Author Archives: David Reiss

A Different Approach to Homelessness

Posted on by
JCS

Pacific Palisades Coast near Porto Marina

The Christian Science Monitor quoted me in In One California Community, a Different Approach to Homelessness. It reads, in part,

On a sunny morning in the beachfront community of Pacific Palisades, Steven “Boston” Michaud perches confidently on a large dock tie just above the sand. He waves vaguely at the hills above the Pacific Coast Highway, indicating where he sleeps. “It’s up there, but you’ll never see me,” he says, pointing to his own shadow on the ground, “because I’m a shadow and I don’t bother anyone.”

Mr. Michaud is one of about 170 homeless people in Pacific Palisades, an affluent waterfront neighborhood in Los Angeles. Pacific beaches have long been a magnet for the homeless from around the world.

Overall, California experienced the second-largest increase in the number of homeless people (1,786 individuals) among the 50 states this past year, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. As their ranks have swelled, some homeless people have edged out of the shadows and have taken up in tidier areas in the Golden State. That, in turn, has attracted the attention of residents – especially when crimes have occurred.

Even Michaud isn’t as invisible as he says he is. A local supermarket took out a restraining order against him.

 By and large, California has been dealing with these issues from a legal standpoint. In general, cities in the state have more anti-homeless laws than cities in other states, with an average of almost nine such laws in each of 58 Golden State cities, according to a report by the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law.

But some communities in the state think that too much emphasis has been put on law enforcement to deal with homelessness – and not enough on other approaches that account for the needs of homeless people and try to address the root causes of the problem. These places are thus coming up with a new generation of creative ways to deal with the persistent problem of homelessness. Pacific Palisades, which is trying out a private, philanthropic approach, is one of these communities.

*      *      *

Private philanthropy in support of community needs is not new, says Mr. Berg of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. But what is new and less common in dealing with homelessness, he says, “is the organized approach to philanthropy at the local level.”

While she applauds the ambition of the effort, Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, has concerns about the implications of a privatization approach. “The government’s role is to provide for public needs in critical times,” she says, adding, “This just serves as yet another example of the government stepping away from that role.”

Beyond that, there is the question of who can afford to duplicate the Palisades approach. Raising enough money to hire social services staff is beyond the reach of many communities, says Brooklyn Law School professor David Reiss, who specializes in housing policies. “So it is unlikely that Pacific Palisades is going to start a big trend, but a well-intentioned program could be effective locally, like many other community-based initiatives.”

HUD at 50

Posted on by

United States Dept of Housing and Urban Development by Tim1965

The Office of Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued HUD at 50: Creating Pathways to Opportunity. It is a massive tome, with a lot of interest in it for the housing geeks among us. In the Preface, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development Lynn Ross writes,

This volume looks back on HUD’s history and looks forward to ways the agency might evolve. If you are familiar with the mission and the work of PD&R, you will not be surprised to learn that this book includes thorough analyses of not only how programs succeeded, but also how they sometimes fell short and what was done in response. I hope you will take the time to engage with the analysis and ideas contained throughout this volume. We’ve organized this book so you can read the thematic chapters in any order—although you can certainly read it cover to cover.

Given that HUD at 50 is more than 250 pages long, only the most dedicated among us will do so. Nonetheless, it is worth skimming the table of contents to see if any of the entries are worth reading in full:

  • Introduction by Julián Castro
  • Chapter 1 The Founding and Evolution of HUD: 50 Years, 1965–2015 by Jill Khadduri
  • Chapter 2 Race, Poverty, and Federal Rental Housing Policy by Ingrid Gould Ellen and Jessica Yager
  • Chapter 3 Urban Development and Place by Raphael W. Bostic
  • Chapter 4 Housing Finance in Retrospect by Susan Wachter and Arthur Acolin
  • Chapter 5 Poverty and Vulnerable Populations by Margery Austin Turner, Mary K. Cunningham, and Susan J. Popkin
  • Chapter 6 Housing Policy and Demographic Change by Erika Poethig, Pamela Blumenthal, and Rolf Pendall
  • Conclusion Places as Platforms for Opportunity: Where We Are and Where We Should Go by Katherine M. O’Regan

I will take a closer look at some of these chapters in the coming days, but feel free to dip in before I do!

The Semi-State of the CFPB

Posted on by

Cordray Speech

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its Semi-Annual Report for the period ending September 30th. I think that it is a dog-bites-man type of report as far as mortgages are concerned. A lot of the heavy lifting on mortgages has already been done over the last few years with the issuance of various major rules, although the Bureau did issue a lot of proposed mortgage rules with smaller scopes during this period (see pages 89-90).  The Bureau now seems to be mostly in an enforcement mode as far as mortgages are concerned (see pages 103-119 for an overview of 45 recent enforcement actions). The report also provides pretty comprehensive lists of its significant activities in its appendices:

  • Appendix B:  Statutory reporting requirements
  • Appendix C:  Significant rules, orders, and initiatives
  • Appendix D:  Actions taken regarding rules, orders, and supervisory actions with respect to covered persons which are not credit unions or depository institutions
  • Appendix E:  Significant state attorney general and regulator actions
  • Appendix F:  Reports
  • Appendix G:  Congressional testimony
  • Appendix H:  Speeches

I leave you with an interesting chart from the report:

Types of Mortgage Complaints (from about 50,000 total)                           %

  • Problems when you are unable to pay (e.g., foreclosure)  45%
  • Making payments (e.g., loan servicing)  37%
  • Applying for the loan (e.g., mortgage broker)  9%
  • Signing the agreement (Settlement process and costs)  5%
  • Receiving a credit offer (Credit decision/Underwriting)  3%
  • Other  2%

Total mortgage complaints                                                                    100%

The Marvel of NYC’s Water Supply

Posted on by

Rocket Thrower & Unisphere by Jim Henderson

Another school holiday, another museum. The family and I went to the Queens Museum. Although I am a lifelong New Yorker, I had never been there before. It is a great, small museum, with just a few galleries. It is right smack in the middle of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The museum is a stone’s throw of the majestic Unisphere, which is even more amazing from close up. We had gone to see the survey of Zhang Hongtu‘s work, which was very good. But readers of this blog would likely be more interested in two exhibits on long-term loan to the museum. The first is From Watersheds to Faucets: The Marvel of New York City’s Water Supply System:

For the 1939 World’s Fair, city agencies were invited to produce exhibits for the New York City Pavilion, now the Queens Museum. Each exhibit shared “what the various branches of municipal government are doing to serve the citizens of today.”

To educate New Yorkers about the water supply system, the Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity, created the relief map now displayed at the Queens Museum. A team of cartographers began work in 1938 with a depression-era budget of $100,000, roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars. But at 540 square feet, the model was too big for the allotted space. Ten years later, it made its only public appearance in the City’s Golden Anniversary Exposition at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace.

In 2008, after decades in storage, the 27-piece relief map was in desperate need of conservation. The model was sent to McKay Lodge Fine Arts Conservation Lab in Oberlin, Ohio and restored to its original brilliance. In collaboration with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, it will now remain on long-term loan in its originally intended home in the New York City Building.

The second exhibit is pretty famous and it is very cool to see up close: the Panorama of the City of New York, the biggest full-scale architectural model in the world. The Panorama was commissioned for the 1964 World’s Fair. The museum has kept the Twin Towers on the Panorama, which is pretty powerful, once you notice it.

The two exhibits together give you a sense of the grandeur of a world-class city both in itself and within its broader physical context. Another thing to put on your NYC bucket list.

Thanks

Posted on by

Garrison Keillor by Jonathunder

A poem, by Garrison Keillor:

I am thankful for ATM machines
For the smell of coffee beans
For the dishwasher and for the GPS
Thought up by the Pentagon, a great success
That makes it unnecessary for us men
To ever need to ask for directions again.

Thank you thank you thank you thanks a lot
For what we have and for some things that we do not

I am thankful for macaroni and cheese,
Of mac and cheese I have only good memories
Boil water. Put the macaroni in. It’s
A very nice meal in about ten minutes.

And speaking of food of low status,
Thank you for instant mashed potatoes
Which is simply dehydrated potato flakes.
Mashed potatoes in one-tenth the time it takes
To boil one and whip it up nice and smooth.
And if you want to know the absolute truth
That dry organic peanut butter I hate it.
I like the kind with sugar and fat, saturated.

Thank you thank you thank you and merci
Peanut butter has always been merciful to me.

And for the U.S. Postal Service I say thanks
Delivering mail from Florida to Fairbanks,

I am grateful for blogs and other new media
And of course for the miraculous Wikipedia
Which puts information at your fingertips
An innovation as great as sailing ships,
Or putting a steam engine on the rails,
So thank you Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.
And thank you Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Who in 1997 launched a search engine
Google, which simply is superb
A noun that quickly became a verb.

Affordable New York

Posted on by

Beyond My Ken

I just came back from a great couple of exhibits at the Museum of the City of New York that would be of great interest to the readers of this blog. The first, Affordable New York: A Housing Legacy, provides a history and education of affordable housing programs that have been integral to the development of the City:

New York City has a long history of creating below-market housing for its residents. Today the city offers subsidized housing to families across a wide economic spectrum; more than 400,000 in public housing, and many more in privately or cooperatively owned apartments. With affordable housing a cornerstone of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, New York’s housing legacy—often overlooked and little understood—is more relevant than ever.

Affordable New York traces over a century of affordable housing activism, documenting the ways in which reformers, policy makers, and activists have fought to transform their city. A focus on current and future housing initiatives demonstrates how New Yorkers continue to promote subsidized housing as a way to achieve diversity, neighborhood stability, and social justice.

The exhibit has a lot of good pictures that give a sense of the range of options that exist for affordable housing development. It also provides a condensed history of the NYC experience with subsidized housing.

The other exhibit, Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, is a bit more somber, but when viewed in the context of the first it shows the great progress we have made in providing decent housing to a broader range of City residents:

Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a pioneering newspaper reporter and social reformer in New York at the turn of the 20th century. His then-novel idea of using photographs of the city’s slums to illustrate the plight of impoverished residents established Riis as forerunner of modern photojournalism. Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half features photographs by Riis and his contemporaries, as well as his handwritten journals and personal correspondence.

This is the first major retrospective of Riis’s photographic work in the U.S. since the City Museum’s seminal 1947 exhibition, The Battle with the Slum, and for the first time unites his photographs and his archive, which belongs to the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.

The pictures of the homeless kids are heartbreaking — Newsies without the songs — and the recreation of one of Riis’ public talks is pretty extraordinary. The shows are running for a few more months, so there is still plenty of time to see them.

NINYBY

Posted on by

human-592734_1920

A propos of yesterday’s post on the great paradox of housing policy — people say that they want restrictive land use policies which limit the construction of new housing at the same time that they say that they want more affordable housing in their communities — I present Exhibit 1: Votes by Community Boards Running Strongly Against de Blasio Affordable Housing Proposals. This document provides evidence that people are strongly opposed to affordable housing in their own communities while bemoaning the lack of affordable housing in nearby communities. This state of affairs is so extreme that it deserves its own acronym, Not in New Yorkers Backyards, or NINYBY.

This document was produced by New York Law School’s CityLand periodical and it discusses a

comprehensive chart tracking every vote taken by community boards citywide on the ZQA and MIH text amendments. On September 21, 2015, the City Planning Commission referred for public review the Zoning for Quality and Affordability (ZQA) and Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) citywide text amendments. Since the public review process has begun, community boards across the city have met to discuss and vote on each of the two proposals. All 59 New York City Community Boards have until November 30th to vote on two citywide text amendments.

CityLand has created a comprehensive citywide chart that is tracking every community board action taken on ZQA and MIH.

*     *     *

Thus far, an overwhelming number of community boards have voted against both of these proposals, with MIH doing marginally better than ZQA. Within the boards themselves, the votes have been lopsided, with several recording unanimous votes against. Most Boards have backed up the votes with statements expressing their reasons for opposition. Some Boards that approved the measures included stipulations to the Yes votes.

New York City is never going to even begin to address its affordable housing issue if it does not implement policies like these proposed by the de Blasio Administration. Those who oppose these policies should at least admit that much is true.