November 20, 2015
Promoting Opportunity with Development
Enterprise Community Partners have posted Promoting Opportunity Through Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (eTOD): Barriers to Success and Best Practices for Implementation. It opens,
Development patterns directly relate to a community’s strength. Individual families, the local economy, municipal governments and the environment all benefit when well-located housing, jobs and other necessary resources are connected by efficient transportation and infrastructure networks. Equitable transit-oriented development (eTOD) is an important approach to facilitating these connections. This paper defines eTOD as compact, often mixed-use development with multi-modal access to jobs, neighborhood-serving stores and other amenities that also serves the needs of low- and moderate-income people. The preservation and creation of dedicated affordable housing is a primary approach to eTOD, which can ensure that high-opportunity neighborhoods are open to people from all walks of life. eTOD supports the achievement of multiple cross-sector goals, including regional economic growth, enhanced mobility and access, efficient municipal and transportation network operations, improved public health, and decreased cost of living.
Yet it is sometimes difficult for planning agencies, local governments, transit agencies, housing organizations, private developers, and other institutions that influence development to act in concert to overcome barriers to eTOD. Each stakeholder has a unique mission with disparate goals and compliance burdens and must comply with complex and sometimes contradictory rules and regulations. However, improving coordination between these sectors can shift a potentially adversarial relationship into a symbiotic partnership. As the public resources that support transportation and infrastructure networks and housing affordability remain threatened, such efficient coordination is an especially important goal. (5, references omitted)
eTOD has a lot going for it: it’s environmentally responsible, it’s socially responsible, it can promote nice development. It is a shame that it is so hard to pull off. It would be great if HUD could take the lead in promoting eTOD, perhaps in tandem with its recent fair housing initiatives.
November 20, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Friday’s Government Reports Roundup
- According to an October 2015 Department of Labor report, 271,000 jobs were added to the US economy in the month of October and the unemployment rate decreased to 5% from 5.1% in September.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released its ninth edition of its “Supervisory Highlights”, reporting illegal practices that the CFPB discovered between May and August 2015, including mortgage origination and servicing and student loan servicing, among others.
- The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) released report “Realizing the Housing Voucher Program’s Potential to Enable Families to Move to Better Neighborhoods”.
November 20, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
November 19, 2015
Building HOME
The HOME Coalition, a coalition of affordable housing organizations, has posted Building HOME: The HOME Investment Partnerships Program’s Impact on America’s Families and Communities, its 2015 report. I don’t think HOME is a household word, at least when it is in ALLCAPS, so here are the basics, taken from the report:
For over 20 years, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME) has proven to be one of the most effective, locally driven tools to help states and communities provide access to safe, decent, and affordable housing for low-income residents. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reports that since HOME’s authorization in 1990, $26.3 billion in HOME funds have leveraged an additional $117 billion in public and private resources to help build and preserve nearly 1.2 million affordable homes and to provide direct rental assistance to more than 270,000 families. The HOME Coalition estimates that this investment has supported nearly 1.5 million jobs and has generated $94.2 billion in local income.
* * *
With HOME, Congress created a program that provides states and communities with unmatched flexibility and local control to meet the housing needs that they identify as most pressing. HOME is the only federal housing program exclusively focused on addressing such a wide range of housing activities. States and local communities use HOME to fund new production where affordable housing is scarce, rehabilitation where housing quality is a challenge, rental assistance when affordable homes are available, and provide homeownership opportunities when those are most needed. Moreover, this flexibility means that states and communities can quickly react to changes in their local housing markets. (7, emphasis removed)
The report calls attention to the fact that Congress has been making big cuts to HOME funding since 2010. These cuts show the complexities inherent in federal housing policy, coming as they do right on the heels of the creation of the National Housing Trust Fund in 2008.
Congress appears to giveth and taketh away from housing programs in equal measure. As an added bonus for Congress, it taketh away on-budget items (HOME) and giveth off-budget items (NHTF, funded by Fannie and Freddie surcharges), making it an even more politically expedient trade-off. HOME dollars are a lot more flexible than NHTF dollars, so even a dollar for dollar trade has significant downsides for state housing programs. There is a lot not to like about this development in federal housing policy.
November 19, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Thursday’s Advocacy & Think TankRound-Up
- Enterprise Community Partners reports that recent Amendments to the Bipartisan Budget Act underfund critical affordable housing and community development programs.
- National Association of Realtor’s Existing Home Sales reflects price gains in Metro Areas for the third quarter of 2015, NAR also says there are at least 6 Reasons why there will not be another Housing Crisis.
- NYU’s Furman Center releases a Data-Update indicating growth in the income-housing gap for New Yorkers – the data indicates that while median rental prices have increased 14.7% over the last decade income has only increased 2.3%.
- The Pew Research Center reports that despite gains in energy efficiency, American’s are using more energy because their homes are bigger – thus any effort to fight global climate change will require major changes and 2/3rds of Americans apparently agree.
- The Terwilliger Foundation for Housing America’s Families argues that the rental crisis needs to be addressed in order for the economy to grow, therefore the Low Income Housing Credit should be a top priority.
November 19, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
November 18, 2015
Moving To Opportunity
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has posted Realizing the Housing Voucher Program’s Potential to Enable Families to Move to Better Neighborhoods. It opens,
Housing Choice Vouchers help families afford decent, stable housing, avoid homelessness, and make ends meet. They also enable children to grow up in better neighborhoods and thereby enhance their chances of long-term health and success. When African American and Hispanic families use housing vouchers, for example, their children are nearly twice as likely as other poor minority children to grow up in low-poverty neighborhoods and somewhat less likely to grow up in extremely poor areas. Still, 280,000 children in families using vouchers lived in extremely poor neighborhoods in 2014. Vouchers could do much more to help these and other children grow up in safer, low-poverty neighborhoods with good schools.
Public housing agencies have flexibility under current Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program rules to implement strategies to improve location outcomes, and state and local governments could facilitate these efforts. But without changes in federal policy to encourage state and local agencies to take such steps and to modify counter-productive policies — and reliable funding to maintain the number of families receiving HCV assistance and to administer the program effectively — there is little reason to expect better results.
Federal, state, and local agencies can make four sets of interrelated policy changes to help families in the HCV program live in better locations:
- Create strong incentives for state and local housing agencies to achieve better location outcomes;
- Modify policies that discourage families from living in lower-poverty communities;
- Minimize jurisdictional barriers to families’ ability to live in high-opportunity communities; and
- Assist families in using vouchers to rent in high-opportunity areas. (1)
This paper poses a number of concrete policy proposals for HUD to increase choices for voucher recipients. They include giving weight to location outcomes for recipients in measuring local housing agency performance; aligning these goals with the new fair housing rules; and providing incentive payments to local agencies that help voucher recipients move to higher-opportunity areas. (8) There are more concrete proposals in the paper that I leave to the reader to review.
What I like about these proposals is that many of them can be implemented administratively by HUD, just like the fair housing rules were. I hope HUD is giving this paper its full attention — there is a lot of good stuff in it that can help people move to opportunities that they cannot currently access.
November 18, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- Introduction to Special Issue: Government Involvement in Residential Mortgage Markets, W. Scott Frame, Real Estate Economics, Vol. 43, Issue 4, pp. 807–819, 2015 (Paid Access).
- How Does the Federal Reserve’s Large‐Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) Influence Mortgage‐Backed Securities (MBS) Yields and U.S. Mortgage Rates?, Diana Hancock & S. Wayne Passmore, Real Estate Economics, Vol. 43, Issue 4, pp. 855–890, 2015 (Paid Access).
- Property Rebels: Reclaiming Abandoned Bank-Owned Homes for Community Uses, Valerie Schneider, American University Law Review, Vol. 65, Issue 2, Forthcoming.
- Is an Apartment a Nuisance?, Michael Lewyn, 43 Real Est. L.J. 509 (2015).
- Helping the Middle-Class: How Interest Rates Affect the Distribution of Housing Wealth, Isaac Hacamo.
- Urbanization and Property Rights, Yongyang Cai, Harris Selod & Jevgenijs Steinbuks, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 7486.
- Crowdfunding the City: The End of ‘Cataclysmic Money’?, David S. Bieri.
- The Role of Property Rights in the Debate on Large-Scale Land Acquisitions, Olivier De Schutter.
- Using Urban Agriculture to Grow Southern New England, Laurie J. Beyranevand, Sara C. Bronin, Marie Mercurio & Sorell E. Negro, Connecticut Planning, SNEAPA 2015.
November 18, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
November 17, 2015
Housing Affordability in NYC
The Citizens Budget Commission has released Whose Burden Is It Anyway? Housing Affordability in New York City by Household Characteristics. The CBC produced some interesting and counterintuitive policy briefs last year, in which it
examined housing affordability across large U.S. cities to assess New York’s situation in a broader context. Using federal data sources, CBC found that while many New Yorkers face high rents, and the share of households who are “rent burdened” (paying more than 30 percent of income toward rent) grew between 2000 and 2012, the city ranks near the middle among 22 large cities in the share of rent-burdened households. A second analysis revealed New York has the lowest transportation costs among the 22 cities studied due to the large proportion of residents who commute via mass transit. When housing and transportation costs are combined, the city rises from 13th to 3rd place in affordability. The average New York household pays 32 percent of its income towards housing and transportation costs, well within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) affordability guideline of 45 percent. CBC also examined how some “typical” households (as defined by HUD) fared in terms of housing and transportation costs in the same group of cities. In this analysis, low income households in New York also ranked relatively well despite facing serious rent burdens. (1)
The current CBC report looks at NYC rent burdens in greater detail. Key findings include,
- Forty-two percent of New York City’s renter households are “rent burdened;” that is, adjusting for actual rent paid by each household (“out-of-pocket contract rent” plus utility costs) and food stamp benefits, they pay more than 30 percent of income in rent.
- Half of rent burdened households are severely rent burdened, paying more than 50 percent of income in rent. Ninety-four percent of these severely rent-burdened households are low income.
- Low-income severely burdened households are disproportionately comprised of singles and seniors. They are also disproportionately households with children and located in the outer boroughs. (2)
CBC adjusts rent to take into account subsidies and familial support. Some will disagree with adjustments of this type, but I think it is a pretty reasonable approach. When combined with the adjustments it made for transportation costs, CBC has produced a textured portrait of the state of housing affordability in NYC.
November 17, 2015 | Permalink | No Comments
