- Corelogic’s Second Quarter U.S. Equity Report indicated that over three-quarters-of -a-million properties regained equity, while 4.4 million remain in negative equity over the same period. Aggregate negative equity fell $28 billion from $338 billion to $309 billion. According to Corelogic this reduction is caused both by foreclosure completions and home price appreciation.
- According to a study by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) new home construction is trailing job growth in major metro areas. NAR sees this as the primary reason for the affordability crisis now gripping the nation in many of the same areas.
- The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) against certain real estate agencies and individual realtors who are alleged to have treated black and latino buyers in Jackson Mississippi in drastically different ways than they treated equally qualified white buyers. According to the NFHA complaint white buyers were shown a wider variety of homes while black and latino purchasers were largely steer into majority minority neighborhoods.
- The NHFA, in a related vein, also released a study entitled Where You Live Matters – 2015 Fair Housing Trends Report which draws a stark parallel between the historic lack of investment in communities of color and the racial disparities in educational, social, and economic outcomes that have resulted.
- NYU’s Furman Center has released a Brief entitled Black and Latino Segregation and Socioeconomic Outcomes which finds that the burgeoning Latino population in the U.S. is largely “inheriting the segregated urban structures experienced by African Americans.” This segregation seems to lead to reduced socioeconomic prospects when compared with whites, including lower earnings, more violent crime, less access to credit and lower homeownership rates.
Tag Archives: fair housing
Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Round-Up
- Enterprise Community Partners and other leaders of the #Capshurtcommunities campaign have arranged a National Call in days on September 15 and 16, 2015 to “to educate Members of Congress on just how devastating these cuts are to low-income children, families, seniors, and veterans in our communities.” The #Capshurtcommunities campaign’s goals are to “Realign the federal budget to preserve and expand access to affordable rental housing for low income households while continuing support for homeownership opportunities for low and moderate income families.” According to the campaign’s leaders the low spending caps which Congress has placed on Federal housing programs hamper the U.S.’s ability to meet its diversity, educational and economic mobility potentials.
Friday’s Government Reports Roundup
- HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research released paper, which describes its “Bridge to Family Self-Sufficiency” Program. The program is intended to determine if low-income families in public housing improve their overall stability, with the right support.
- HUD released public, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which is intended to more efficiently further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act.
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released a final rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD’s rule clarifies and simplifies existing fair housing obligations for HUD grantees to analyze their fair housing landscape and set locally-determined fair housing priorities and goals through an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH).
Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
Fast on the heels of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding disparate impact Fair Housing claims, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued a final rule, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing:
Through this final rule, HUD provides HUD program participants with an approach to more effectively and efficiently incorporate into their planning processes the duty to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act, which is title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Fair Housing Act not only prohibits discrimination but, in conjunction with other statutes, directs HUD’s program participants to take significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination. The approach to affirmatively furthering fair housing carried out by HUD program participants prior to this rule, which involved an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice and a certification that the program participant will affirmatively further fair housing, has not been as effective as originally envisioned. This rule refines the prior approach by replacing the analysis of impediments with a fair housing assessment that should better inform program participants’ planning processes with a view toward better aiding HUD program participants to fulfill this statutory obligation.
Through this rule, HUD commits to provide states, local governments, public housing agencies (PHAs), the communities they serve, and the general public, to the fullest extent possible,with local and regional data on integrated and segregated living patterns, racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, the location of certain publicly supported housing, access to opportunity afforded by key community assets, and disproportionate housing needs based on classes protected by the Fair Housing Act. Through the availability of such data and available local data and knowledge, the approach provided by this rule is intended to make program participants better able to evaluate their present environment to assess fair housing issues such as segregation, conditions that restrict fair housing choice, and disparities in access to housing and opportunity, identify the factors that primarily contribute to the creation or perpetuation of fair housing issues, and establish fair housing priorities and goals. (1-2)
The tenacious hold that segregation has had over so many communities has been so difficult to address and HUD’s past attempts to do so have come up short so often. One can hope that this change in strategy from an “analysis of impediments” to “a fair housing assessment” can make incremental improvements throughout the nation.
It will be up to the next administration to really implement this rule because at first the rule just requires more planning about fair housing on the part of local communities. It is only later, when HUD evaluates their success and decides whether there will be any consequences for failure, that the rule’s effectiveness can be identified.
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- Beyond Disparate Impact: How the Fair Housing Movement Can Move On, by Rigel Christine Oliveri, Washburn Law Journal, Forthcoming,
- Crowding Out Effects of Refinancing on New Purchase Mortgages, by Steven A. Sharpe & Shane M. Sherlund, FEDS Working Paper No. 2015-017.
- Have Distressed Neighborhoods Recovered? Evidence from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, by Jenny Schuetz, Jonathan S. Spader & Alvaro Cortes, FEDS Working Paper No. 2015-016.
- A Standing Question: Mortgages, Assignment, and Foreclosure, by Eric A. Zacks & Dustin A. Zacks, Journal of Corporation Law, Vol. 40, 2015, Forthcoming.
- Socioeconomic and Racial Disparities in the Financing Returns to Homeownership, by Tom Mayock & Rachel Spritzer.
- REIT Spinoffs: Passive REITs, Active Businesses, by Richard Nugent, Tax Notes, pg. 1513 & 1635, March 23 & 30, 2015.
- Asset-Level Risk and Return in Real Estate Investments, by Jacob S. Sagi, April 19, 2015.
Housing out of Thin Air
NYU’s Furman Center has posted a policy brief, Creating Affordable Housing out of Thin Air: The Economics of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning in New York City. It opens,
In May 2014, New York City’s new mayor released an ambitious housing agenda that set forth a multi-pronged, ten-year plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. One of the most talked-about initiatives in the plan was encapsulated in its statement, “In future re-zonings that unlock substantial new housing capacity, the city must require, not simply encourage, the production of affordable housing in order to ensure balanced growth, fair housing opportunity, and diverse neighborhoods.” In other words, the city intends to combine upzoning with mandatory inclusionary zoning in order to increase the supply of affordable housing and promote economic diversity. (1)
Inclusionary zoning, “using land use regulation to link development of market-rate housing units to the creation of affordable housing,” is seen by many as a low-cost policy to support a broader affordable housing approach. (2) There is a limit to the reach of such a program because developers will only build if the overall project pencils out, including any units of mandatory inclusionary zoning.
The policy brief’s conclusions are important:
In many neighborhoods, including some that the city has already targeted for the new program, market rents are too low to justify new mid- and high-rise construction, so additional density would offer no immediate value to developers that could be used to cross-subsidize affordable units. In these areas, inclusionary zoning will need to rely on direct city subsidy for the time being if it is to generate any new units at all regardless of the income level they serve.
Where high rents make additional density valuable, there is capacity to cross-subsidize new affordable units without direct subsidy, but the development of a workable inclusionary zoning policy will be complex. The amount of affordable housing the city could require without dampening the rate of new construction or relying on developers to accept lower financial returns or landowners to be willing to sell at lower prices will vary widely depending on a neighborhood’s market rent, the magnitude of the upzoning, and, to a lesser extent, on the level of affordability required in the rent-restricted units. Where developers must provide the required affordable housing, and whether they can instead pay a fee directly to the city, also bears heavily on the number of affordable units a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy has the potential to generate, but raises other difficult issues. (14-15)
The de Blasio Administration’s housing and land use team is very sophisticated (including the Furman Center’s former director, Vicki Been, now Commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development), so the City will be well aware of these constraints on a mandatory inclusionary housing program. Nonetheless, it will be of great importance to design a flexible program that can adapt to changing market conditions to ensure that such a program is actually a spur to new development and not merely a well-intentioned initiative.
