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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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In the US, mixed housing developments aren't working for low-income ...
https://www.citymetric.com/.../us-mixed-housing-developments-arent-working-low-in...
Feb 13, 2015 - Mixed-income housing in Chicago, built on the site of a ... hundreds of troubled public housing projects with mixed-income developments.
In the US, mixed housing developments aren't working for low-income families
By L. Vale and S. Shamsuddin
Mixed-income housing in Chicago, built on the site of a now-demolished public housing estate. Image: Authors' own.
For decades, public housing stood as the most architecturally visible and politically stigmatized reminder of urban poverty in many US cities. Originally built to accommodate an upwardly mobile segment of the working poor, by the 1970s public housing had become a last-resort option for low-income elderly and the poorest of families. Critics blamed public housing for concentrating poverty, encouraging welfare dependency, increasing crime and violence, and contributing to urban disinvestment and decline.
Over the past 20 years, the United States federal government and local housing authorities have replaced hundreds of troubled public housing projects with mixed-income developments. Has it worked?
It depends who you ask: scholars, elected officials, housing developers, and low-income residents continue to disagree. A key area of contention has to do with the term “mixed-income” – which, though widely used, is rarely defined.
In our research into public housing, we’ve concluded that if policymakers fail to agree on a clearer definition of mixed-income housing's aims and attributes, the sought-after benefits of public housing reinvention will remain elusive.
A new vision for public housing
Beginning in the early 1990s, policymakers proposed demolishing low-income public housing projects and replacing them with mixed-income housing. The idea was that this would reduce concentrated poverty and revitalize deteriorating neighborhoods. Between 1993 and 2010, Congress appropriated more than $6bn to fund these efforts through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) program.
Today, “the projects” are now far less visually prominent in many cities, as more than 250,000 public housing units – including some of the most notorious high-rise complexes, like Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes and Detroit’s Frederick Douglass Homes – have been demolished.
Detroit's Frederick Douglass Homes development. Image: Mikerussell at Wikimedia Commons.
Supporters contended that the HOPE VI program would create safe and attractive neighborhoods to serve all incomes. Some former residents of demolished projects would gain a place to live in the new communities, while others could use subsidized housing vouchers to move into diverse neighborhoods (presumed to be less deprived than their former homes).
Detractors countered that mixed-income redevelopment would lead to a loss of much-needed “hard units” of public housing. As a result, many low-income households would merely be dislocated to other pre-existing, impoverished neighborhoods, where they would lack established social networks.
Others added that income mixing is a thinly veiled attempt by a neoliberal state to commit public funds to gentrification. Additionally, most scholars have found that many of the assumed benefits of mixing low-income residents with their higher-earning counterparts – such as role modeling and social networking – fail to positively impact the lives of low-income families.
By contrast, other aspects of mixed-income developments seem more promising: enhanced security, increased investment in neighborhoods, and higher expectations for management.
What does mixed-income mean, anyway?
To assess whether mixed housing developments actually work, we need to decide what we mean by the term "mixed-income". However, if there is little consensus on what mixed housing actually does, there is even less of a consensus on what mixed-income housing is.
Our research shows that the term “mixed-income” encompasses a heterogeneous set of projects, which differ widely in several areas. These include:
The distribution and range of household incomes included in the redevelopment effort;
The spatial strategy for mixing different income groups together;
The proportion of dwelling units designated for home owners and for renters;
The length of time that selected housing units are guaranteed to be subsidized for low-income families;
The relative income levels of residents living in the surrounding neighborhood.
Even though all 250+ HOPE VI public housing redevelopment projects since 1993 have received funding from the same federal program and are bound by the same basic federal regulations, local housing authorities and their partners exercised considerable discretion over the final form of mixed-income projects. This discretion reveals distinct choices about where and how low-income families should be housed.
Based on our preliminary analysis of HOPE VI proposals sent to the US Department of Housing and Development, most redevelopment efforts stipulated that families at the lowest end of the income scale – in other words, those in most desperate need of housing – should constitute a minority of residents in new mixed-income communities. Some redevelopments even sought to have a majority of units occupied by relatively wealthy households who would pay market-rate rents.
Conversely, other HOPE VI proposals allocated the overwhelming majority of apartments to low-income public housing residents. Still others skipped market-rate apartments entirely and instead favored substantial tiers of “affordable” housing that included smaller subsidies for those working families who might never think to apply for public housing, but still had relatively low incomes.
In this latter brand of housing community, residents have a variety of income levels – and can still be considered “mixed” – even though all or nearly all of those incomes can still be regarded as “low”. Such initiatives have been implemented both before the HOPE VI program began, and under its auspices.
Unfortunately, these narrow-mix arrangements constitute the minority of mixed-income housing proposals. Because vastly different social, economic, financial, and spatial mixes share the name “mixed-income,” many kinds of communities have been too easily lumped together under the same term. HOPE VI seems best conceptualized as an umbrella that covers quite a large variety of local practices and strategies.
In 2006, protesters in post-Katrina New Orleans objected to using demolished public housing as the primary site for building mixed-income communities instead targeting wealthy neighborhoods. Image: Subculture Photography via Flickr.
Who’s left out? Large numbers of extremely low-income households that once called public housing home.
Even if there are positive outcomes from mixed-income housing, important unresolved questions remain: which type of mixed-income housing plan will be best for achieving such gains? Do only some residents benefit, while others simply get displaced to other high-poverty areas?
In other words, before we can accurately evaluate the positive and negative effects of mixed-income communities, we must first agree on what we mean by the term mixed-income. Without disentangling this definitional knot, mixed-income redevelopment of public housing will remain deeply ambiguous as a practice.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Lawrence Vale is the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Shomon Shamsuddin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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Sun Dec 23, 2018 11:56 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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What does "mixed-income" mean for our towns? — Strong Towns
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/.../what-does-mixed-income-mean-for-our-towns
Apr 18, 2018 - Needless to say, the effectiveness of mixed-income housing as we know it is far ... A mixed-income development in Morristown, New Jersey
What does "mixed-income" mean for our towns?
April 18, 2018
by Austin Maitland
What does mixed-income housing mean? To some, it means the next generation of public housing, an incredible improvement over the disastrous projects of the early 20th century. To others, it is just a less obvious way to discriminate against people with low incomes. The complicated reputation of this type of housing has fueled debate between policymakers and residents for decades. Needless to say, the effectiveness of mixed-income housing as we know it is far from a settled issue. But through its successes and failures, mixed-income housing offers some valuable ideas for ensuring equitable and sustainable neighborhoods. And it may offer a glimpse at a promising future for our towns.
The Beginning of Public Housing
To understand the relevance of mixed-income housing to our cities today, it’s important to know where it came from. In the early 20th century, U.S. housing policy introduced the government to the real estate business. Early iterations of public housing were meant as a solution to the problems of tenements and slums that housed most low-income residents. Slumlords had supposedly taken advantage of the poorest class of people by providing cramped, unsanitary, and unsightly living conditions in privately-operated tenements. The federal government intervened by expanding the housing division of the Public Works Administration and passing subsequent housing acts which marked the provision of housing as a responsibility of the government.
However, within a few decades, public housing facilities were plagued with the same mismanagement, unsanitary living conditions, and lack of maintenance that were used to justify the government’s initial venture into housing (See: Pruitt-Igoe, Robert Taylor Homes). The dramatic failure of federally-funded housing projects famously drew the ire of urbanist Jane Jacobs who described the housing as “[l]ow-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism, and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.” Another key difference was that this time, the disastrous housing came at the expense of the taxpayer.
The Arrival of Mixed-Income Housing
Towards the end of the 20th century, mixed-income housing emerged as an alternative to the projects and has gained traction in housing policy ever since. Mixed-income facilities allow the government to exit the business of development and property management altogether. Under a mixed-income system, public housing agencies grant density bonuses and financing incentives to private developers in exchange for including units with rents held below the market rate to people with qualifying incomes. The practice is a favorite in New Jersey where municipalities have a constitutional obligation to permit the construction of units affordable to a range of incomes under the Mount Laurel Doctrine.
One of the primary benefits of the integration of subsidized and market-rate housing is that low-income residents typically enjoy higher-quality construction and amenities than what is offered in traditional public housing. Newer developments like Essex Crossing in New York, or The Union on Queen near Washington D.C. offer a quality of subsidized housing that would have been unimaginable just a few short decades ago when public housing lacked so much as air conditioning or functional heating systems.
Beyond the improved facilities, mixed-income developments give lower-income residents the opportunity to live in higher-income neighborhoods. When the government was constructing entire facilities dedicated to low-income residents, political and financial realities typically ensured the projects were located far from the wealthiest and safest neighborhoods. Mixed-income facilities help soften the negative perceptions of subsidized housing by removing obvious geographic and visual indicators of class. In doing so, they become more politically palatable to wealthier neighborhoods — with good schools and lower crime rates — that may otherwise oppose subsidized housing.
Emerging Limitations
Mixed-income housing is not without flaw. For one, the physical integration of subsidized and market-rate units has not erased the differences in quality of life between economic classes. Low-income residents may not always have access to the same amenities (e.g. fitness centers, community rooms, etc.) as the market-rate renters. Some facilities place more restrictions on residents of only the subsidized units such as frequent room inspections and regulated visitor access. What low-income renters gain in quality of living arrangements, they often sacrifice in privacy and autonomy.
Offering a dynamic mix of apartments, townhouses, and single-family homes, this Houston neighborhood has housing options at a wide variety of price points.
Offering a dynamic mix of apartments, townhouses, and single-family homes, this Houston neighborhood has housing options at a wide variety of price points.
Most importantly, mixed-income housing is flawed because the system falls short of addressing the root of the problem it is intended to solve: lack of affordable housing. It’s true that in places like New Jersey, laws that mandate subsidized housing have prompted the construction of hundreds of thousands of housing units, including subsidized and market-rate, that would have otherwise been blocked at the municipal level.
But forcing the price of some units below market rates simply drives up the cost of housing for non-qualifying residents, which naturally expands the pool of people seeking the subsidies in the first place. That isn’t to say the government shouldn’t provide any sort of safety net for those in need of housing. But taken to the extreme, achieving mixed-income neighborhoods through subsidization is an inherently unsustainable practice; it is an intermediate step towards affordability rather than a goal in and of itself.
A Different Type of Mixed-Income Neighborhood
Until this point, we have discussed mixed-income housing as a combination of market-rate and subsidized units. But that is not the only way to achieve mixed-income neighborhoods. With the right land use regulations, neighborhoods can naturally offer housing at a variety of prices within reach of most incomes without any need for subsidization.
Neighborhoods that offer housing to a range of incomes provide a variety of benefits over subsidized mixed-income neighborhoods. Whereas subsidized mixed-income units require wealth redistribution for viability, naturally affordable units expand the tax base as more people can support themselves without public aid. Naturally mixed-income neighborhoods also forgo the need for paternalistic policies that target low-income residents such as the ban on porch grills, visitor restrictions, or the lack of access to facility amenities. When housing is affordable to all, individuals retain their autonomy and dignity as residents.
Fortunately, we can find examples of non-subsidized mixed-income neighborhoods in pockets all over the country. Sometimes natural mixed-income housing occurs due to a lack of pressure on the housing market. For instance, it’s not uncommon to find areas catering to a wide variety of incomes in older neighborhoods of post-industrial cities like Trenton, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or Buffalo.
In this neighborhood a mere 1.5 miles from the economic opportunities of downtown Houston, a modest one-bedroom apartment goes for $799 just one block from a luxury three-bedroom apartment going for $3,800. In a place like northern New Jersey, those prices would only be possible with considerable subsidies.
In this neighborhood a mere 1.5 miles from the economic opportunities of downtown Houston, a modest one-bedroom apartment goes for $799 just one block from a luxury three-bedroom apartment going for $3,800. In a place like northern New Jersey, those prices would only be possible with considerable subsidies.
In cities with explosive economic growth, such neighborhoods are harder to come by as zoning regulations often cripple the ability of housing supply to keep up with demand. However, Houston offers a good example of how a city bursting with economic opportunity can maintain neighborhoods accessible to a wide range of incomes.
While certainly not without regulation, Houston is far more developer-friendly than most other cities in the country, allowing developers to employ a wide range of housing types and densities to compete for residents. Residents benefit from this competition as rents remain relatively affordable and stable across incomes despite the massive influx of jobs and residents.
After decades of policy favoring economic polarization, mixed-income housing is a step in the right direction for building economically inclusive and sustainable neighborhoods. However, achieving mixed-income through subsidies is not enough to address the ongoing issue of housing affordability.
Subsidized housing policy must be matched with sensible land use regulations that allow neighborhoods to be responsive to the needs of people of all incomes. Only then will people of all incomes have equal access to the wide range of economic opportunities offered by our towns and cities.
(Top photo by Johnny Sanphillippo)
A proposed bill in Washington State would require cities to allow a minimum housing density near transit stations. It is a well-intentioned response to a very real problem, but its one-size-fits-all nature risks unintended consequences.
Oct 11, 2018 Daniel Herriges
Sep 11, 2018 Daniel Herriges
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Jul 25, 2018 Daniel Herriges
About the Author
Austin Maitland is a Rochester, NY native and graduate student in urban planning at Rutgers University. |
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Sun Dec 23, 2018 12:05 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Baltimore is a perfect example. Thompson v HUD is a landmark case about HUD allowing and even encouraging the development of segregated housing and ghettos. Vouchers will only work in certain situations. Moving to the suburbs often means lack of transportation and jobs.
This lawsuit took years to revolve.
Investors are swooping up housing in Flint and asking residents to sell while rental prices are rising, probably hoping for section 8 Housing and apartments are already out of the reach of many young people. With homeless rising in many states because of high priced housing, I am curios to see if I am overly pessimistic. I wuld like to hear other voices about the gentrification going on. |
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Mon Dec 24, 2018 12:02 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Home Blog Building Blocks Podcast: Tenant's Rights and Anti-Displacement Advocacy
March 15, 2018
Building Blocks Podcast: Tenant's Rights and Anti-Displacement Advocacy
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Posted By: Laurel Blatchford
Enterprise is advocating for tenant's rights, anti-displacement, and affordable housing production and preservation across the Metro Denver region.
In March 2016, Matthew Desmond exposed readers to the many faces of the housing crisis through his groundbreaking book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond’s study not only revealed the deeply personal effects of the eviction process on families, but also sparked a nationwide conversation on the roles race, gender, and economic mobility play in the search for decent, safe, and affordable housing. Unfortunately, the scale of America’s eviction problem is far greater than the stories of the Milwaukee residents in Desmond’s book.
As keynote speaker for Enterprise’s 2017 Denver Forum for the First, Desmond underscored the importance of local and regional efforts to protect affordable housing in Denver, a city where residents are facing the consequences of rapid development and associated housing cost escalation at an overwhelming rate. In 2016, 36,000 families in Colorado received official eviction notices. However, the number of actual evictions is likely to be even higher as state and local data does not typically consider actions such as “cash-for-keys” agreements, tenant intimidation, landlord foreclosures, or building condemnations when measuring the scale of this problem.
To better understand the Denver region’s housing challenges, I invited Melinda Pollack, Enterprise’s Vice President of National Initiatives, to the Building Blocks Podcast to explore the genesis of Denver’s issues and share examples of the grassroots efforts to prevent community displacement.
Over the last 20 years, Denver has seen incredible growth due to major investments in its transit system, a booming tech economy, and a consistent wave of newcomers. However, longtime residents, as in many other metropolitan areas, have found it increasingly difficult to keep up with increased rents in the face of stagnating wages and an aging, limited housing stock. In late 2017, Freddie Mac released a report finding that the amount of housing in Colorado that was affordable to people making less than half of the median income had plunged by more than 75% between 2010 and 2016 - one of the biggest decreases in the country.
Lacking government protections, affordable units have been torn down, converted, or purchased to make room for new development with little consideration for what this growth will mean for low- to median-income Denverites. These pressures in the housing market have led to increased evictions and forced displacement with profound effects on both the individual family and the broader community - often triggering family homelessness, job loss, or declines in physical and mental health.
To combat this trend, Enterprise’s Denver market has made the commitment to work with housing advocates, low-income communities, and Colorado legislators to enact housing policy changes at the state and local levels. By increasing the resources available for affordable housing and removing barriers to its development, Denver has a chance to make large scale housing preservation sustainable for the long-term. This, coupled with meaningful protections for existing residents, will allow for more Denverites to benefit from the region’s growth.
Learn more about Denver’s complex affordable housing climate and efforts to protect tenant’s rights on episode 4 of Building Blocks: Connecting People, Places, and Policies. |
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Mon Dec 24, 2018 6:31 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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ECONOMIC JUSTICE
Case: Thompson V. HUD
HOME >OUR IMPACT >ECONOMIC JUSTICE >THOMPSON V. HUD
Thompson v. HUD
Date Filed: 1/31/1995
As one of the most important fair housing lawsuits of the past decade, Thompson sought to eradicate the legacy of racially segregated public housing in Baltimore, Maryland, the hometown of Thurgood Marshall, LDF’s first Director-Counsel. Baltimore’s public housing has suffered from nearly a century of segregation that has left thousands of low-income African-American families perpetually locked in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. By 1995, when Thompson was filed, housing experts considered Baltimore to be one of the most racially segregated cities in America.
In January 2005, after nearly ten years of litigation, Federal District Court Judge Marvin J. Garbis gave public housing residents a precedent-setting civil rights victory. Judge Garbis held that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by unfairly concentrating African-American public housing residents in the most impoverished, segregated areas of Baltimore City. He found that HUD’s programs “failed to achieve significant desegregation” in the Baltimore region. Judge Garbis further faulted HUD for treating Baltimore City as “an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region.” Judge Garbis ruled that HUD must take affirmative steps to implement an effective regional strategy for promoting fair housing opportunities for African-American public housing residents throughout the Baltimore region.
After issuing his January 2005 order, Judge Garbis directed further proceedings to determine whether HUD’s conduct also violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws and to decide on an appropriate remedy for the plaintiff class of approximately 14,000 African-American families who are tenants, former tenants, and prospective tenants of Baltimore City public housing developments. The parties went to trial in the spring of 2006, and post-trial proceedings were completed that summer.
At the 2006 trial, HUD’s own witnesses confirmed that the Baltimore region’s public housing is, and always has been, racially segregated and has never offered low-income African-Americans any meaningful opportunity to live in integrated areas of the Baltimore region. LDF’s proposed remedy called on HUD to remedy the harm caused by its discriminatory policies. Testifying in support of LDF’s proposed remedy were leading housing policy experts including Jill Khadduri, Xavier Briggs and Margery Turner, Camille Zubrinsky Charles, John Powell, and Gerald Webster.
In November 2012, the Court approved a historic settlement to resolve the case. At the court hearing approving the settlement, several African-American families, including current and former residents of Baltimore public housing, spoke poignantly in favor of the settlement. “This is a wonderful program. It gave me a chance to start a new and better life,” said client Michelle Green, another participant in the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program who spoke at the hearing today. “It’s not just about housing. They try to help low-income people branch out and do their best.”
Key Features of the Settlement
The settlement, approved by the Court, includes a number of initiatives that HUD will undertake:
Regional Housing Opportunities. HUD will continue the successful Baltimore Housing Mobility Program launched in an earlier phase of this case. Over the past decade, this program — which is currently administered by Metropolitan Baltimore Quadel, a nationally respected company — has assisted more than 1,800 families who have voluntarily chosen to move from public housing and other areas of deep poverty in Baltimore City to “communities of opportunity, ”neighborhoods throughout Baltimore City and the surrounding region that are in low in poverty and offer better educational and economic opportunities. Each family that chooses to participate receives a Housing Choice Voucher, high-quality housing and credit counseling, and support with the transition to the new neighborhood and schools. (For more details, see New Homes, New Neighborhoods, New Schools: A Progress Report on the Baltimore Housing Mobility.) The settlement will provide similar opportunities for up to 400 additional families each year, through 2018.
Incentives for Affordable Housing Development. HUD will seek to provide incentives for private housing developers to include affordable units for families when federally-insured, market-rate developments are built in communities of opportunity throughout the Baltimore Region.
On-line Housing Locator. HUD will develop an online listing to help families locate affordable housing opportunities throughout the Baltimore Region.
Regional Opportunity Study. HUD will sponsor a study to analyze housing opportunity throughout the Baltimore Region.
Civil Rights Reviews. HUD will conduct civil rights reviews of particular plans and proposals submitted to HUD for approval, involving federally funded housing and community development programs in the Baltimore Region. In these reviews, HUD will pay particular attention to the impact of the plans and proposals, individually and collectively, on the creation of meaningful housing choices for all families in strong, healthy, and inclusive communities across the Baltimore Region.
In addition, the settlement provides for completion of the remaining housing opportunities required by the 1996 Thompson partial consent decree and related court orders. Most have been completed, but a few projects are still in progress.
Thompson is but one of the numerous lawsuits that LDF has litigated to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968, including challenges to racially discriminatory practices by realty agencies, discriminatory site selection for public housing and tenant assignment policies, and the failure of federally-funded housing programs to avoid concentrating African-Americans and the poor in urban centers or traditionally black residential areas.
LDF’s co-counsel in Thompson include the ACLU of Maryland, which filed the original lawsuit in 1995, as well as Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, Brown Goldstein & Levy LLP, and Levy Ratner LLP. |
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Tue Dec 25, 2018 9:40 am |
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