Posts filed under 'Housing'
Do you wonder sometimes about the connection between affordable housing and sewage disposal? Land is expensive around here, so if you want to see affordable housing built, you need to allow it on small lots. But leaching fields for septic systems generally take up a lot of land.
As one health official told Pioneer’s researchers, “dilution is the solution to pollution”, meaning the more land you have for a septic system, the more the dirty effluent get diluted before polluting our water supplies. The flip side is, the more land used for housing, the less open space preserved.
Can you put a septic system on a small lot? Can affordable housing be built in communities with no sewers? According to Pioneer’s survey, 53 of the 187 communities within 50 miles of Boston have no homes on sewer. Many more have sewers in just a small part of town.
Pioneer is looking to do more research on the topic (alternative technologies, shared systems, Title 5, local regs, etc.). If you have thoughts on the topic, do let me know. In the meantime, join me at CHAPA’s June 9 event on the challenges and opportunities of building affordable housing where there are no sewers.
Also, check out this conference in Vermont on sewage solutions for small communities.
May 6th, 2008
A little-noticed provision in the housing bond bill, inserted by the Senate and supported by the Patrick administration, will require that all affordable housing projects pay ‘prevailing wage’ on construction.
The article in today’s Globe cites a Mass Housing Partnership study that found such provisions increase costs by 34%.
In the words of a leading housing advocate:
“It’s likely to increase the cost of developing affordable housing significantly,” said Aaron Gorstein, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, an affordable housing umbrella group. “It could lead to fewer units being available for low- and moderate-income families.”
April 17th, 2008
Yesterday’s Globe had an article critical of the film tax credit offered by the Commonwealth.
I will say that it has significantly improved the celebrity level of the gossip columns, minimizing the Globe’s Names & Faces section’s embarassing fascination with C-list celebrities eating chinese food at the Kowloon. Wow! John Waite? Pro wrestlers? Wasn’t exactly Page 6 material.
However, the Department of Revenue’s report makes one fact clear — these are temporary jobs:
…the 20 film productions for which tax credits were claimed in calendar year 2006 employed approximately 2,267 individuals, with an average employment duration of 3.2 months, with the employment duration ranging from one week to 12 months. Weighted for the number employed and the duration of employment for particular productions (with large productions receiving a higher weighting than small productions), the average duration of employment was 1.4 months. However, these estimates are not definitive, as it is not currently possible for DOR to independently verify the accuracy of employment figures included in the applications. For the 27 calendar year 2007 film credit applications received thus far, productions employed 1,477 individuals with an average employment duration of 3.7 months, ranging from 1 week to 12 months. Weighted for the number employed and the duration of employment for particular productions, the average duration of employment was 1.7 months.
Rumors abound that a studio may set up full-time shop in Quincy or elsewhere but until then this is not a major employer — approximately 4-5,000 people on average per month.
These employment levels are roughly equivalent to the knifemaking and wholesale plumbing supply businesses in Massachusetts. Except those industries pay 2 - 3x the average weekly wage of the motion picture industry. I’ll watch out for their tax credits, complete with pretty pictures of the stars….
March 28th, 2008
On the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08!
–Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.”
–In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were 1,084 foreclosures and 1,335 sales of houses and condos in Valley communities from Glendale to Calabasas, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.”
“It’s bad. It’s really bad,” market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.
We’re lucky. We don’t build houses anymore in Massachusetts (1980s production was around 40,000 units, from 2000-2006 around 20,000-23,000, and currently we are building at an annual rate of about 12,000 to 14,000). Very small increases in supply means that in a recession our housing prices should decline much less than elsewhere. But also expect a sharp upturn in already high prices as soon as consumer confidence comes back.
March 26th, 2008
The Boston Zoning Commission voted yesterday to approve the City Council’s measure to cap students renting off-campus apartments at 4 per unit, without regard to its size. (Read the Globe’s front page article here.) Now I’m sympathetic to what motivated this measure in the first place: I’m pretty sure if my wife and I lived in Allston or Mission Hill, next door to the noise and the revelry, we’d be annoyed as all get up too. Nevertheless, what this measure will most likely not do is bring rental rates in the neighborhoods around the city’s colleges and universities back down to what proponents might call an affordable level. As some of the displaced students would (hopefully, if they paid attention during their Intro to Econ lectures) be able to explain, constricting supply tends to inflate prices, not the other way around.
March 13th, 2008
The Globe reports in “Warehouse for the Poor” that Holyoke and other cities in Western Massachusetts are serving as destination cities for the poor and homeless, who are nudged there by the state agencies.
Holyoke’s homeless shelters can accommodate four times the number of families per capita than homeless shelters in Boston. And when shelters are full in other places, the state Department of Transitional Assistance sends homeless families to shelters with open spots, often in Holyoke. Last year, 40 families from the Boston metropolitan area were referred to Holyoke, Sullivan said.
“Our goal is to place families as close to the local office as possible, based on the availability of units,” said Alison Goodwin, a spokeswoman for the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services, which oversees the agency. But if local shelters are full, state regulations require that homeless families be housed in the first unit available, Goodwin said.
Agencies operating emergency shelters in Holyoke received more than $4 million from the state in fiscal year 2008, Goodwin said.
As you have now grown to expect, Pioneer had the story first. Yup, right here, folks. Not just once, but twice. Mayor Sullivan of Holyoke is right to note that he cannot realistically turn away families and individuals in need. But the state has to stop concentrating poverty in our cities–especially older industrial cities which already face any number of fiscal, education, public safety and economic problems.
If we are serious about addressing poverty, it must be dealt with statewide. Otherwis, we create poverty traps for generations to come. Folks, where’s the plan?
February 9th, 2008
Lenore and Skip Schloming of the Small Property Owners Association play in rough waters, where landlords are seen as the Grand Exploiters. SPOA represents folks who own 5, 10, maybe 50 units and don’t get the big state support enjoyed by big developers. They’re essentially small business owners, many of whom buy in urban areas because they can build up equity and grow.
In addition to fighting back on ever-more ingenious attempts to reinstate rent control, SPOA is pushing some ideas that make eminent sense–and could actually do something for the low-income market and the homeless.
First, from a recent newsletter:
Officials and nonprofit leaders keep pursuing the same old housing strategy for the poor–try to get more tax money to build more subsidized housing–in the face of glaring statistics that it simply does not work. What they refuse to try is a rent escrow law, the surest way to improve the supply of low-income housing–at zero taxpayer cost.
Currently, the state’s rent withholding law allows tenants to stop paying rent and be safe from eviction for any reported defect in their apartment under the state’s sanitary code. Well-intentioned, but it can and is gamed. Why not put in place a rent escrow law that requires tenants to escrow any rent they claim to be withholding because of defects. The landlord can’t access the rent, but the tenants also have less incentive to game the system. This would make many more landlords open to low-income rentals, increasing the supply.
Then the Schlomings note the increase in homelessness in Boston notwithstanding that we are in year 8 of the city plan to end homelessness. They argue that the cost of maintaining a subsidized unit, according to the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, is over $1,900 per month, while
a privately owned rooming house costs about $650 to $700 a month for room for one person, leaving $1,239 a month for supportive services.
That kinda makes a lot of sense, don’t you think? After all, homelessness is not just a matter of shelter but also of providing robust support to address, to the extent possible, the issues that led to that situation in the first place.
February 5th, 2008
What level of concentration of poverty is the right amount? Is it right for the state to create destination cities for the poor?
As it stands, the state will, whenever possible, place the poor it is “helping” in areas of cities where housing values are extremely low in order to maximize their own ability to give people shelter.
Seems to be right from the immediate bean-counting standpoint, but if you think about it, it can create a death spiral for cities, which are already deep in the trough fiscally.
Let’s start with the numbers. In Massachusetts, the following Middle Cities have easily met their “state target for affordable housing”:
- Holyoke – 21%
- Springfield – 17%
- Lawrence – 15%
- Worcester – 14%
- Brockton, Lowell, Lynn – 13%
- New Bedford - 12%
Do we really want to have the state concentrate even more poverty in Holyoke, Springfield or these other cities? Shouldn’t other towns have to pick up a share of the responsibility?
How do they afford to provide the kinds of services these new arrivals need? How much of an additional public safety burden is it? What level of disruption to or limitation on the schools–and more importantly to the kids–is it? How is it possible for the poor to find work in areas where unemployment is higher than elsewhere in the state? How can you attract middle-class residents and businesses when your streets aren’t safe and your schools stink? Aren’t we locking in a culture of low expectations in these cities?
The long-term costs associated with the policy of “stackin em high” are higher than you might think.
Can we all at least agree intelligently that we are being stupid?
December 21st, 2007
Jane Jacobs was the maven of public input, but she is also in many respects a common sense proponent of organic, private market growth in our cities. Try this on for size, from The Death and life of Great American Cities, published in 1961 when Robert Moses still held the marionette of New York in his hands:
There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend — the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars — we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse the decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday’s and day-before yester-day’s suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.
But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism, and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace…
Yup, yup, yup. There is an argument to be made that the state housing agencies, by stuffing more and more poor people into our major urban centers, is making them unsustainable. Fix the schools and focus on public safety, and frankly you could tell the state housing agency staff to pack up their things and go home.
December 20th, 2007
But fewer younger, healthier people are joining the state’s workforce to defray the costs incurred by the older, sicker population.
Thus spake the Boston Globe this morning and their assessment is correct. The Commonwealth’s population is stagnant. We are losing young workers even as we gain dependents. Their focus, however, is another matter.
We must begin with the fundamental question, which in this case is: Why are so many young workers leaving the state? The easiest answer to that question is the high cost of living. And, yes, double digit increases in health insurance premiums are part of the problem. Its crux, however, is not health insurance; it’s housing. We should be focused on ways to reduce the cost of housing in Massachusetts. Only in that way will we be able to entice the young and the healthy to stay here.
Which brings me to the title of my post this morning. What is a dependency ratio? It’s simply the ratio between the number of people in a given pool who are of working age and those who are not - children and the elderly. A dependency ratio can be calculated for a country, a company or, in this case, a Commonwealth. Last year in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explored the implications of dependency ratios for companies such as Bethlehem Steel and GM. Despite enormous increases in productivity - GM makes more cars today with 1/3 the workforce than it did at its supposed height in the early 60s - GM is being eaten alive by its dependency ratio. The lessons for the economy of a state whose dependency ratio is fast approaching GM’s are not happy ones. We need to sit up and take notice before we become GM to North Carolina’s or Texas’ Toyota.
October 31st, 2007
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