Housing

The metropolitan Washington housing market, just beginning to stabilize at midyear, will have to deal soon with tens of thousands of additional foreclosed homes thrown onto the market, an Urban Institute study forecasts.

High poverty rates, especially among African Americans and Latinos, threaten the well-being of neighborhoods as well as families. We can anticipate that the number of neighborhoods with dangerously high poverty rates is higher today than in 2000, representing a tragic reversal of the downward trend between 1990 and 2000. Historically, public policies played a central role in establishing and enforcing patterns of racial segregation, alongside discriminatory practices by the private sector and individuals. But no single causal process explains the persistence of residential segregation in America today. To ensure the well-being and sustainability of all neighborhoods, public policies must intervene to break the cycle.

The Housing Policy Revolution: Networks and Neighborhoods from the Urban Institute Press traces the shift in U.S. housing policy from the Washington-led bureaucracies of the 1960s to today's highly collaborative, tax-supported networks of advocates, local governments, bankers, and property developers.

Despite substantial progress since passage of the Fair Housing Act four decades ago, neighborhoods remain highly segregated by race and ethnicity. This paper summarizes existing research evidence on both the costs of segregation and the potential benefits of neighborhood diversity. It uses decennial census data to show that a growing share of US neighborhoods are racially and ethnically diverse, but that low-income African Americans in particular remain highly concentrated in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Because the dynamics that sustain segregation today are complex, strategies for overcoming them must address not only discrimination, but information gaps, affordability constraints, prejudice, and fear.

With the generous support of the William S. Abell Foundation, the Urban Institute (UI) surveyed District permanent supportive housing (PSH) agencies and specific PSH projects, asking their staff to detail current projects and future ambitions. This research brief is an analysis of the stock of PSH in the District as of early fall 2008, demographic information on PSH tenants at that time, and a look at how the District might move forward toward fulfilling its commitment to create 2,500 new units of PSH and ultimately eliminating chronic homelessness.

Neighborhoods likely to be the hardest hit by foreclosure impacts in 2009 are those that experienced the highest densities of subprime (high-cost) lending during the peak 2004-2006 period. This brief examines patterns of such lending in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. The very highest subprime densities were found in minority neighborhoods that were, interestingly, at the higher rather than the lower end of the income spectrum. But there was considerable variety in characteristics among the most troubled. Of the fifth of census tracts that ranked highest in subprime density, 35 percent had predominantly white populations and 60 percent were in the suburbs.

HOPE VI supports demolishing large, dilapidated public housing and replacing it with smaller-scale, more appealing properties. What makes this feasible (mixed financing; private-sector entities; and mixed-income, mixed-tenure complexes) also creates conditions that challenge and can undermine long-term sustainability. Sustainability has not yet been assessed and whether it should or can be assessed has been questioned. With input from housing practitioners and insight from a trial exploration of two HOPE VI redevelopments, this report demonstrates the need for, and feasibility of, conducting an assessment that can assist both private owners and public agencies in sustaining this valuable resource.

Every parent recognizes the inextricable connections between where we live and the quality of our children’s education. Although public policies have historically contributed to disparities in both neighborhood affordability and school quality, federal programs focused on affordable housing rarely take public schools into account and school officials typically assume that they have no influence over housing patterns. This paper focuses on four principles regarding the vitality and performance of schools and communities, discussing opportunities for constructive policy interventions, summarizing what we know about their likely effectiveness, and recommending next steps for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education.

The Housing Policy Revolution illuminates how our networked approach to housing policy developed and fundamentally transformed governmental response to public welfare. Through historical political analysis and detailed case studies, the book imparts policy lessons on delivering funding for urban change. David J. Erickson traces the history of our current policy era, where decentralized federal subsidies (block grants and tax credits) fund a network of for-profit and nonprofit affordable home builders. In addition to government reports and legislative history, he draws upon interviews, industry journals, policy conference proceedings, and mainstream media coverage to incorporate viewpoints from both practitioners and policymakers.

This brief reviews recent social and economic trends in the ten metropolitan areas that form the context for the neighborhood programs being operated as a part of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections initiative. It finds that these areas are strikingly different along a number dimensions and in are many ways representative of the diversity in conditions and trends across America's metropolitan areas. Since 2002, for example, two of these areas attained among the nation's highest rates of employment growth (Denver and Seattle) while two others experienced serious declines (Oakland and Milwaukee). Although there were important differences in magnitudes, all sites did share in a number of trends: minority groups growing as a share of total population, improvements in several social indicators (e.g., in crime and teen pregnancy) but, disturbingly, notable increases in child poverty.