.
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/2010-05-25-cottages_N.htm
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY 5/31/2010
SEATTLE — John Stoeck is building a one-bedroom, 437-square-foot cottage on the spot where his garage stood before a tree fell on it. Construction costs: about $50,000. When the cottage is finished this summer, he plans to rent it for at least $900 a month, which will make a nice dent in his mortgage payments.
His is just one of about 50 tiny cottages sprouting in backyards across the city as it tries to expand affordable housing options in established neighborhoods without resorting to high rises and apartment complexes. The city changed zoning rules to allow cottages in single-family neighborhoods citywide, rejected a proposed cap of 50 cottages a year and helped organize a design competition to spur creation of reasonably priced plans. The point is not just to allow the cottages, but to encourage them.
"I want to preserve rural areas around Seattle, and I don't want the suburbs continuing to march on without any limits. One way to do that is to add more density to these inner-city neighborhoods," says Stoeck, 47, an architect.
Backyard cottages are a promising way to address the need for affordable housing without diminishing the character of urban neighborhoods, and they're creating more options for families who want to live near an elderly parent or adult child. "It's harder and harder for working people to live in the city," says former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, now a fellow at the Harvard University Institute of Politics.
The backyard homes, he says, also help ease traffic jams and reduce pollution.
Seattle tested the backyard cottages initiative in the southeast part of the city starting in 2006, resulting in 28 cottages. It was expanded citywide in December, and 22 more building permits have been issued.
Other cities such as Denver and Faribault, Minn., are allowing for the first time or expanding programs that encourage backyard residences to accommodate growing demand for affordable housing in the wake of the recession and foreclosure crisis.
Unlike attached "granny flats" or basement apartments, backyard cottages are separate buildings, often just a few feet from owners' homes. Once built, owners such as Stoeck either rent out the cottage or rent out their main home and move into the cottage.
Besides expanding housing options, backyard cottages have another benefit: "It's really a way to help people hang on to their homes," says Andrea Petzel, senior urban planner for the city of Seattle. She expects about 40 to be built each year.
The Denver City Council votes next month on a zoning code that for the first time would allow "accessory dwelling units," including detached cottages, in some residential areas.
It would "balance our housing opportunities and at the same time add density" in areas where affordable rentals are scarce, says Peter Park, community planning and development manager.
Faribault, Minn., which has a rental housing shortage, began allowing freestanding backyard dwellings in October.
"It can be a good thing if you have the proper controls in place," zoning administrator Greg Kruschke says.
Santa Cruz, which has some of California's highest housing prices, encourages backyard cottages citywide, and about 40 are built each year. Santa Cruz "did not want to price people out of living here," says Carol Berg, the city's housing and community development manager.
The concept evolved from the carriage houses where employees or extended families lived near grand homes in the early 1900s, says Dana Cuff, professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA. That changed in the 1950s, she says, when the American dream meant owning a single-family home on a big lot.
"We need to adapt our living environment to the kinds of families we have now," Cuff says.
"We have two people working in nearly every household now, so people don't need as big a yard," she says.
Other benefits: Owners' rental income can help fend off foreclosure, and aging parents can move into cottages to maintain their independence, she says.
Backyard cottages "don't suit everyone, but they're really right for some people," Cuff says.
Her view is borne of personal experience: A decade ago, she and her husband moved into one on their property in Santa Monica.
Critics cite privacy concerns
Seattle needs room to grow: Almost two-thirds of the city is zoned for single-family homes. Its population rose from 563,374 in 2000 to 602,000 last year.
Houses are pricey here. The median cost in the fourth quarter of 2009 was $305,500, compared with the national median price of $172,900, the National Association of Realtors says.
Nickels had been intrigued by the idea of backyard cottages for decades before he became Seattle's mayor in 2002 and made it a priority. Opponents argued that it would double the city's density, he recalls, but he felt "there was no excuse other than political cowardice not to move forward."
After the first batch of cottages was built in southeast Seattle, a survey of people who lived near them turned up a surprise: More than half the neighbors didn't know they were there, he says.
Some critics of the Seattle initiative still worry that backyard cottages will clutter neighborhoods, clash with existing homes, create parking shortages and attract irresponsible renters.
Seattle architect and developer Marty Liebowitz says the cottages could rob neighbors of the privacy they want to "barbecue, entertain guests and walk around naked if they're kinky."
Seattle arborist Michael Oxman has another concern: If the idea catches on and many cottages are built, he says, they "would decimate the urban forest of Seattle." Inevitably, he says, trees will be removed to make room for cottages and parking spaces for owners and tenants.
Chuck Cady, who has sold Seattle real estate for 30 years, says cottages probably increase the value of lots where they're built but might hurt the value of homes adjacent to them.
"If you've got a lovely backyard that's totally private, it's worth more than one with a two-story, butt-ugly addition looking down on your backyard," he says.
In Seattle, "none of the worst-case scenarios happened," Petzel says. Getting city permits for a typical single-family home can take about three months, but for cottages the turnaround time can be as short as six weeks, she says.
Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark, a proponent of the initiative, says design standards were written to help ensure neighbors' privacy.
Backyard cottages can be built only on lots of 4,000 or more square feet, height is limited based on lot width, and entrances must face away from neighbors. At least one property owner must live in the main house or cottage.
"Sometimes they actually improve the neighborhood," says Diane Sugimura, Seattle's director of planning and development. "We don't believe the majority of homeowners will choose to do this, but it really provides another option … and it allows you an income source."
'A great spot'
College student Laura Chamberlain, 20, would love to live in a backyard cottage. She's tired of overpriced apartments near campus, and the expansion of Seattle's light rail system makes living away from school more practical, she says.
"A cottage would be a great spot for me while I save enough money to buy a house, and unlike condo living, I might be able to grow my own vegetables," she says.
Stoeck, who shares the main house with his wife, Jennifer, and son Colin, 9, says that because the cottage is just steps from his back door, choosing the right tenant is important. So is keeping his neighbors happy: He gave them a tour of the cottage and assured the people who live next door that his tenant won't be able to see into their home.
"You have to be careful about the context and scale of the neighborhood, but I think the idea is great, and I'd do it again in a second," Stoeck says.
Clark says the economy helped prove cottages' value.
"In a recession people are definitely looking for ways to pay the bills and for lower-cost housing options," she says. "Seattle had an overheated rental market, so folks who had backyard cottages had something that was desirable."
Patrick Leigh, 57, took a different approach to the cottage initiative. He built a bigger new house in front of an existing tiny one on the back of his lot in West Seattle. The houses are for sale. "If people want affordable housing," says Leigh, a land surveyor, "this is one way to help.
"There are tough choices to be made as population increases. Do we really want to keep building out where people have to commute? I think we're better off getting more density in the city."
Less is more for some
Yolinda Ward and Lynn Watkins bought a four-bedroom Craftsman-style house in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood four years ago after falling in love with its architectural details and expansive yard. Soon, the couple decided the house was too big, so they built a 600-square-foot cottage behind and over the existing garage and moved into it. They rent the "big house" to Ward's godson, Erik Norwood, his wife Rebecca and their two children. A friend rents the basement.
Although Watkins, 60, had to forfeit part of her garden space to build the cottage, she loves living in it. "It's easier to clean and everything's right here," she says. The bedroom is on the ground level; upstairs there's a kitchen and living room.
Original designs for the cottage included big windows facing the back door and deck of the "big house," says Ward, 61. They decided to move the windows to overlook the garden and eliminated them on the wall with a view of the big house.
Privacy is important, but being close to her godson's family is part of the appeal, Ward says. She can open a window near her desk and chat with almost-3-year-old Jaeda when she's playing outside. There's a big family meal every other Wednesday.
The cottage cost about $135,000, Ward says, and added about $200 to their mortgage payment — an increase covered by the rent they receive, which also covers increased property taxes. The property, appraised at $560,000 before the cottage was added, now is worth $710,000.
The only drawback the couple can think of is that they don't have room for overnight guests. Watkins still has room for a garden, and the "green" elements they added — including extra insulation, a water heater that kicks in only when hot water is needed and the recycling of runoff water — keep expenses low.
"It's a very easy way to get regular income, and it will pay for itself," Ward says. Strangers sometimes knock on their door to ask about the cottage — and how they can build one, too.
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/2010-05-25-cottages_N.htm
Friday, March 26, 2010
State Should Resist the 'Housing Cult'
[Shigley's the co-editor/founder of a respected planning journal, the California Planning and Development Report]
18 March 2010
Gov. Schwarzenegger is going around the state urging lawmakers to approve a measure that would provide $200 million in tax credits for homebuyers. The governor claims the measure will save or add thousands of construction jobs.
His claim is hardly new. But is there any real basis for it?
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Newmark posted a blog with the headline, “Don’t Be Brainwashed by the Housing Cult” in which he questioned the assumption that homebuilding is a pillar of the economy. If Newmark is right, it demands a reconsideration of how the government subsidizes home construction.
Specifically, Newmark challenged the statement by Toll Brothers CEO Bob Toll that new home construction directly or indirectly provides one-fifth to one-quarter of all jobs in this country. It was the sort of boast that we hear frequently from the industry. Newmark, however, noted that homebuilding accounted for only 2.5% of GDP last year. Even in early 2006, when homebuilding was booming (and, as it turns out, we were overbuilding by a large amount) the industry amounted to 8% of GDP.
Newmark doesn’t think much of the homebuilding industry’s ongoing demand that the federal government provide subsidies to new home buyers, or of the industry’s pressure on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA to continue supplying taxpayer-guaranteed mortgages to new home buyers. He notes that 14.5% of housing units in the country are sitting vacant, and he concludes, “It seems that the only Americans who really need more new houses are the American home builders.”
I might expect this sort of commentary from an environmentalist or a greenie masquerading as an academic. But Newmark, although a contrarian and a shit-disturber, is no tree-hugger or slow-growther seeking additional government regulation. He’s an unapologetic capitalist, and he has actual facts behind his argument here.
We Californians like to think our state is different. After all, California reliably adds about 500,000 new residents every year. Even last year, when the California economy was in worse shape than at any time since the Depression, the state population grew by 367,000 people, according to Department of Finance. California, the argument goes, will always need additional housing units.
I tend to accept that argument. But if Newmark’s economic analysis is to be believed, the home construction imperative is social, not economic. We should build housing because people need shelter, not in order to employ people.
One year ago, the California Building Industry Association convinced state lawmakers to provide a tax credit of up to $10,000 to buyers of new homes. About 10,000 buyers took advantage of the program, getting themselves an average credit of about $7,000. The CBIA, state lawmakers and Schwarzenegger touted the program as a job-booster. Heck, even I offered a qualified endorsement. Now the CBIA and Schwarzenegger are calling for $200 million of tax credits for the buyers of any home, new or not.
--------Update--------
The governor signed AB 183, the $200 million tax credit, into law on March 25.
-------------------------
However, all of the evidence says that last year’s program did nothing more than permit homebuilders to unload inventory. According to the Economic Development Agency, construction jobs fell by 18% to 570,000 in 2009. The CBIA itself bemoans that housing starts remained at the lowest level ever recorded in 2009.
I’m going to suggest that if the government wants to subsidize new housing, it should fund the units Californians actually need – and not simply toss money untargeted into the market.
And what we need are not the three- and four-bedroom single-family houses that are the specialty of the CBIA’s members. The average household size has been decreasing for years, and the fastest-growing household segment is one- and two-person households: seniors (by 2030, 20% of Californians will be at least 65 years old), singles, childless couples and single people sharing quarters. What these smaller households want are – this is not a big surprise – smaller housing units in convenient locations.
About 57% of California’s housing units are detached single-family houses, according to the Department of Finance’s 2008 California Statistical Abstract. It’s safe to assume that most of these are suburban-style houses that were originally designed for mom, dad and their two or three kids. But this sort of nuclear family will account for only about 25% of California households by 2020. The one- and two-person household is replacing the Leave It To Beaver family. Give these small households 800 to 1,000 square feet of well-designed living space (or un-designed living space, as in a loft), preferably within walking distance of the grocery, a coffee house, the library, a cinema and a park, and these people are as happy as clams.
If the government wants to subsidize new housing, it should aim squarely at the units that we truly need. And it should do so because people need decent shelter, not for any other reason.
– Paul Shigley
18 March 2010
Gov. Schwarzenegger is going around the state urging lawmakers to approve a measure that would provide $200 million in tax credits for homebuyers. The governor claims the measure will save or add thousands of construction jobs.
His claim is hardly new. But is there any real basis for it?
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Newmark posted a blog with the headline, “Don’t Be Brainwashed by the Housing Cult” in which he questioned the assumption that homebuilding is a pillar of the economy. If Newmark is right, it demands a reconsideration of how the government subsidizes home construction.
Specifically, Newmark challenged the statement by Toll Brothers CEO Bob Toll that new home construction directly or indirectly provides one-fifth to one-quarter of all jobs in this country. It was the sort of boast that we hear frequently from the industry. Newmark, however, noted that homebuilding accounted for only 2.5% of GDP last year. Even in early 2006, when homebuilding was booming (and, as it turns out, we were overbuilding by a large amount) the industry amounted to 8% of GDP.
Newmark doesn’t think much of the homebuilding industry’s ongoing demand that the federal government provide subsidies to new home buyers, or of the industry’s pressure on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA to continue supplying taxpayer-guaranteed mortgages to new home buyers. He notes that 14.5% of housing units in the country are sitting vacant, and he concludes, “It seems that the only Americans who really need more new houses are the American home builders.”
I might expect this sort of commentary from an environmentalist or a greenie masquerading as an academic. But Newmark, although a contrarian and a shit-disturber, is no tree-hugger or slow-growther seeking additional government regulation. He’s an unapologetic capitalist, and he has actual facts behind his argument here.
We Californians like to think our state is different. After all, California reliably adds about 500,000 new residents every year. Even last year, when the California economy was in worse shape than at any time since the Depression, the state population grew by 367,000 people, according to Department of Finance. California, the argument goes, will always need additional housing units.
I tend to accept that argument. But if Newmark’s economic analysis is to be believed, the home construction imperative is social, not economic. We should build housing because people need shelter, not in order to employ people.
One year ago, the California Building Industry Association convinced state lawmakers to provide a tax credit of up to $10,000 to buyers of new homes. About 10,000 buyers took advantage of the program, getting themselves an average credit of about $7,000. The CBIA, state lawmakers and Schwarzenegger touted the program as a job-booster. Heck, even I offered a qualified endorsement. Now the CBIA and Schwarzenegger are calling for $200 million of tax credits for the buyers of any home, new or not.
--------Update--------
The governor signed AB 183, the $200 million tax credit, into law on March 25.
-------------------------
However, all of the evidence says that last year’s program did nothing more than permit homebuilders to unload inventory. According to the Economic Development Agency, construction jobs fell by 18% to 570,000 in 2009. The CBIA itself bemoans that housing starts remained at the lowest level ever recorded in 2009.
I’m going to suggest that if the government wants to subsidize new housing, it should fund the units Californians actually need – and not simply toss money untargeted into the market.
And what we need are not the three- and four-bedroom single-family houses that are the specialty of the CBIA’s members. The average household size has been decreasing for years, and the fastest-growing household segment is one- and two-person households: seniors (by 2030, 20% of Californians will be at least 65 years old), singles, childless couples and single people sharing quarters. What these smaller households want are – this is not a big surprise – smaller housing units in convenient locations.
About 57% of California’s housing units are detached single-family houses, according to the Department of Finance’s 2008 California Statistical Abstract. It’s safe to assume that most of these are suburban-style houses that were originally designed for mom, dad and their two or three kids. But this sort of nuclear family will account for only about 25% of California households by 2020. The one- and two-person household is replacing the Leave It To Beaver family. Give these small households 800 to 1,000 square feet of well-designed living space (or un-designed living space, as in a loft), preferably within walking distance of the grocery, a coffee house, the library, a cinema and a park, and these people are as happy as clams.
If the government wants to subsidize new housing, it should aim squarely at the units that we truly need. And it should do so because people need decent shelter, not for any other reason.
– Paul Shigley
Thursday, March 11, 2010
City redresses past discrimination - NY Times
With New Homes, Town Makes Amends for Its Bias
By SUSAN SAULNY NY Times - March 10, 2010
HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — Even though more than 50 years have passed since Sallie Sanders was a confused little girl wondering why her family was kicked out of their house for being on the wrong side of the color line here, the pain seems fresh.
“Just abruptly, we had to end up staying with relatives and friends,” said Ms. Sanders, a retired state worker who is black and who, at age 60, still has trouble recounting the ordeal without breaking into tears. “It was kind of devastating. My parents tried to protect us quite a bit, but I knew something was wrong.”
And something was. In 1971, a federal judge found that this old manufacturing town, five miles from downtown Detroit, had deliberately used urban renewal projects throughout the 1950s and ’60s to obliterate black areas from its two square miles, displacing hundreds of families.
Although the judge, Damon J. Keith, ordered a remedy, and Hamtramck agreed to build new housing, it did not. For decades.
Now, though, in a time of deep recession and a housing slump in one of the most economically depressed states in the country, Hamtramck (pronounced ham-TRAM-eck) is at last fulfilling its legal — and what officials now call moral — obligation to provide affordable housing to the mostly poor families who were dislodged generations ago. And if the plaintiffs in the original class-action lawsuit are no longer living, as in Ms. Sanders’s case, children and grandchildren are eligible.
About 100 houses have been completed for rent or sale, and another 100 are on the way, paid for by a mix of local and state money.
In the last five years, the town began building the new houses, but the project stalled because of the recession. It is only now approaching the final stages of construction, thanks to a recent increase in federal stimulus money. The homes, mostly two- and three-bedroom models, cost $140,000 to $160,000, and subsidies can reduce the price to $100,000; most rentals are in the $400-a-month range, after government assistance.
But beyond the building, Hamtramck has changed in another way, too. According to the Census Bureau, it is now Michigan’s most international and diverse city, having evolved from a town that was 90 percent Polish just 40 years ago. With the changes came new attitudes about how to deal with the past.
Just weeks ago, Ms. Sanders moved into a new ranch-style house on the same street where her family once lived, and Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm personally handed over the keys. As a young lawyer, Ms. Granholm was a clerk to Judge Keith in the late 1980s.
“We went full circle, and it’s pretty wonderful,” said Ms. Sanders, whose parents, now dead, were among the 250 plaintiffs who sued the city. “To acknowledge that, O.K., they were wrong, that gives me a little satisfaction because my parents were mistreated so. I just wish they were here to see it.”
The home building is also what experts call a bittersweet finale to one of the longest-running housing discrimination suits to weave its way through court, having begun in the civil rights era. Beyond its age, the case is also distinctive in that it happened at all. While Hamtramck may be an extreme example, experts said housing discrimination against blacks in the mid-1900s was common, but class-action lawsuits were rare because of their expense and complexity.
Some contend that urban renewal projects were routinely used to demolish black areas, and that most of the housing was never replaced.
“This case is unusual in a good way,” said Victor Goode, a lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Michael Barnhart, an expert on fair-housing law and the lead lawyer in the Hamtramck case, agreed. “This kind of discrimination happened all over the country,” Mr. Barnhart said, citing Chicago, Detroit and other cities.
Over the last 10 years, as the settlement appeared to be coming to fruition, Mr. Barnhart and a local minister, the Rev. Joseph R. Jordan, met with surviving plaintiffs and their families just about weekly, spending hours trying to work out the details of moving hundreds of families back to town, most from Detroit.
“We had tried several times over the years to get something started, but really couldn’t find the funding,” Mr. Barnhart said.
Judge Keith, who now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, called the case “difficult” and “depressing” in an interview. But, he added: “I was there to see Sallie Sanders get the keys. It was meaningful to me as a human being.”
Charnita Monday, 64, is renting one of the new houses. She moved to Hamtramck from Bessemer, Ala., looking for factory work in the late 1960s. The home she bought was among those condemned.
“The judge just kept hammering on the case, and all those years, they wouldn’t let it go,” said Ms. Monday, who is black. “I think an injustice has been righted.”
“I had gotten physically tired, mentally tired and even tired of praying,” she said. “But now, it’s like you got a new life, you know?”
In his 1971 opinion, Judge Keith wrote that testimony showed that Hamtramck officials were well aware of the difficulties their actions caused for blacks, but that they “ignored their requests for assistance, failed to investigate complaints and in no way compensated such displacees for the loss suffered.”
He also chastised the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for approving Hamtramck’s plans and failing to protect the plaintiffs’ rights.
After decades, Hamtramck has an opportunity, however painful, to come to terms with itself.
“Nobody with a conscience wants the burden of this enormous charge of racial discrimination to be hanging over them and who they are,” said Mayor Karen Majewski. “It’s important that we do whatever we can to redeem ourselves, our history and reputation.”
“And it’s been very hard to find a way to do that,” Ms. Majewski said, “because you know what this economy is like.”
Hamtramck, despite its size, has always had a large sense of self and pride — so much so that it refused to be annexed by Detroit like so many other small towns were in the early 1900s, forcing the city to grow around it. As a result, Hamtramck, originally a homogenous village, is now a city within a city, and in the last few decades it has become a first stop for immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen, Albania and Lebanon, among a host of other countries. As of the 2000 census, 41 percent of Hamtramck’s population of 23,000 was foreign-born.
Alongside church bells, the Muslim call to prayer is broadcast by loudspeakers every day. Twenty-five languages are spoken in the public schools.
To Mr. Jordan, the minister, Hamtramck is almost unrecognizable as the same place that tore down his friends’ neighborhoods. “We have made tremendous progress,” he said.
Ms. Monday said she had been distraught after her house was demolished and she had to move her five young children into a small apartment in Detroit, where she lived until her new home became available in 2008.
“When I left, I was bitter,” she said. “It’s a different place now. It’s been good to me, and I’m happy.”
Monday, March 1, 2010
HUD Will Enforce Obligation to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing!
Cities and counties that receive federal funding for housing and community development activities are required to sign a pledge to "affirmatively further fair housing." But that pledge has rarely been enforced by HUD in the roughly 40 years that it's been required. Recently, in a case brought by a fair housing enforcement group, a court found that wealthy Westchester County outside of NY city violated its pledge by allowing areas within the county to restrict development of affordable housing. The court ordered the county to develop a plan to build affordable housing in some of its more exclusive areas like Scarsdale, and to set aside $70 million in funding to assist with the development. The plan proposed late last year by the county provided for 750 units of affordable housing, but was unclear about where the housing would be located, and advocates feared that the county would continue to exclude affordable housing from wealthier neighborhoods, and that HUD would continue to look the other way.
But in a remarkable op ed piece in today's Westchester Journal News, Assistant HUD Secretary John Trasviña slammed the county for continuing to try to evade its affirmative housing pledge. This is a big step forward for HUD. From the op-ed:
"Our nation's commitment to equality can be found in many places in our society — in our history books, in our polling places and our places of employment. Among the most important places it can be found are our homes and neighborhoods, the latter of which fundamentally shape our futures by determining where our children go to school and what jobs are nearby.
"Diverse, inclusive communities offer the most educational, economic and employment opportunities to their residents. They cultivate the kind of social networks our communities and our country need to compete in today's increasingly diverse and competitive global economy. Indeed, studies have proved that students of all races and backgrounds are better prepared for the work force and engage in more complex and creative thinking when they learn in a diverse environment.
"Despite these documented benefits, we know that racially segregated neighborhoods of concentrated poverty resulted not in spite of government — but in many cases because of it. And not just at the federal level. That is why in order to receive federal funds local jurisdictions must analyze and take action to address residential segregation and discrimination. It is this obligation that the court found Westchester County failed to fulfill in a recent case brought by a civil rights organization. To ensure the county did not lose access to millions of federal dollars, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development brought the parties together to reach an agreement in which Westchester would provide 750 affordable, accessible homes over the next seven years in neighborhoods with little racial diversity.
"In the settlement, Westchester agreed to use its legal and financial resources to end practices, such as exclusionary zoning, that limit diversity and follow through on its commitment to promote stable, inclusive communities. HUD expects the county to carry out the letter and the spirit of the settlement."
That's progress!
But in a remarkable op ed piece in today's Westchester Journal News, Assistant HUD Secretary John Trasviña slammed the county for continuing to try to evade its affirmative housing pledge. This is a big step forward for HUD. From the op-ed:
"Our nation's commitment to equality can be found in many places in our society — in our history books, in our polling places and our places of employment. Among the most important places it can be found are our homes and neighborhoods, the latter of which fundamentally shape our futures by determining where our children go to school and what jobs are nearby.
"Diverse, inclusive communities offer the most educational, economic and employment opportunities to their residents. They cultivate the kind of social networks our communities and our country need to compete in today's increasingly diverse and competitive global economy. Indeed, studies have proved that students of all races and backgrounds are better prepared for the work force and engage in more complex and creative thinking when they learn in a diverse environment.
"Despite these documented benefits, we know that racially segregated neighborhoods of concentrated poverty resulted not in spite of government — but in many cases because of it. And not just at the federal level. That is why in order to receive federal funds local jurisdictions must analyze and take action to address residential segregation and discrimination. It is this obligation that the court found Westchester County failed to fulfill in a recent case brought by a civil rights organization. To ensure the county did not lose access to millions of federal dollars, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development brought the parties together to reach an agreement in which Westchester would provide 750 affordable, accessible homes over the next seven years in neighborhoods with little racial diversity.
"In the settlement, Westchester agreed to use its legal and financial resources to end practices, such as exclusionary zoning, that limit diversity and follow through on its commitment to promote stable, inclusive communities. HUD expects the county to carry out the letter and the spirit of the settlement."
That's progress!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
