New Urbanism is an urban design movement that promotes a return to traditional neighborhoods, as well as the revitalization of cities and town centers. It was officially founded in the 1990’s by a group of renegade architects and planners, in reaction to sprawling development patterns of the automobile era. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) spearheads the effort to create compact, walkable neighborhoods.
New Urbanism (NU) takes many forms. It includes masterplanned communities like Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TND) and Transit Oriented Developments (TOD), but also smaller projects, such as a group of renovated row houses within an existing city block.
History of Suburbia
James Howard Kunstler, writer and critic of the American surburban landscape, explains that suburbs emerged because people wanted to flee the true horrors — pollution, bad air, poor sanitation, crime — of industrial cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries [1]. People yearned for a cabin in the woods or a little house in the country, or at least an escape from the factories that were filling the central city.
However, before the car, some of America’s best building and urban design was being done in early decades of the 20th century. Good examples of neighborhood design are found in streetcar suburbs and in small towns, along Main Street, USA. These neighborhoods, mixed-used and scaled for people, are the standard that many New Urbanists try to emulate today.
With the rise of the automobile after World War II, Kunstler describes that suburbia "became a cartoon of itself. It became a cartoon of ‘country life.’ It was no longer country living in any meaningful way; it had become basically industrial living in an industrial box in a fake country setting.” [1] Most American suburbs, especially those built between 1970 and the present, are cheaply constructed, poorly designed and hastily planned.
History of New Urbanism
New Urbanism began to take shape after Seaside, Florida was developed in 1981. Seaside opened as an old-style, walkable neighborhood that displayed attractive architecture and thoughtful design – all of which were rare for new construction at the time. By the 1990’s, there was growing frustration with suburban sprawl, so an alternative vision would easily attract scores of devoted followers.
Congress for the New Urbanism
The Congress for the New Urbanism, formed in 1993, is the founding organization of the New Urbanism movement. It sponsors annual meetings called Congresses, where “architects, landscape architects, planners, economists, real estate agents and developers, lawyers, government officials, educators, citizen activists, and students discuss issues related to the health and vitality of regions, towns, and neighborhoods.” [2] CNU was originally assembled by Peter Katz, who became the group’s first Executive Director.
The organization takes a very broad approach and “advocates the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions.” [2]
Charter
The Charter for the New Urbanism [3], unveiled in 1996, establishes the principles of NU that revolve around reinvesting in central cities, reconfiguring suburbs and preserving countryside – with the goal of creating real places. The charter is divided into three main sections that descend in spatial scale:
The Region: Metropolis, city, and town
The neighborhood, the district and the corridor
The block, the street and the building
Each section presents 9 principles that should be considered not only by New Urbanist planners and architects, but by all decisionmakers involved in urban development. One key idea is that cities and towns should have recognizable centers and borders, beyond which new construction is strictly avoided. In addition, neighborhoods should be “compact, pedestrian-friendly, and mixed-use”. Regional architectural styles, historic preservation and shared public space are also crucial.
Canons of Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism
CNU created an addendum to its charter – partly in response to criticism has been leveled at New Urbanism, but also to address the emerging environmental crises of the new century. For example, critics pointed out that several New Urbanist developments were built on farmland or open space, much like sprawling subdivisions. The Canons [4] attempt to link green building with urban planning, while emphasizing environmental issues like land conservation and global warming.
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina brought New Urbanism national attention, as New Urbanist planners were called upon to help rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
New Urbanist Developments: Some Examples
Seaside, Florida, USA (1981)
The Kentlands in Gaithersberg, Maryland, USA (1989)
Oceanview Lofts in Berkeley, California, USA (1993)
Celebration, Florida, USA (1995)
Civano in Tucson, Arizona, USA (1997)
Orenco Station in Portland, Oregon, USA (1997)
Highland Terrace, Louisville, Kentucky, USA (2000)
Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, California, USA (2000)
Del Mar Station, Pasadena, California, USA (2003)
Criticism
One of the most salient critiques of New Urban projects is that many of them have consumed valuable farmland and open space. Just like conventional suburbs, they sometimes sit far from town centers. CNU’s revised Canons have therefore called for building primarily on urban infill and urban adjacent land.
Link to article
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Economic Segregation Impacting Education
News & Notes: NPR , October 30, 2007
Listen to story
A new study released by the Southern Education Foundation shows that most public school students in the South are from low-income households.
Joining Farai Chideya to talk about the implications of that finding are Lynn Huntley, president of the Southern Education Foundation, and Joseph Edelin, a teacher at Kipp Ways Academy in Atlanta, Ga.
Link to article
Listen to story
A new study released by the Southern Education Foundation shows that most public school students in the South are from low-income households.
Joining Farai Chideya to talk about the implications of that finding are Lynn Huntley, president of the Southern Education Foundation, and Joseph Edelin, a teacher at Kipp Ways Academy in Atlanta, Ga.
Link to article
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
THE STABILITY OF MIXED INCOME COMMUNITIES
by Douglas J. Krupka, January 2006
Income segregation is a visible aspect in American urban areas. Many believe that the presence of isolated populations of the poor in central cities and inner ring suburbs has important effects on residents, including reducing upward mobility. The undesirable sideeffects of economic sorting underlie policy interest in creating and sustaining mixed-income communities in American metropolitan areas. To varying degrees, federal, stateand local governments all attempt to induce greater income mixing in select neighborhoods through regulation and subsidies. While proponents of these efforts assume that if a mixed income neighborhood can be created, the income mixing that is induced will persist, the accuracy of this assertion has never been directly tested.
The level of economic segregation in American metropolitan areas offers something of a puzzle. Mixed income neighborhoods exist in all cities, despite the broad pattern of economic segregation. Standard urban economic models predict strict sorting along economic lines (Alonso 1964, Muth 1969, Tiebout 1956), a result that motivated a line of research explaining mixed-income neighborhoods. 1 Taking a cue from studies of racial sorting, the prevailing approach to explaining mixed-income neighborhoods tends to rely on the assumption that residents obtain additional enjoyment or benefits from living in such neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the results from these models are not very robust; often the mixed equilibrium is only one of several equally likely outcomes or occurs only for arelatively small range of parameter values. These studies ignore the fact that the standard models predicting economic segregation describe long-run equilibria while the income-mixing data are derived from cross-sectional snapshots of urban areas in America at a single point in time. A dynamic interpretation of models that predict income segregation implies that mixed income neighborhoods may exist due to transitional factors, but will not be stable in the long run. The fundamental question then becomes: are mixed-incomeneighborhoods self-sustaining equilibrium outcomes or are they simply observations of transient states, neighborhoods that are in the midst of changing from one income group to another? New research by Krupka (2005) offers the first rigorous attempt to empirically answer this question.
The analysis of mixed-income neighborhood stability presents subtle statistical issues. The standard models of income segregation suggest lengthy periods of transitional mixing. In the standard Alonso/Muth model, people sort by income into homogenous neighborhoods because different income groups value land differently and the marketallocates land to valued uses. However, secular trends like population in-migration or uneven growth in income across the population are likely to change the structure of an urban area slowly; neighborhoods will not instantaneously change to accommodate the new income group. Costs of relocation and housing stock adjustment slow this adjustment process down considerably. If this transitional process is at all extensive, census data simply cannot speak to the stability of mixed income neighborhoods.
Tiebout offers a model of income segregation whereby families sort into jurisdictions in order to maximize their utility derived from the consumption of public services like education, police protection and garbage pick-up. If the demand for these and other public services exhibit strong income effects, people will sort into jurisdictions based on income. However, if public service levels are slow to adjust to demographic changes in the community, it may take a considerable amount of time before indigenous residents realize that non-preferred service levels are not aberrations, but permanent deficiencies in the community. It is only as families realize this transition is irreversible that they will consider a move to a new jurisdiction. The intervening years will likely include long periods of uncertainty as the political process works out which income group “wins” and gets its preferred level of services. During these periods, jurisdictions will exhibit substantial mixing, but this is no sign that the mixing represents a stable situation.
Finally, if we adopt Schelling’s (1969) approach of assuming people have direct preferences for the incomes of their neighbors, income mixing again appears to beunsustainable at the neighborhood level. These income preferences could arise from various sources: neighborhood externalities, or demand effects on the provision of privategoods and services. This equilibrium, however, is most likely reached via a long transitional period whenever demographic or economic change in the metropolitan area as a whole cause neighborhood instability. These transition periods will exhibit large amounts of income mixing, as classes are thrown into neighborhoods together and wait to see which class will become the dominant group in the neighborhood. If these transitions are at all drawn out, cross sectional estimates of mixing will simply not reflect the long-run equilibrium level of mixing, and cannot yield any insights into long run neighborhood stability
Krupka’s (2005) empirical study of mixed-income stability draws from a private data set that compiles demographic, economic and housing information at the census block group level, and connects census geographies over thirty years. With this data it is possible to use the census block group as the unit of observation to study how neighborhoods change over time. There are three predictions that the models of income segregation make. Allof them are interpretations of the idea that income mixing is not a stable equilibrium. The first prediction is that neighborhoods that exhibit large amounts of income mixing will tend to become more homogenous over time. Second, income mixing will be a result of instability in neighborhood demographics. Finally, a mixed incomeneighborhood, because it is unstable, will tend to have larger changes in demographic mix over the ensuing time period as sorting occurs, and the neighborhood empties out except for a homogenous group
The study tests these predictions using the standard deviation of income in theneighborhood as a measure of the amount of income mixing. Demographic instability (or change) is measured by the magnitude of the change in neighborhood median income. Several control variables are included in the empirical analysis. The results suggest thatneighborhood demographic shocks are indeed a primary predictor of income mixing, while prior income mixing is a strong predictor of subsequent demographic transitions, just as the standard economic segregation models predict.
The most important result, however, is that the amount of income mixing does indeed decrease over time. All else equal, the most conservative estimates reveal that a typicalmixed neighborhood will lose at least 20 per cent of its standard deviation in incomes over ten years. This estimate ranges to as much as 70 per cent per decade in some cases.
These results are important for two reasons. First, they are consistent with the prevailingview of neighborhood income mixing as a transitional phenomenon. The branch of the economics literature which has struggled to explain mixed-income neighborhoods as stable equilibrium outcomes appears to be on the wrong track.
On the other hand, stable mixed-income communities have been a public policy goal for some time. Local housing agencies, redevelopment authorities and HUD have all offered incentives to developers to induce the development of such communities. The logic ofsuch policies would seem to be that mixed-income communities, while preferred by all,are unprofitable because of some sort of market imperfection.
In the face of these policy initiatives, it is important to understand how and why income mixing occurs. If it is the case that people prefer to live in mixed neighborhoods but real estate markets do not provide them, then the policies encouraging such development will be correcting a market failure. The empirical evidence, however, indicates that this is not the case; whatever households’ expressed attitudes about income-mixing per se, economic forces shaped by household residence decisions, business location and/or public service provision do not allow extremely mixed neighborhoods to persist.
This is not to say that public policy has no place in encouraging mixed-incomeneighborhoods. There are justifications for valuing such communities beyond households’ preferences. The fact that income mixing within block groups is so substantial (over 60 per cent of the total variance in income occurs within block-group boundaries) might give planners hope that sustaining mixed neighborhoods is not impossible. Nonetheless, this empirical research indicates that market forces work against income-mixing so that mixed-income advocates must recognize that maintaining such neighborhoods requires sustained policy over time
Link to article
Friday, May 8, 2009
Low income housing: beneficial for students?
Mat Lindenberg - The Clipper, 10/10/08
As tuition and other college expenses and the pure cost of living escalate, more and more students in Washington and across the nation are finding it harder to live on their own. Yet not every student has the support of parents to fall back on, or enough money to even share the rent with a few other roommates.
College students are a notoriously thrifty bunch, living on a diet of Top Ramen and powering their cars with crossed fingers and whatever change hides in their pockets, yet a lack of disposable income does not necessarily qualify you for low-income housing.
"The system was not designed, or intended, for (a majority of) college students," said Jerry Brevier, a Housing Management Coordinator for the Low Income and Affordable Housing Institute.
"This is a program for the homeless and soon to be homeless, senior citizens and the disabled, and people who do not make enough money or have the ability to pay rent and [support families]."
Still, there are a number of students who can and will benefit greatly from low income housing. It is important, however, to know both your rights and your landlords, and to be aware of the regulations involved so you don't suddenly end up on the street or be found ineligible and owe back rent to the government.
Low Income housing is defined by the government as housing that costs its residents 30 percent or less of their total annual income, and is only available to those who make less than 60 percent of the annual median income of the area in which they live. In Snohomish County, the most recent figures on the median income set it at $54,584, which means you must make less than 32,750$ to qualify. College students cannot legally apply if they are taking or plan to take more than 12 credits a semester.
Most people who live in Low Income Housing are also able to get some, most, or all of their rent paid for by the government under Section 8 of the US Housing Act of 1937. In 2006, however, numerous regulations were introduced after loopholes in the law allowed college students to not count money they received towards their college education as part of their total income.
Aid under Section 8 is now only available for college students who meet one of the following criteria:
Over 24.
Veterans of the Military.
Married, but still meeting income limitations.
Parents of a child considered a dependent for tax purposes.
Children of parents who both could qualify for low-income housing.
These, it should be noted, are the most basic rules - the housing authority in the county in which you live, or the landlord you are renting from may have their own rules. The Snohomish County Housing Authority did not return calls for a statement.
"We hear from people, time to time, who take advantage of this program," said Brevier. "It really is sad to me, because {Low Income Housing} is like welfare; it's for those that need it."
WSU Student and internet blogger 'Kirt' recently wrote about his interaction with his landlord after he was found to be in noncompliance. He talked via email with the author about some of the problems that come about when either the landlord or the tenant break the agreements.
"I lived in a low income housing complex for a few months and started taking more than the 12 credits [allowed, but I didn't report it.] The [landlord somehow found out], and threatened to [turn me into the government] unless I paid him [much higher rent]." 'Kirt' did not say how the situation turned out, or provide details to confirm his story.
"There are real legal consequences to lying about this sort of thing," said Brevier. "You can be charged with fraud and [many other charges, depending on your case.]"
According to a police report put out by the Department of Justice in 2007, lying to receive Low Income Housing is "a felony that provides for a term of imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000 upon conviction."
Our area offers a lot of opportunities to take advantage of this program, and though as college students it is much harder to qualify, for those that need it low income housing could be a lifeline.
Link to article
As tuition and other college expenses and the pure cost of living escalate, more and more students in Washington and across the nation are finding it harder to live on their own. Yet not every student has the support of parents to fall back on, or enough money to even share the rent with a few other roommates.
College students are a notoriously thrifty bunch, living on a diet of Top Ramen and powering their cars with crossed fingers and whatever change hides in their pockets, yet a lack of disposable income does not necessarily qualify you for low-income housing.
"The system was not designed, or intended, for (a majority of) college students," said Jerry Brevier, a Housing Management Coordinator for the Low Income and Affordable Housing Institute.
"This is a program for the homeless and soon to be homeless, senior citizens and the disabled, and people who do not make enough money or have the ability to pay rent and [support families]."
Still, there are a number of students who can and will benefit greatly from low income housing. It is important, however, to know both your rights and your landlords, and to be aware of the regulations involved so you don't suddenly end up on the street or be found ineligible and owe back rent to the government.
Low Income housing is defined by the government as housing that costs its residents 30 percent or less of their total annual income, and is only available to those who make less than 60 percent of the annual median income of the area in which they live. In Snohomish County, the most recent figures on the median income set it at $54,584, which means you must make less than 32,750$ to qualify. College students cannot legally apply if they are taking or plan to take more than 12 credits a semester.
Most people who live in Low Income Housing are also able to get some, most, or all of their rent paid for by the government under Section 8 of the US Housing Act of 1937. In 2006, however, numerous regulations were introduced after loopholes in the law allowed college students to not count money they received towards their college education as part of their total income.
Aid under Section 8 is now only available for college students who meet one of the following criteria:
Over 24.
Veterans of the Military.
Married, but still meeting income limitations.
Parents of a child considered a dependent for tax purposes.
Children of parents who both could qualify for low-income housing.
These, it should be noted, are the most basic rules - the housing authority in the county in which you live, or the landlord you are renting from may have their own rules. The Snohomish County Housing Authority did not return calls for a statement.
"We hear from people, time to time, who take advantage of this program," said Brevier. "It really is sad to me, because {Low Income Housing} is like welfare; it's for those that need it."
WSU Student and internet blogger 'Kirt' recently wrote about his interaction with his landlord after he was found to be in noncompliance. He talked via email with the author about some of the problems that come about when either the landlord or the tenant break the agreements.
"I lived in a low income housing complex for a few months and started taking more than the 12 credits [allowed, but I didn't report it.] The [landlord somehow found out], and threatened to [turn me into the government] unless I paid him [much higher rent]." 'Kirt' did not say how the situation turned out, or provide details to confirm his story.
"There are real legal consequences to lying about this sort of thing," said Brevier. "You can be charged with fraud and [many other charges, depending on your case.]"
According to a police report put out by the Department of Justice in 2007, lying to receive Low Income Housing is "a felony that provides for a term of imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000 upon conviction."
Our area offers a lot of opportunities to take advantage of this program, and though as college students it is much harder to qualify, for those that need it low income housing could be a lifeline.
Link to article
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The decline and fall of affordable housing
The downtown that Portland builds should open doors for people of all income levels
Sunday, March 04, 2007 By MARTHA GIES
The Oregonian
Jerome Henwood still smolders over a rent hike that sent him packing. "It's not just the homeless who are hurting," he insists. "It's the low-income elderly and disabled, and we're being pushed out of downtown." Henwood, 62, moved into an 11-story market-rate apartment building on Southwest Park Avenue in 2002. The rent was $670, but he made do with just Social Security. "It had a rooftop garden," he says, and he loved the location, just south of Portland State University. Then a California equity group bought the building, and just 15 days before his lease was to expire, he learned his rent would jump to $1,055, just $2 shy of his monthly income. And he's not the only one who's been forced out of downtown.
During the last decade, downtown Portland has become a privileged place to live, as condominiums sprouted from the Pearl District to South Waterfront and rental buildings in between have been flipped into condos. Longtime residents -- minimum wage-earners or retirees on fixed incomes such as Henwood -- watched their rents soar and affordable units disappear.
Unless we're willing to write off downtown as an enclave for the well-to-do -- or for the few addicts lucky enough to get treatment and housing -- we must muster the political will to build more truly affordable rentals. The city manages deals all the time. Just look at the $57 million aerial tram, the $45 million upgrade of Civic Stadium and the $42 million snazzy little streetcar.
Portland's vaunted livability attracts people with money. But let's not end up like San Francisco, where dot-com money took over the city, driving the middle class to the suburbs and the poor to the streets. Four pertinent new reports give us a snapshot of where Portland stands now. It's a mixed picture. The Portland Development Commission just finalized its recommendations for spending the new tax increment set-aside from urban renewal districts that the City Council earmarked for affordable housing: $162.6 million over the next six years. This time around, PDC increased its commitment to build as many as 1,450 units specifically for people who pay no more than 30 percent of their income for rent. That's citywide, too, not just downtown. The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will release new median income figures any day now. This could trigger rent increases in income-restricted buildings, since landlords are allowed to raise rents whenever the medium income rises.
Northwest Pilot Project's Downtown Portland Affordable Housing Inventory -- expected to be about 3,400 units -- will be published after new rents are announced. Here, the affordable ceiling is set just $35 higher than what a single person working full time at Oregon's minimum wage can pay -- $425 per month.
Figures for the first two years of the city's Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness indicate it's working, with fewer people living on the street. But it has created even more competition for the dwindling low-income rental stock because, thus far, no new units have been added.
Wrong direction
Portland turned onto the path of high prices and tight supply when, in a move to clean up things, the city tore down a lot of low-income housing in the '70s. As late as 1974, an estimated 6,000 units still existed downtown; but a 1978 report showed 738 units lost since 1970 in the Lownsdale and Yamhill districts alone. It looked as if subsidized housing could make up for the lower-end rental housing lost when landlords signed the first 20-year HUD contracts in 1977. In subsidized buildings in which tenants pay 30 percent of their income for rent, and the government makes up the difference. Subsidies help keep buildings rented at market rate and also help the renter -- just as government-guaranteed loans and income tax deductions help those of us paying mortgages.
But with the Reagan budget cuts to HUD programs in the '80s, homelessness exploded nationally. In Portland, it took until 1988 to get a grip on the loss, and the City Council passed a resolution: the 5,183 low-income downtown housing units that existed in April 1978 would be maintained. We've never pulled that off.
Ten years ago, HUD contracts signed in the '70s began to expire. At the Roosevelt Plaza on Southwest Park, 58 people received eviction notices in 1997. Northwest Pilot Project, which had helped seniors displaced from downtown hotels for decades, and director Susan Emmons negotiated a postponement. For the first time, owners helped pay some relocation costs. As the person Northwest Pilot Project sent to help tenants find new homes, I was the unwitting agent of the destruction of a community, a family really. Many of these people were long-term tenants -- among them people in wheelchairs, or suffering schizophrenia, or speaking only Korean -- and they loved their home, right on the Park Blocks and convenient to Safeway. After those people moved, the building went condo.
If the Roosevelt evictions were my personal introduction to the brutal side of gentrification, they also were a turning point in public awareness of the problem. The Oregonian ran four major articles on the loss, including a front-page photo of tiny Olive Lacsamana, 93, sitting alone in her tidy room before eviction.
So in 1998, when the Oak's contract expired, the city bought the building to maintain 90 apartments as subsidized housing, and they remain so today. The city passed a preservation ordinance the same year. It requires any owner opting out of a HUD contract to first offer to sell the building to the city, so low rents can be preserved. Unfortunately, the ordinance has not been enforced, and when the Western Rooms quietly converted to market-rate rentals in 2001, we lost 39 units of subsidized housing. Which is not to say that all landlords are ready to bolt. The largest HUD contract downtown, Clay Tower with 235 subsidized one-bedroom units, expires this December, and the Schnitzer family, which owns the building, is trying to negotiate a meaningful extension from a cash-stripped HUD.
These HUD buildings are a critical part of the housing picture, and the new inventory will show 1,040 HUD units downtown.
Less successful have been the income-restricted buildings, first built here in the '90s in exchange for tax credits. The income restrictions are too high. A one-bedroom "60 percent" apartment rents for $709 a month, while the elderly that Northwest Pilot Project serve typically average $750 in monthly incomes. The new inventory of affordable housing downtown will also show the trend away from open-market housing for the general low-income public, toward housing targeting special needs: corrections clients, the chronically homeless and people in recovery.
One reason for this shift is the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness. It addresses only the chronically homeless, defined as single, disabled people who have been homeless for a year or more, or homeless multiple times. Defenders of this plan argue that the chronically homeless cost millions by burdening courts, jails, hospitals and sanitation systems.
The Ten-Year Plan report claims 480 new housing units. Yet, except for the 60 units at 8 N.W. 8th Ave., on the drawing board as early as 1999, nothing has been built downtown. All the others are existing low-income housing and were simply co-opted by the plan from the existing pool of low-income affordable housing stock. Let's not set up a system under which someone has to be chronically homeless before being able to get a place to live.
So now what are our options?
At the federal level, we are just going to hope to outlive the current administration's cuts to vital HUD housing programs.
At the state level, we need to reverse the proscription against a real-estate transfer tax so that we can enact one here and use money to finance new low-income housing. More immediately, Senate Bill 38 could generate approximately $60 million per biennium for housing by increasing the document recording fee from $21 to $36, with the additional revenue going to Oregon Housing and Community Services. The fee is charged for paperwork processing when a property changes hands.
And locally, we have the new tax-increment financing revenues, though they are not going to bring us to our goal downtown. Also, as we do create units, some of which will be in the South Park Blocks and Downtown Waterfront Urban Renewal Areas, lets not earmark all of them for the chronically homeless, leaving the elderly and the working poor out of the mix.
This is a real estate problem, and we need to solve it at a real estate level. For myself, I'm still haunted by Olive Lacsamana at the Roosevelt and all the other low-income elderly that we continue to shuffle around this city.
In the meantime -- though you can't see it from the top of the tram -- downtown Portland is 1,800 affordable housing units short of our 5,183-unit downtown goal.
Martha Gies is the author of "Up All Night" and many short stories and essays published over the last 30 years. A longtime low-income housing activist, she has helped relocate tenants from the Roosevelt Plaza, Clifford Hotel, Western Rooms, St. Francis Hotel and the Ace Apartments. Since 1996, she has done the housing counts for the Downtown Portland Affordable Housing Inventory.
Link to article
Sunday, March 04, 2007 By MARTHA GIES
The Oregonian
Jerome Henwood still smolders over a rent hike that sent him packing. "It's not just the homeless who are hurting," he insists. "It's the low-income elderly and disabled, and we're being pushed out of downtown." Henwood, 62, moved into an 11-story market-rate apartment building on Southwest Park Avenue in 2002. The rent was $670, but he made do with just Social Security. "It had a rooftop garden," he says, and he loved the location, just south of Portland State University. Then a California equity group bought the building, and just 15 days before his lease was to expire, he learned his rent would jump to $1,055, just $2 shy of his monthly income. And he's not the only one who's been forced out of downtown.
During the last decade, downtown Portland has become a privileged place to live, as condominiums sprouted from the Pearl District to South Waterfront and rental buildings in between have been flipped into condos. Longtime residents -- minimum wage-earners or retirees on fixed incomes such as Henwood -- watched their rents soar and affordable units disappear.
Unless we're willing to write off downtown as an enclave for the well-to-do -- or for the few addicts lucky enough to get treatment and housing -- we must muster the political will to build more truly affordable rentals. The city manages deals all the time. Just look at the $57 million aerial tram, the $45 million upgrade of Civic Stadium and the $42 million snazzy little streetcar.
Portland's vaunted livability attracts people with money. But let's not end up like San Francisco, where dot-com money took over the city, driving the middle class to the suburbs and the poor to the streets. Four pertinent new reports give us a snapshot of where Portland stands now. It's a mixed picture. The Portland Development Commission just finalized its recommendations for spending the new tax increment set-aside from urban renewal districts that the City Council earmarked for affordable housing: $162.6 million over the next six years. This time around, PDC increased its commitment to build as many as 1,450 units specifically for people who pay no more than 30 percent of their income for rent. That's citywide, too, not just downtown. The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will release new median income figures any day now. This could trigger rent increases in income-restricted buildings, since landlords are allowed to raise rents whenever the medium income rises.
Northwest Pilot Project's Downtown Portland Affordable Housing Inventory -- expected to be about 3,400 units -- will be published after new rents are announced. Here, the affordable ceiling is set just $35 higher than what a single person working full time at Oregon's minimum wage can pay -- $425 per month.
Figures for the first two years of the city's Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness indicate it's working, with fewer people living on the street. But it has created even more competition for the dwindling low-income rental stock because, thus far, no new units have been added.
Wrong direction
Portland turned onto the path of high prices and tight supply when, in a move to clean up things, the city tore down a lot of low-income housing in the '70s. As late as 1974, an estimated 6,000 units still existed downtown; but a 1978 report showed 738 units lost since 1970 in the Lownsdale and Yamhill districts alone. It looked as if subsidized housing could make up for the lower-end rental housing lost when landlords signed the first 20-year HUD contracts in 1977. In subsidized buildings in which tenants pay 30 percent of their income for rent, and the government makes up the difference. Subsidies help keep buildings rented at market rate and also help the renter -- just as government-guaranteed loans and income tax deductions help those of us paying mortgages.
But with the Reagan budget cuts to HUD programs in the '80s, homelessness exploded nationally. In Portland, it took until 1988 to get a grip on the loss, and the City Council passed a resolution: the 5,183 low-income downtown housing units that existed in April 1978 would be maintained. We've never pulled that off.
Ten years ago, HUD contracts signed in the '70s began to expire. At the Roosevelt Plaza on Southwest Park, 58 people received eviction notices in 1997. Northwest Pilot Project, which had helped seniors displaced from downtown hotels for decades, and director Susan Emmons negotiated a postponement. For the first time, owners helped pay some relocation costs. As the person Northwest Pilot Project sent to help tenants find new homes, I was the unwitting agent of the destruction of a community, a family really. Many of these people were long-term tenants -- among them people in wheelchairs, or suffering schizophrenia, or speaking only Korean -- and they loved their home, right on the Park Blocks and convenient to Safeway. After those people moved, the building went condo.
If the Roosevelt evictions were my personal introduction to the brutal side of gentrification, they also were a turning point in public awareness of the problem. The Oregonian ran four major articles on the loss, including a front-page photo of tiny Olive Lacsamana, 93, sitting alone in her tidy room before eviction.
So in 1998, when the Oak's contract expired, the city bought the building to maintain 90 apartments as subsidized housing, and they remain so today. The city passed a preservation ordinance the same year. It requires any owner opting out of a HUD contract to first offer to sell the building to the city, so low rents can be preserved. Unfortunately, the ordinance has not been enforced, and when the Western Rooms quietly converted to market-rate rentals in 2001, we lost 39 units of subsidized housing. Which is not to say that all landlords are ready to bolt. The largest HUD contract downtown, Clay Tower with 235 subsidized one-bedroom units, expires this December, and the Schnitzer family, which owns the building, is trying to negotiate a meaningful extension from a cash-stripped HUD.
These HUD buildings are a critical part of the housing picture, and the new inventory will show 1,040 HUD units downtown.
Less successful have been the income-restricted buildings, first built here in the '90s in exchange for tax credits. The income restrictions are too high. A one-bedroom "60 percent" apartment rents for $709 a month, while the elderly that Northwest Pilot Project serve typically average $750 in monthly incomes. The new inventory of affordable housing downtown will also show the trend away from open-market housing for the general low-income public, toward housing targeting special needs: corrections clients, the chronically homeless and people in recovery.
One reason for this shift is the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness. It addresses only the chronically homeless, defined as single, disabled people who have been homeless for a year or more, or homeless multiple times. Defenders of this plan argue that the chronically homeless cost millions by burdening courts, jails, hospitals and sanitation systems.
The Ten-Year Plan report claims 480 new housing units. Yet, except for the 60 units at 8 N.W. 8th Ave., on the drawing board as early as 1999, nothing has been built downtown. All the others are existing low-income housing and were simply co-opted by the plan from the existing pool of low-income affordable housing stock. Let's not set up a system under which someone has to be chronically homeless before being able to get a place to live.
So now what are our options?
At the federal level, we are just going to hope to outlive the current administration's cuts to vital HUD housing programs.
At the state level, we need to reverse the proscription against a real-estate transfer tax so that we can enact one here and use money to finance new low-income housing. More immediately, Senate Bill 38 could generate approximately $60 million per biennium for housing by increasing the document recording fee from $21 to $36, with the additional revenue going to Oregon Housing and Community Services. The fee is charged for paperwork processing when a property changes hands.
And locally, we have the new tax-increment financing revenues, though they are not going to bring us to our goal downtown. Also, as we do create units, some of which will be in the South Park Blocks and Downtown Waterfront Urban Renewal Areas, lets not earmark all of them for the chronically homeless, leaving the elderly and the working poor out of the mix.
This is a real estate problem, and we need to solve it at a real estate level. For myself, I'm still haunted by Olive Lacsamana at the Roosevelt and all the other low-income elderly that we continue to shuffle around this city.
In the meantime -- though you can't see it from the top of the tram -- downtown Portland is 1,800 affordable housing units short of our 5,183-unit downtown goal.
Martha Gies is the author of "Up All Night" and many short stories and essays published over the last 30 years. A longtime low-income housing activist, she has helped relocate tenants from the Roosevelt Plaza, Clifford Hotel, Western Rooms, St. Francis Hotel and the Ace Apartments. Since 1996, she has done the housing counts for the Downtown Portland Affordable Housing Inventory.
Link to article
Monday, May 4, 2009
Efforts to Restrict Sprawl Find New Resistance From Advocates for Affordable Housin
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: Tuesday, December 26, 2000
Until this year, Habitat for Humanity affiliates in Arizona and Colorado never felt a need to get involved in a political fight. But in the fall they jumped into a battle against a seemingly unlikely foe: the environmental movement.
In one of the most far-reaching efforts yet to curb suburban sprawl, ballot initiatives in both states proposed giving voters an unprecedented level of power to designate wide swaths of land off limits to new housing.
Officials with Habitat, which builds low-income housing for needy families, feared that the measures would drive up the cost of land and ''basically shut down our ability to acquire land and lots for growth,'' said Chris Wolf, the organization's director in Phoenix. So the Habitat affiliates joined with developers to oppose the initiatives; in Colorado, opponents even made a television commercial highlighting Habitat's objections.
Nobody argues in favor of suburban congestion. But increasingly the debate over sprawl has turned to whether laws intended to fight it are playing a role in driving up housing prices, at a time when housing affordability in many parts of the country has dipped to its lowest level in almost a decade.
The success of anti-sprawl efforts is evident in the increasing number of communities that have adopted measures like low-density zoning, moratoriums on building permits or voter-approved growth boundaries. Although the Arizona and Colorado initiatives were defeated last month, many similar local proposals in California passed, and battles over anti-sprawl laws continue to rage in suburbs outside Washington, Atlanta, Dallas and other big cities.
Although the battles have been concentrated in the rapidly growing South and West, sprawl has been a concern in the densely populated Northeast as well. Only two years ago voters in New Jersey approved borrowing $1 billion to help preserve about a million acres of farmland and woodland.
As anti-sprawl measures proliferate, developers have enlisted affordable-housing advocates to promote the view that the restrictions make higher home prices inevitable, in effect amounting to a tax on prospective home buyers that hits the working and middle classes hardest.
''One of the unintentional byproducts of efforts to control sprawl is to restrict the amount of land available for housing,'' said Nicolas P. Retsinas, a former Clinton administration housing official who is director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, at Harvard University. ''When you restrict supply in the face of increased demand, what a surprise! Prices go up.''
Efforts to limit construction, critics say, can affect all types of housing, from apartments to mansions. Builders and other opponents contend that even when the limits mainly affect more expensive homes, the trickle-down consequences include rising prices for more modest housing.
But environmentalists and other supporters of growth controls say there is little proof that such measures have any significant impact on housing prices. Susan LeFever, director of the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club, notes that cities without strong growth-control laws have seen huge run-ups in home prices, a result of the nation's economic boom.
''It's certainly easy to pull out examples of places with growth restrictions where the cost of housing has gone up,'' she said. ''But it's equally easy to pull out places that don't have growth restrictions where the cost of housing has gone up just as much.''
Unless there is a recession severe enough to slow suburban development, experts expect anti-sprawl measures to remain popular with voters and local elected officials.
California saw more growth-related proposals on local ballots this year than at any other time since 1990, before the state plunged into recession, said Bill Fulton, president of the Solimar Research Group, public policy analysts in Ventura, Calif. During the last four years, he said, there have been 118 slow-growth initiatives in California, nearly twice as many as in the prior four-year period.
Most of the proposals in California this year were approved, although a few larger ones failed, notably in San Francisco and Sonoma County.
''In an economic boom is when you see growth restrictions come back,'' Mr. Fulton said, ''but they tend to lag behind a few years.''
In King County, Wash. -- Seattle and environs -- housing costs have soared so high that county officials recently ordered a study of whether the state's rules restricting development outside cities was helping drive up prices.
The ''surprising conclusion'' of the report, due out next month, is that there is no proof the rules have more than a negligible effect on home prices, said Ron Sims, the county executive. He attributes the jump in housing costs to the region's tremendous prosperity and rising incomes, noting that the housing market flattened out this year after the Nasdaq swooned.
In Cary, N.C., though, an affluent town of nearly 100,000 outside Raleigh, Mayor Glen Lang says home prices are already being affected by slow-growth measures approved in the last few years.
''When you have demand and decrease supply, prices rise dramatically,'' Mr. Lang said.
Both sides of the debate point to the same example: Portland, Ore.
Development is limited outside the growth boundary that has ringed Portland since the 1970's, and critics contend that this is why the city has seen home prices skyrocket. According to the government's Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, average home prices in the Portland-Vancouver, Wash., metropolitan area have risen 148 percent in the last dozen years.
''The development controls have acted as a long-run drag on housing supplies,'' said Gerard Mildner, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. ''The desire to protect open space and farmland has trumped people's concerns about housing affordability.''
Defenders of the Portland boundary, however, note that cities without similar growth controls have also seen steep price increases over the same period, including a 128 percent rise in Denver and a 116 percent rise in Salt Lake City-Ogden, Utah.
A study published this summer in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy concluded that while the Portland growth boundary ''has likely imposed upward pressure on prices, the results indicate that the effect has been fairly modest,'' most likely less than $10,000 for a typical home. Higher land prices have been offset by a trend toward smaller lots and other elements of higher-density housing, said one of the study's authors, Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.
The debate over growth controls is made all the more intense because of the unequal way the nation's long economic boom has treated Americans. While the last decade has created tremendous wealth, many people -- teachers, police officers, nurses and many others in middle-class jobs -- have watched the cost of housing rise faster than their incomes.
The median price for a single-family home rose about 45 percent during the 1990's, according to the National Association of Realtors. For the wealthiest fifth of American families, that was no problem, as their mean incomes rose 57 percent during that time, according to the Census Bureau.
But the incomes of most other families failed to keep pace with housing prices. The least affluent two-fifths of American families, for example, saw their incomes grow just 35 percent.
While the hottest housing markets have cooled recently -- prices fell slightly in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Portland during the third quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors -- there has been no letup in much of the rest of the country. Prices rose 5 percent in the Midwest and 4 percent in the South during the quarter.
In the last decade, the rise in home prices has been offset somewhat by lower mortgage rates. But during the third quarter, housing affordability reached its worst level since 1992. (Affordability should improve in the fourth quarter, as rates have dropped a good bit since the summer.) Some experts are concerned that the drop in affordability will slow recent gains in the percentage of American families who own their own homes -- advances that have resulted partly from loans made on such less-restrictive terms as smaller down payments.
And concerns about affordability extend to renters: a study issued this year by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that 5.4 million renter families either spent more than half their income on rent or lived in ''severely inadequate'' housing in 1997.
In Congress, developers have used the affordability issue to seek relief from restrictions on construction. But while builders argue that excessive growth controls can hurt the local economy, some local elected officials say there is also an economic danger in not doing enough to preserve natural amenities.
''If you're going to manage growth, you can't kill the goose that laid the golden egg,'' said Kirk Watson, the mayor here in Austin, where home prices have soared during the technology boom. Much of the credit for Austin's boom belongs to the city's beautiful rolling hills and other natural features, which have helped attract a talented labor force, the mayor said.
''The new economic paradigm is about the knowledge economy, and that is always going to follow the quality of life,'' Mr. Watson said. ''Part of managing this boom and growth is preserving what the knowledge economy was looking for in the first place.''
Photos: A recently completed housing development in growing Phoenix nearly encroaches on a park. (Associated Press); Chris Wolf of Habitat for Humanity says an Arizona ballot initiative would have crippled the Phoenix affiliate. (Jeff Topping for The New York Times) Chart: ''STATUS REPORT: Elusive Dream'' For all but the wealthiest families, income did not keep up with the rising cost of a home during the 1990's. All changes: 1990 through 1999. Chart shows cost of homes for poorest and wealthiest familes since 1990. (Sources: Census Bureau; National Association of Realtors)
Link to article
Published: Tuesday, December 26, 2000
Until this year, Habitat for Humanity affiliates in Arizona and Colorado never felt a need to get involved in a political fight. But in the fall they jumped into a battle against a seemingly unlikely foe: the environmental movement.
In one of the most far-reaching efforts yet to curb suburban sprawl, ballot initiatives in both states proposed giving voters an unprecedented level of power to designate wide swaths of land off limits to new housing.
Officials with Habitat, which builds low-income housing for needy families, feared that the measures would drive up the cost of land and ''basically shut down our ability to acquire land and lots for growth,'' said Chris Wolf, the organization's director in Phoenix. So the Habitat affiliates joined with developers to oppose the initiatives; in Colorado, opponents even made a television commercial highlighting Habitat's objections.
Nobody argues in favor of suburban congestion. But increasingly the debate over sprawl has turned to whether laws intended to fight it are playing a role in driving up housing prices, at a time when housing affordability in many parts of the country has dipped to its lowest level in almost a decade.
The success of anti-sprawl efforts is evident in the increasing number of communities that have adopted measures like low-density zoning, moratoriums on building permits or voter-approved growth boundaries. Although the Arizona and Colorado initiatives were defeated last month, many similar local proposals in California passed, and battles over anti-sprawl laws continue to rage in suburbs outside Washington, Atlanta, Dallas and other big cities.
Although the battles have been concentrated in the rapidly growing South and West, sprawl has been a concern in the densely populated Northeast as well. Only two years ago voters in New Jersey approved borrowing $1 billion to help preserve about a million acres of farmland and woodland.
As anti-sprawl measures proliferate, developers have enlisted affordable-housing advocates to promote the view that the restrictions make higher home prices inevitable, in effect amounting to a tax on prospective home buyers that hits the working and middle classes hardest.
''One of the unintentional byproducts of efforts to control sprawl is to restrict the amount of land available for housing,'' said Nicolas P. Retsinas, a former Clinton administration housing official who is director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, at Harvard University. ''When you restrict supply in the face of increased demand, what a surprise! Prices go up.''
Efforts to limit construction, critics say, can affect all types of housing, from apartments to mansions. Builders and other opponents contend that even when the limits mainly affect more expensive homes, the trickle-down consequences include rising prices for more modest housing.
But environmentalists and other supporters of growth controls say there is little proof that such measures have any significant impact on housing prices. Susan LeFever, director of the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club, notes that cities without strong growth-control laws have seen huge run-ups in home prices, a result of the nation's economic boom.
''It's certainly easy to pull out examples of places with growth restrictions where the cost of housing has gone up,'' she said. ''But it's equally easy to pull out places that don't have growth restrictions where the cost of housing has gone up just as much.''
Unless there is a recession severe enough to slow suburban development, experts expect anti-sprawl measures to remain popular with voters and local elected officials.
California saw more growth-related proposals on local ballots this year than at any other time since 1990, before the state plunged into recession, said Bill Fulton, president of the Solimar Research Group, public policy analysts in Ventura, Calif. During the last four years, he said, there have been 118 slow-growth initiatives in California, nearly twice as many as in the prior four-year period.
Most of the proposals in California this year were approved, although a few larger ones failed, notably in San Francisco and Sonoma County.
''In an economic boom is when you see growth restrictions come back,'' Mr. Fulton said, ''but they tend to lag behind a few years.''
In King County, Wash. -- Seattle and environs -- housing costs have soared so high that county officials recently ordered a study of whether the state's rules restricting development outside cities was helping drive up prices.
The ''surprising conclusion'' of the report, due out next month, is that there is no proof the rules have more than a negligible effect on home prices, said Ron Sims, the county executive. He attributes the jump in housing costs to the region's tremendous prosperity and rising incomes, noting that the housing market flattened out this year after the Nasdaq swooned.
In Cary, N.C., though, an affluent town of nearly 100,000 outside Raleigh, Mayor Glen Lang says home prices are already being affected by slow-growth measures approved in the last few years.
''When you have demand and decrease supply, prices rise dramatically,'' Mr. Lang said.
Both sides of the debate point to the same example: Portland, Ore.
Development is limited outside the growth boundary that has ringed Portland since the 1970's, and critics contend that this is why the city has seen home prices skyrocket. According to the government's Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, average home prices in the Portland-Vancouver, Wash., metropolitan area have risen 148 percent in the last dozen years.
''The development controls have acted as a long-run drag on housing supplies,'' said Gerard Mildner, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. ''The desire to protect open space and farmland has trumped people's concerns about housing affordability.''
Defenders of the Portland boundary, however, note that cities without similar growth controls have also seen steep price increases over the same period, including a 128 percent rise in Denver and a 116 percent rise in Salt Lake City-Ogden, Utah.
A study published this summer in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy concluded that while the Portland growth boundary ''has likely imposed upward pressure on prices, the results indicate that the effect has been fairly modest,'' most likely less than $10,000 for a typical home. Higher land prices have been offset by a trend toward smaller lots and other elements of higher-density housing, said one of the study's authors, Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.
The debate over growth controls is made all the more intense because of the unequal way the nation's long economic boom has treated Americans. While the last decade has created tremendous wealth, many people -- teachers, police officers, nurses and many others in middle-class jobs -- have watched the cost of housing rise faster than their incomes.
The median price for a single-family home rose about 45 percent during the 1990's, according to the National Association of Realtors. For the wealthiest fifth of American families, that was no problem, as their mean incomes rose 57 percent during that time, according to the Census Bureau.
But the incomes of most other families failed to keep pace with housing prices. The least affluent two-fifths of American families, for example, saw their incomes grow just 35 percent.
While the hottest housing markets have cooled recently -- prices fell slightly in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Portland during the third quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors -- there has been no letup in much of the rest of the country. Prices rose 5 percent in the Midwest and 4 percent in the South during the quarter.
In the last decade, the rise in home prices has been offset somewhat by lower mortgage rates. But during the third quarter, housing affordability reached its worst level since 1992. (Affordability should improve in the fourth quarter, as rates have dropped a good bit since the summer.) Some experts are concerned that the drop in affordability will slow recent gains in the percentage of American families who own their own homes -- advances that have resulted partly from loans made on such less-restrictive terms as smaller down payments.
And concerns about affordability extend to renters: a study issued this year by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that 5.4 million renter families either spent more than half their income on rent or lived in ''severely inadequate'' housing in 1997.
In Congress, developers have used the affordability issue to seek relief from restrictions on construction. But while builders argue that excessive growth controls can hurt the local economy, some local elected officials say there is also an economic danger in not doing enough to preserve natural amenities.
''If you're going to manage growth, you can't kill the goose that laid the golden egg,'' said Kirk Watson, the mayor here in Austin, where home prices have soared during the technology boom. Much of the credit for Austin's boom belongs to the city's beautiful rolling hills and other natural features, which have helped attract a talented labor force, the mayor said.
''The new economic paradigm is about the knowledge economy, and that is always going to follow the quality of life,'' Mr. Watson said. ''Part of managing this boom and growth is preserving what the knowledge economy was looking for in the first place.''
Photos: A recently completed housing development in growing Phoenix nearly encroaches on a park. (Associated Press); Chris Wolf of Habitat for Humanity says an Arizona ballot initiative would have crippled the Phoenix affiliate. (Jeff Topping for The New York Times) Chart: ''STATUS REPORT: Elusive Dream'' For all but the wealthiest families, income did not keep up with the rising cost of a home during the 1990's. All changes: 1990 through 1999. Chart shows cost of homes for poorest and wealthiest familes since 1990. (Sources: Census Bureau; National Association of Realtors)
Link to article
Saturday, May 2, 2009
What is mixed-income housing?
To address questions raised by regionwide households exploring housing options within the new mixed-income communities under development in Chicago, MPC worked with a variety of stakeholders to publish the attached brochure answering the question "What is mixed-income housing?" .
Chicago’s new mixed-income developments are being built as a part of a broader transformation effort of key City neighborhoods. Some sites are already complete and others are just opening or will begin construction soon.
These communities include homes at market-rate prices, along with affordable opportunities for rent (targeting families making up to 60% of AMI or approximately $45,000 per year for a household of four) and for sale (for families making up to 120% of AMI or around $90,000 per year). There are also homes reserved for qualifying public housing residents.
Click here for the brochure
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