Tag Archives: race

NYC’s Changing Neighborhood Demographics

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The Citizens Housing Planning Council has released a cool interactive map of NYC, Making Neighborhoods.  It “follows change across the city by putting people at the center of analysis. Our work measures and visualizes the movements of groups of New Yorkers who share demographic characteristics.”

The press release continues,

The project uses cluster analysis methodology–common in economic or marketing studies–to form 14 distinct groups, or “population clusters,” and follow their locations in 2000 and 2010. By comparing the two years, we can see which population types grew in number or geographic size, or moved into new areas; if their numbers declined or they retreated from their neighborhoods and were replaced by others; or if groups remained relatively unchanged in a decade. By following groups of people with shared characteristics, we see a different portrait of a changing city. It is one that New Yorkers will recognize, as it reflects the neighborhoods they make for themselves.

Making Neighborhoods stands out among neighborhood-level research being done today in two ways. First, it ignores government-drawn boundary lines like community districts and sub-borough areas, which often obscure important patterns that cross these borders. Second, it captures intersectional change: rather than measuring individual changes in income, race, education type, and so on, this study shows changes in all of those dimensions.

Our work on this project includes three main outputs. First, a full academic paper details the research methods, the cluster traits, their changes over the study period, and policy implications. We also created a report that summarizes and draws out the highlights of the full-length paper. Finally, we created–with help from Van Dam, Inc.–interactive maps that communicate this fairly complex study in a stunning visualization.

In addition to distilling five overarching trends from the population cluster changes, CHPC and lead researcher Raisa Bahchieva performed an analysis of housing distress citywide. By measuring and locating the filing of lis pendens notices and housing code violations, we are able to see which population clusters are experiencing mortgage foreclosure or poor housing, respectively.

This is another cool mapping tool that helps to make sense of NYC’s complex geographic, political and social environment.

Cool Mortgage Tool

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The Urban Institute has created a cool interactive tool to map mortgages in the United States. Enterprise describes the tool as follows: it

maps 12 years of data on more than 100 million mortgage originations throughout the U.S. by race and ethnicity, illustrating how the housing boom and bust affected borrowers of different backgrounds by metropolitan area. According to the data, not only were African-American and Hispanic communities particularly damaged by the housing bust, but they have also been the least likely to recover since the recession. The map also shows how geographically uneven the housing recovery has been. For instance, while mortgage originations have only decreased 18 percent in San Francisco and San Jose since 2005, they have fallen by 39 percent in Detroit.

The Urban Institute argues that

For a full mortgage market recovery, we need to expand the credit box again. A number of reforms can be undertaken to encourage lending to creditworthy borrowers who would have qualified before the housing boom. A return to 2005 and 2006 lending practices would be ill-fated, but the pendulum has unquestionably swung too far. Today’s tight standards have locked out many prospective borrowers from homeownership, disproportionately preventing African American and Hispanic families from building wealth and benefiting from the recovery.

There is a growing outcry to loosen credit. It is important that those calling for that loosening also support reforms that ensure that new credit is sustainable credit.  The last thing that people need is a mortgage that has a high likelihood of ending up in default. The Urban Institute acknowledges this point, but it can get lost in the political fight over the future of housing finance.

Policy folk also need to better understand how homeownership helps households build wealth, particularly given the rapid changes in the mortgage market. If households can readily access the equity in their homes through home equity loans, homeownership’s wealth-building function becomes more of a consumption spreading one.  That is, if homeowners access equity in the present in order to supplement current income, they will not be building wealth over the long term.

The robust Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should protect consumers from predatory attempts to get them to refinance, but people may not protect their future selves from their current desires. This may just be the way it goes, but we should not make claims about wealth building until we know more about how homeownership in the 21st century actually promotes it.

FHA Whitewash

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While preparing for my talk tomorrow on The FHA and Housing Affordability, I was reviewing some of the recent literature on the FHA. I came across a recent HUD working paper with some interesting data about recent FHA crises but also with a disturbing spin on the FHA’s history. The FHA Single-Family Insurance Program: Performing a Needed Role in the Housing Finance Market states that in its early years “race was not explicitly regarded as a factor in FHA’s mortgage insurance operations.” (9) This is flat out wrong and has been known to be flat out wrong at least since Kenneth Jackson published Crabgrass Frontier in 1987. Jackson clearly demonstrated that race was “explicitly regarded as a factor in FHA’s mortgage insurance operations.”

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Jackson writes that the FHA’s Underwriting Manual from those early years stated that “[i]f a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall be continued to be occupied by the same social and racial classes” and recommended that owners employ restrictive covenants to exclude African Americans (and some other groups). (208) The working paper has other extraordinary statements that minimize the FHA’s central role in promoting segregation during the mid-20th Century. For instance, it states that the FHA’s “early policy may have inadvertently promoted redlining practices.” (18) There was nothing “inadvertent” about it.

I typically find that federal government reports make great efforts to be factually accurate, so this paper is a great exception.  One might think that the authors deserve some leeway in their interpretation, but Jackson’s history has only been confirmed by later research, such as last year’s Do Presidents Control Bureaucracy? The Federal Housing Administration During the Truman-Eisenhower Era which was published in Political Science Quarterly. It makes much the same point as Crabgrass Frontier. I would be curious to hear the authors’ response to my assessment, but I really can’t see how they can deny it.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Santayana)