News
Report: One in Six Children in the U.S. Are Hungry
Published May 14, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
A new report (pdf) released last week by Feeding America claims that one in six young children (those who are five-years-old and younger) in 26 U.S. states face a constant threat of food insecurity. That adds up to 3.5 million young children in this country who do not have adequate access to healthy food.
The statistics in the report—Child Food Insecurity in the United States: 2005 – 2007—were compiled using data collected by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS).
Perhaps an even more disturbing statistic is that the rate of food insecurity in young children is 33 percent higher than the rate experienced by U.S. adults, where only one in eight live at risk of hunger. I personally find it deeply troubling that there are so many hungry children in this country who don’t have the ability to provide for themselves.
Erasing the Decision-Makers
Published May 13, 2009 @ 12:59PM PT
Following up on Kate's terrific post from this morning, I'm reading this absolutely maddening article from The Times-Picayune about the impending mixed-income housing complexes that are replacing the projects, demolished last year. Absent entirely from this article are the decision-makers behind the demolition and redevelopment of the projects, whose proposal will reduce the # of deeply subsidized units from ~5k to fewer than 1,600. Check out the passive and/or anthropomorphic language journalist Katy Reckdahl uses:
New designs hope to avoid past problems in public housing complexes
Because we all know designs, when gathered around the board room table, are very focused on problem-solving. More inanity after the jump!
MA successfully sues Goldman Sachs over subprime lending
Published May 12, 2009 @ 01:35PM PT
In the first settlement of its kind in the country, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has reached a $60 million agreement with a Wall Street investment bank that helped facilitate the frenzy of subprime lending that saddled so many homeowners with mortgages they could not afford to pay.
Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs Group agreed to reduce the size of subprime loans for some 700 Massachusetts homeowners by up to 35 percent, Coakley said yesterday. The investment bank played a key role in perpetuating sales of subprime mortgages by packaging the loans into securities that were sold to investors, with the proceeds used to fund new rounds of mortgages.
"This is a landmark case. It is one of the few times we've seen somebody who didn't actually originate the loans being held accountable," said Guy Cecala, the chief executive of Inside Mortgage Finance, a mortgage industry newsletter.
Mass. has been investigating the subprime industry for the last two years, starting with mortgage originators and moving on through the chain. Says Coakley: ""We've made the determination, and our courts have agreed, that many of these loans were unfair. They were destined to fail".
Housing advocates lauded the settlement for focusing on financial institutions that played a key part in the nation's housing crisis, which prompted wide-scale inflation in the housing market and then a crash that led to a worldwide financial collapse. At the height of the subprime market in 2006, 82.4 percent of subprime loans were packaged with other loans into securities that were sold to investors, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
And I'm doubly excited to see an alum from my urban planning department at MIT quoted - Andrew Jakabovics points out that by reducing the loan principal for these 700+ homeowners, they're given a chance to get their "head[s] above water again."
Sometimes I just love my activist blue state!
In the Bronx, Green - and Beautiful! - Affordable Housing
Published May 12, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Disclosure: I profiled WHEDCO for a Ford Foundation-MIT environmental justice conference last year.
Yay! I love success stories, or promising stories:
Since March 10, Ms. Prince has been living in an apartment in the Intervale Green complex, on Intervale Avenue between Freeman Street and Louis Niñe Boulevard, an infamous strip of South Bronx urban blight (it served as backdrop for some of the most gruesome scenes in the movie “Fort Apache, the Bronx”)...The building, developed by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, or Whedco, a Bronx nonprofit group, opened to qualified low-income residents in February, and has filled about a third of its 128 apartments...Designed with a large, glass-windowed lobby, two green roofs and a sculpture-filled courtyard, the development, tasteful, sparkling and eco-friendly, could give many cookie-cutter luxury buildings a run for their money.
The tone of this article from the NY Times is amusing: the author is like, what? Poor people can have luxury too? Wait a minute...Is this sensible social and economic policy?
At this scale, it certainly is. WHEDCO has an array of government, philanthropic and community-based partners, all of whom are looking to this construction as a potential model for future green affordable housing. It's when we decide if we want to take this effort to scale, will we put the necessary resources behind it - that's the question. Along with: what exactly do we mean by scale?
And not to mention: how do we balance form and function in affordable housing?
Are non-profits set to spend stimulus weatherization $$?
Published May 11, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The state-run Weatherization Assistance Program for low-income families was singled out for big stimulus spending partly because it had worked the same way for nearly 35 years and didn’t need adjustments. But governors in some states are proposing brand new approaches that critics say could derail the tried-and-true home insulation program. [snip]
Targeted for hefty stimulus funding, weatherization has been attacked by members of Congress and taxpayer groups who say the local agencies that run the program won’t be able to spend the windfall fast enough to generate much needed jobs.
This is a fascinating article, because it gets at something I've mentioned here before: so much of our government and social sector infrastructure has been devastated in the last 8 if not 25 years. Now that we've got $$ to spend, we're worried the small but steady non-profits we've counted on to deliver these programs for years aren't up to it.
That's a legitimate point, in my opinion.
Leadership Vacuums in Detroit & New Orleans
Published May 09, 2009 @ 09:48AM PT
Detroit and New Orleans: Two struggling African-American cities with proud pasts and deeply uncertain futures. Now, in addition to their on-going challenges of high poverty and inequality and uneven economic development, both face mayoral contests. In Detroit, it seems no one cares. In New Orleans, most black residents and practically all white residents crow at Mayor Ray Nagin, "Good riddance!"
What's interesting about these two races is how questions of meeting the daily needs of residents matches up against the need for a guiding vision for the future of these two cities.
Tax Credits for Affordable Housing Dry Up
Published May 08, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
And another limit to market-driven affordable housing production is revealed:
"Mr. Brandt’s experience is being mirrored throughout the nation, demonstrating the shortcomings of a financing vehicle that was conceived more than two decades ago to inject market discipline into the development of income-restricted housing. The theory was that investors would support only those projects likely to be successful.
Many developers are finding themselves either unable to sell tax credits that they have been awarded or short millions of dollars because the price that investors are willing to pay for a tax credit has tumbled from $1 or more to less than 75 cents today.
Today, the total amount of tax credit equity available for low-income housing has shrunk to $4 billion to $4.5 billion, down from about $9 billion in 2007, Frederick H. Copeman, the national director of tax credit investment advisory services at Ernst & Young, said in an interview in his Boston office."
Despite our frequent hand-wrangling over that eyesore public housing, in reality the majority of subsidized housing today is tax-credit financed and produced by private sector developers, for- and non-profit. Yet, the limits to this approach fuel calls for state and federal affordable housing trust funds, to again prioritize the needs of the lowest-income Americans that public housing filled starting in the 1960s.
