Tag Archives: homeless

Affordable New York

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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.

California Dreamin’ of Affordable Housing

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Architecturist

Just A Dream for Many

Yesterday, I blogged about the affordable housing crisis in New York City. Today, I look at a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, How Housing Vouchers Can Help Address California’s Rental Crisis. It opens,

California’s severe shortage of affordable housing has hit low-income renters particularly hard. Nearly 1.6 million low-income California renter households paid more than half of their income for housing in 2013, and this number has risen 28 percent since 2007. While the shortage is most severe on California’s coast, many families throughout California struggle to pay the rent. A multifaceted approach with roles for local, state, and federal governments is needed to address the severe affordable housing shortage, but the federal Housing Choice Voucher program can play an outsized role.

California’s high housing costs stretch struggling families’ budgets, deepening poverty and hardship and exacerbating a host of other problems. For example, 23 percent of Californians are poor, according to Census measures that take housing costs into account, well above the poverty rate of 16 percent under the official poverty measure. California has 14 percent of the nation’s renter households but nearly 30 percent of the overcrowded renters. And California has one-fifth of the nation’s homeless people, more than any other state. A large body of research shows that poverty, overcrowding, housing instability, and homelessness can impair children’s health and development and undermine their chances of success in school and later in the workforce.

Housing vouchers help some 300,000 low-income California families afford the rent, more than all other state and federal rental assistance programs combined. Vouchers reduce poverty, homelessness, and housing instability. They can also help low-income families — particularly African American and Hispanic families — raise their children in safer, lower-poverty communities and avoid neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Moreover, so-called “project-based” vouchers can help finance the construction of affordable rental housing in areas with severe shortages.

Yet the number of vouchers in use has fallen in recent years, even as California’s housing affordability problems have worsened. Due to across-the-board federal budget cuts enacted in 2013 (called sequestration), 14,620 fewer California families used vouchers in December 2014 than in December 2012. By restoring funding for these vouchers, Congress can enable thousands more California families to afford safe, stable housing. (1, reference omitted)

Really, the analysis here is not California-specific. The authors are arguing that low-income families benefit greatly from rental subsidies and that Congress should restore funding for housing vouchers because they provide targeted, effective assistance to their users. While California has a high concentration of voucher users, all low-income renter households would benefit from an increase in the number of housing vouchers. No argument there.

I am disappointed that the report does not address an issue that I highlighted yesterday — attractive places like NYC and California continue to draw a range of people from global elites to low-income strivers. Policymakers cannot think of the affordable housing problems in such places as one that can be “fixed.” Rather, it must be seen as, to a large extent, a symptom of success.

So long as more and more people want to live in such places, housing costs will pose a challenge. Housing costs can be mitigated to some extent in hot destinations, but they are hard to solve. And if they are to be solved, those destinations must be willing to increase density to build enough units to house all the people who want to live there.

Friday’s Government Reports Roundup

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Lawyering up for Housing Affordability

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The New York City Independent Budget Office issued an estimate of the cost of providing “free legal representation to individuals with incomes at or below 125 percent of the federal poverty level who are facing eviction and foreclosure proceedings in court . . ..” (1) The IBO nets the cost of this proposal against the potential savings that the City would reap by reducing admissions to homeless shelters. The IBO concludes that this proposal would have a net cost of roughly 100 million to 200 million dollars.

The IBO notes that “there are benefits to reducing evictions that extend beyond the city’s budget, such as the potential for reducing turnovers of rent-regulated apartments, which would slow rent increases for those units, as well as avoiding the long term physical and mental health consequences associated with homelessness.” (1-2)

Seems to me that this is money well spent in 21st century New York City. Market forces are such that landlords can frequently raise rents significantly whenever a tenant leaves.  Unscrupulous landlords harass their tenants in a variety of ways in order to encourage them to leave sooner.  This might be done through the abuse of legal process, with a landlord trying to evict a tenant multiple times when the tenant has not violated the terms of the lease. Or it might be done through improperly maintaining the property, for instance, cutting off the water repeatedly. In either case, though, tenants are being subject to a lot of illegal behavior in this hot real estate market.

Housing court is a mess for both tenants and landlords, but typically only landlords have lawyers to help them navigate it. This proposal would even the field a bit. Mayor de Blasio’s affordable housing goals would be greatly augmented by this proposal.

Perhaps housing court reform should also be put on the table so that these cases are adjudicated equitably, but that is a topic for another day . . ..

Homeless in America

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The Department of Housing Urban Development released Part 1 of The 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.  Part 1 provides Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness. Its key findings include,

  • In January 2014, 578,424 people were homeless on a given night. Most (69 percent) were staying in residential programs for homeless people, and the rest (31 percent) were found in unsheltered locations.
  • Nearly one-quarter of all homeless people were children under the age of 18 (23 percent or 135,701). Ten percent (or 58,601) were between the ages of 18 and 24, and 66 percent (or 384,122) were 25 years or older.
  • Homelessness declined by 2 percent (or 13,344 people) between 2013 and 2014 and by 11 percent (or 72,718) since 2007. (1)

The report notes that in “2010, the Administration released Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, a comprehensive plan to prevent and end homelessness in America.” (3) The plan had four goals:

  1. Finish the job of ending chronic homelessness in 2015
  2. Prevent and end homelessness among Veterans by 2015
  3. Prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children by 2020
  4. Set a path to ending all types of homelessness (3)

HUD claims success on all four fronts:

  1. The number of individuals experiencing chronic homelessness declined by 21 percent, or 22,892 people, between 2010 and 2014.
  2. The number of homeless veterans declined by 33 percent (or 24,837 people) since 2010, and most of the decline was in the number of veterans staying in unsheltered locations.
  3. Since 2010 the number of homeless people in families has declined by 11 percent (or 25,690 people).
  4. Overall, homelessness has declined by more than 62,000 people since 2010 (62,042), a 10 percent reduction since the release of Opening Doors. (3)

In many ways, the success of American housing policy comes down to the question — can all Americans have a safe and affordable place to call home? The Administration answers this question in the affirmative. And this report appears to demonstrate that the Administration’s plan to end homelessness is working.

While I am skeptical of claims that we have finally figured out how to systematically address homelessness, I am happy to see that it is trending downward over the last few years.  This report was authored by some serious people, including Dr. Dennis Culhane of the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans at the University of Pennsylvania, so there is reason to trust these numbers. One can hope that this trend continues, but given the financial insecurity so many households face, I am worried that it will not.

Affordable Housing in the De Blasio Era

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Mayoral candidate de Blasio’s position on affordable housing policy can be found here. The key points include:

  • Require developers to build some affordable housing when they build in neighborhoods that have been upzoned (mandatory inclusionary zoning)

  • Direct $1 billion in city pension funds to affordable housing construction

  • Apply the same tax rate to big, vacant lots as applies to commercial properties and earmark the increased revenues for affordable housing

  • Ensure that affordable housing subsidies meet the needs of lower-income families and are distributed equitably throughout the City

As I had mentioned previously, NYU’s Furman Center (and its Moelis Institute for Affordable Housing Policy) ran a great series of ten conversations on the big housing issues facing New York City’s mayor. Since then, the Furman Center has posted ten policy briefs about those issues.The ten issues are

  1. Should the next mayor commit to build or rehabilitate more units of affordable housing than the Bloomberg Administration has financed?

  2. Should the next mayor require developers to permanently maintain the affordability of units developed with public subsidies?

  3. Should the next mayor adopt a mandatory inclusionary zoning program that requires developers to build or preserve affordable housing whenever they build market-rate housing?

  4. Should the next mayor seek to expand the use of city pension funds to develop affordable housing?

  5. Should the next mayor provide a rental subsidy for moderate- and middle-income households?

  6. Should the next mayor permit more distant transfers of unused development rights to support the development of affordable housing?

  7. Should the next mayor support the New York City Housing Authority’s plan to lease its undeveloped land for the construction of market-rate rental housing?

  8. Should the next mayor allow homeless families to move to the top of the waiting list for housing vouchers or public housing?

  9. Should the next mayor offer to cap the property tax levy on 421-a rental properties in order to preserve the affordable units within those buildings?

  10. How should the next mayor prioritize the preservation of existing affordable housing units?

Mayor-Elect de Blasio and his team will have to struggle with all of these issues. There are few easy answers in New York City when it comes to housing policy.