Tag Archives: fair housing

Affirmatively Furthering Neighborhood Choice

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Professor Kelly

Professor Kelly

Jim Kelly has posted Affirmatively Furthering Neighborhood Choice: Vacant Property Strategies and Fair Housing to SSRN (forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review). He writes,

With the Supreme Court’s Inclusive Cmtys. Project decision in June 2015 and the Obama Administration’s adoption, the following month, of the Final Rule for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, local government accountability for ending segregation and resolving the spatial mismatch between affordable housing and economic opportunity has been placed on a more solid footing. Instead of being responsible only for overt, conscious attempts to harm protected groups, jurisdictions that receive money from HUD will need to take a hard look at their policies that perpetuate the barriers to housing opportunity for economically marginalized protected groups. The duty to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing, although somewhat aspirational in its formulation, requires HUD grant recipients to engage with fair housing issues in a way that the threat of litigation, even disparate impact litigation, never has.

For cities struggling with soft residential real estate markets, HUD’s concerns about land use barriers to affordable housing may seem tone deaf. Advocates challenging exclusionary policies have often focused on cities with high housing costs. Even a city with large vacant problems, such as Baltimore, was sued primarily because of its location with a strong regional housing market. But, concerns about social equity in revitalizing communities make the Final Rule’s universal approach to AFFH very relevant to cities confronting housing abandonment in its older, disinvested neighborhoods. This Articles has shown that attention to the Final Rule’s new Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) reporting system is warranted both as a protective measure and as an opportunity to advance core goals of creating and sustaining an attractive and inclusive network of residential urban communities. (30-31)

For those of us who have trouble parsing the contemporary state of fair housing law in general and the AFFH rule in particular, the article provides a nice overview. And it offers insight into how fair housing law can help increase “the supply of decent, affordable housing options to members of protected groups . . .” (2) Not a bad twofer for one article.

Race, Poverty and Housing Policy

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Signing of the Housing and Urban Development Act

Signing of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965

Ingrid Gould Ellen and Jessica Yager of NYU’s Furman Center contributed a chapter on Race, Poverty, and Federal Rental Housing Policy to the HUD at 50 volume I have been blogging about. It opens,

For the last 50 years, HUD has been tasked with the complex, at times contradictory, goals of creating and preserving high-quality affordable rental housing, spurring community development, facilitating access to opportunity, combating racial discrimination, and furthering integration through federal housing and urban development policy. This chapter shows that, over HUD’s first 5 decades, statutes and rules related to rental housing (for example, rules governing which tenants get priority to live in assisted housing and where assisted housing should be developed) have vacillated, reflecting shifting views about the relative benefits of these sometimes-competing objectives and the best approach to addressing racial and economic disparities. Also, HUD’s mixed success in fair housing enforcement—another core part of its mission—likely reflects a range of challenges including the limits of the legal tools available to the agency, resource limitations, and the difficulty of balancing the agency’s multiple roles in the housing market. This exploration of HUD’s history in these areas uncovers five key tensions that run through HUD’s work.

The first tension emerges from the fact that housing markets are local in nature. HUD has to balance this variation, and the need for local jurisdictions to tailor programs and policies to address their particular market conditions, with the need to establish and enforce consistent rules with respect to fair housing and the use of federal subsidy dollars.

The second tension is between serving the neediest households and achieving economic integration. In the case of place-based housing, if local housing authorities choose to serve the very poorest households in their developments, then those developments risk becoming islands of concentrated poverty. Further, by serving only the poorest households, HUD likely narrows political support for its programs.

The third tension is between serving as many households as possible and supporting housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Unfortunately, in many metropolitan areas, land—and consequently housing construction—is significantly more expensive in the higher-income neighborhoods that typically offer safer streets, more extensive job networks and opportunities, and higher-performing schools. As a result, a given level of resources can typically house fewer families in higher-income areas than in lower-income ones.

The fourth tension is between revitalizing communities and facilitating access to high-opportunity neighborhoods. Research shows that, in some circumstances, investments in subsidized housing can help revitalize distressed communities and attract private investment. Yet, in other circumstances, such investments do not trigger broader revitalization and instead may simply constrain families and children in subsidized housing to live in areas that offer limited opportunities.

The final apparent tension is between facilitating integration and combating racial discrimination. Despite the Fair Housing Act’s (FHA’s) integration goal, legal decisions, which are discussed further in this chapter, have determined that the act’s prohibition on discrimination limits the use of some race-conscious approaches to maintaining integrated neighborhoods.

To be sure, these tensions are not always insurmountable. But addressing all of them at once requires a careful balancing act. The bulk of this chapter reviews how HUD programs and policies have struck this balance in the area of rental housing during the agency’s first 50 years. The chapter ends with a look to the challenges HUD is likely to face in its next 50 years. (103-104, citation omitted)

The chapter does a great job of outlining the tensions inherent in HUD’s broad mandate. It made me wonder, though, whether HUD would benefit from narrowing its mission for the next 50 years. If it focused on assisting more low-income households with their housing expenses (for example, by dramatically expanding the Section 8 housing voucher program and scaling back other programs), it might do that one thing well rather than doing many things less well.

The Founding & Evolution of HUD

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Omer Wazir

I had previously blogged about HUD at 50, a hefty tome filled with a lot of interesting chapters. Today, I focus on Chapter 1, written byJill Khadduri, The Founding and Evolution of HUD: 50 Years, 1965-2015 (starting at page 5). The abstract for the chapter reads,

This is an institutional history of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), focused on the development of HUD’s major policies and programs over the 50 years from its founding in 1965 to 2015. The chapter emphasizes how the successive secretaries of HUD and the political administrations they operated within shaped the agency and its programmatic responses to housing and urban issues. It attempts to place the evolution of HUD within the contexts of the housing, housing finance, and community development industries; other governmental institutions, including the U.S. Congress and other levels of government; and the most urgent housing and urban problems perceived during each secretary’s tenure. This chapter benefits from hindsight on which policies and programs appear to have had lasting importance. However, it does not focus on the outcomes of HUD policies and is not an assessment of HUD’s effectiveness in dealing with the issues of poverty, urban distress, housing quality and affordability, and fair housing over the past 50 years. (5)

There will be a lot that is familiar to housing nerds in this chapter, but its real value lies in putting all of the pieces together in a coherent narrative, charting the big changes in federal housing policy. How was federal housing policy related to urban policy? How was housing policy related to housing finance policy?  Where do Community Development Block Grants fit in?  How about housing vouchers? Fair housing policy? Enterprise Zones and Empowerment Zones? How important was homeownership vis-à-vis rental housing policy? When did special needs populations and the homeless get more resources? How did large-scale disaster relief fit into HUD’s mission? These issues, and more, are addressed and placed in broader context. Bottom line for housing nerds and aspiring housing nerds: read it, or at least skim it.

Housing Policy and Economic Mobility

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Pamela Blumenthal

Pamela Blumenthal

John McGinty

John McGinty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pamela Blumenthal and John McGinty of the Urban Institute have written an interesting research report, Housing Policy Levers to Promote Economic Mobility. I generally believe that housing policy should be designed to assist low- and moderate-income households live in safe, decent and affordable housing, but I rarely consider how housing policy can actually help low- and moderate-income households become upwardly mobile. This report does just that and concludes,

At a time of growing income and wealth inequality, economic mobility provides a frame through which to consider the potential of housing policy to change the trajectories of individuals and communities. Economic mobility is about the opportunities individuals have to improve their economic well-being and requires education and other skill acquisition, available jobs, transportation networks, and other resources. Stable housing with access to those components gives low-income and minority individuals and families a chance to climb out of poverty. The current structures too often constrain individual choice because families cannot find affordable housing near a good school or in a safe neighborhood.

National policies that enforce fair housing, more fairly distribute tax benefits, and invest in people and places that have long suffered from disinvestment can begin to change the trajectory. State policies that fund affordable housing production and preservation in location-efficient areas and create requirements or incentives for local jurisdictions to integrate affordable housing throughout the community can also help.

To truly move the needle in promoting upward mobility, however, housing policy may need to adopt a lens through which programs are adopted, implemented, and evaluated based on their ability to promote upward mobility. Just as initial concerns about housing quality in the 1930s gave way to a focus on affordability in federal housing policy, another transition may be occurring. This goes beyond recognizing that a stable, safe, affordable home is critical to healthy development and well-being, to addressing the important role that neighborhood context plays—particularly for children. The importance of enabling all families to live in neighborhoods where they have access to jobs, good schools, parks, and other community resources and are free from violence, toxins, noise, and other harmful environments may become future federal housing policy. (41)

I don’t think that there is anything earth-shattering in this report, but it does focus attention on housing policy in a fruitful way.

Moving To Opportunity

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Mount Laurel

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.

Friday’s Government Reports

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  • The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that it plans to expand the Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative into 18 additional Metropolitan areas -the program gives community organizations an “advanced first look” opportunity to purchase foreclosed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac properties, before they are offered to the general public. This interactive map provides more detail about the 18 Metropolitan areas targeted by the program.
  • FHFA has also released it’s Annual Housing Report for the 2014 activities of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac – in 2014 they acquired $584 billion of loans on single-family owner-occupied housing and provided funding for 738,466 multifamily rental units in 2014.
  • U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) releases it’s 50th Anniversary Commemorative Book, in which NYU’s Furman Center Contributes a chapter, Race, Poverty & Federal Rental Housing Policy discussing the key goals of the agency, evaluating its progress and identifying “key tensions running through its work.”  In another Chapter, Housing Finance in Retrospective authors Wachter & Acolin trace the impact of HUD on the U.S. market.

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnthony22 at English Wikipedia [GFDL (https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling in Westchester v. HUD, No. 15-2294 (Sept. 25, 2015) the longstanding case regarding whether Westchester County has “adequately analyzed — in its applications for HUD funds — impediments to fair housing within the County’s jurisdictions.” (3) The Second Circuit affirmed the District Court’s judgment in favor of HUD, which means that HUD’s withholding of funds under the Community Planning and Development (CPD) Formula Grant Programs stands.

HUD withheld those funds because it found that the County had failed to “assess the impediments to fair housing choice caused by local zoning ordinances or to identify actions the County would take to overcome these impediments.” (6) HUD further found, as a result that the County would not “affirmatively further fair housing” as required by the Fair Housing Act. (6)

The case resolved a narrow, legalistic question:

May HUD require a jurisdiction that applies for CPD funding to analyze whether local zoning laws will impede the jurisdiction’s mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing”? Because HUD may impose such a requirement on jurisdictions that apply for CPD funds, and because the decision to withhold Westchester County’s CPD funds in this case was not arbitrary or capricious, we conclude that HUD’s action complied with federal law. (50)

While the case was decided on narrow grounds, the Court does notes that

The broader dispute between the County and HUD implicates many “big‐picture” questions. Beyond prohibiting direct discrimination based on race or other protected categories, what must a jurisdiction do to “affirmatively further fair housing”? What is the difference, if any, between furthering “fair” housing and furthering “affordable” housing? How much control may HUD exert over local policies, which, in its view, impede the creation of “fair” or “affordable” housing? And if conflicts of this sort between HUD and local governments are to be avoided, is the simplest solution to avoid applying for federal funds in the first place? (32)

These are all very good questions and it is unfortunate that this case does not help to answer any of them. The level of segregation in the United States by race has been a tragedy for many, many decades and we are no closer to figuring out how to deal with it after all these years.