Weekly update from the National Housing Conference

Dear Friend,

For the past two weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to meet several of our current and future members from Cleveland, Ohio to Oakland, California. The work our “unlikely coalition” of homebuilders, lenders, civil rights advocates, nonprofit housing producers and individual housing professionals are doing is inspiring and enlightening. We often say we are only as strong as our members, and there is nothing as gratifying as seeing how powerful a statement that is.

In the Bay Area of California, I got to spend an afternoon with Linda Mandolini, president of Eden Housing and the chair of NHC’s Board of Governors. Eden is one of the largest nonprofit affordable housing producers and property managers in the country, serving more than 100,000 people in its 50-year history. We visited a wonderful rehab project at Faith Tennyson in Hayward. There, 158 units are being restored with residents largely in place. In addition to unit and façade improvements, the site will have a much-improved community center and play area. We also toured the Alta Mira Senior and Family Apartments, a beautiful project with 151 family and senior units, adjoining a 206-unit market-rate development that shares common areas. The affordable units are one, two and three bedrooms targeted to households earning between 20 and 50 percent of the area median income and are a tangible example of what success in our fight for affordable housing for all can look like.

In Sacramento, I was able to get together with NHC member and Housing Visionary Awardee Lisa Hershey, executive director of Housing California, to discuss how we can use the successful experience of the California housing bond initiatives to support our effort to develop and enact a national housing act for the 21 ^st century. In Oakland, I met with Amie Fishman, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California. We talked about the unique issues driving the affordable housing crisis in California, especially in the Bay Area, and how zoning impacts housing affordability. Our national housing crisis extends from areas where workers of nearly all income levels cannot afford housing to areas where prices are so low they are hard to build, rehab and mortgage.

In San Diego, I met with NHC members and affordable housing leaders from across the country, including Julia Gordon, president of the National Community Stabilization Trust; Lindsey Johnson of the US Mortgage Insurers; Chrissi Johnson of Quicken Loans; Barry Zigas from Consumer Federation of America; Gary Acosta, CEO and co-founder of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals; Jim Park, co-founder and CEO of the Mortgage Collaborative; Carol Bouchner from Genworth Financial; Mike Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending; and Lisa Rice from the National Fair Housing Alliance, to name just a few. We discussed the latest data from organizations like Moody’s Analytics and the Urban Institute, and how to move forward on housing finance reform and the growing minority homeownership gap. We also met with Congresswoman Katie Porter, a member of the House Financial Services Committee and expert on affordable housing in her own right.

In Cleveland, I got to catch up with Jim Rokakis, director of the Thriving Communities Office of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy and a national leader in land banking and blight elimination. Jim and I worked closely on the creation of the Hardest Hit Fund’s blight elimination program, and he continues to be a leading figure in the fight to help those neighborhoods most devastated by the housing crisis recover. While in Detroit, I had the opportunity to catch up with Erica Raleigh, executive Director of Data Driven Detroit (D3). D3 was a key leader in the effort to survey every parcel of land in the City of Detroit during its bankruptcy crisis, a project that has empowered the city and its stakeholders to attack neighborhood decay with precision, and an ongoing effort that has resulted in the stabilization of many of Detroit’s neighborhoods.

These trips are the highlight of my work here and always remind me how important all of our members are to ensuring safe, decent and affordable housing for all in America.

Sincerely,

David Dworkin

NHC President and CEO

Democratic presidential candidates unveil rural plans

Three Democratic candidates—Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)— unveiled plans to help rural America last week, all of which included initiatives to expand rural Americans’ access to high-speed broadband. Warren’s plan calls for publicly-owned and operated broadband networks and mentions her proposal to invest $523 million in rural affordable housing and $2.5 billion in rehabilitation for 200,000 homes on tribal lands. Klobuchar’s plan addresses affordable housing as well, calling for expanding rural rental assistance programs and strengthening protections for mobile homeowners. And Gillibrand’s plan calls for a $50 billion Rural Future Partnership fund to be used for priorities including affordable housing.

Wealth gap 8-10x larger for Blacks and Latinx since 1963

The gap between white and Latinx and black Americans has exploded and continues to widen, according to data presented by the Urban Institute. NHC believes that the significant erosion of housing wealth since the 2009 housing crash through equity extraction and foreclosure has exacerbated this trend. 

The Center for American Progress published a report showing that extreme weather caused by climate change is exacerbating the affordability crisis. The report makes several policy recommendations, including expanding rental assistance and homelessness assistance programs and increasing funding for disaster mitigation strategies. Read the report here.

In an article published last weekend, the New York Times found that the disappearance of the mortgage-interest deduction, once a primary means of federal homeownership assistance, has had little effect on middle-class neighborhoods across the country. The article notes that, as a result of the 2017 tax overhaul, far fewer households are claiming the deduction, yet there is no indication that house prices or buying activity have changed. Read the article here.

The Boston Globe reported last week that three large Boston hospitals are teaming up to launch a $3 million initiative to help families facing eviction. The plan reflects a growing consensus that a strong connection exists between good health and affordable, quality housing. Read the article here.

The International Monetary Fund has issued a new study that finds “strong evidence that increasing house price and income inequality has reduced long distance migration, the type most linked to jobs.” According to the study, migration to more prosperous locations is disincentivized because higher housing prices trump higher earnings, and migration to less prosperous locations is disincentivized because lower earnings trumps lower house prices. Read the full study here.

Wednesday, August 14