Posts filed under 'Housing'
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
Remember the pledge to put 1000 new police officers on the street?
That is not happening, but the administration has just put forward a plan to put 50 more officers on the street.
However, Chief Anthony Scott of Holyoke is balking at the state aid, saying “After the three or four years, the city and taxpayers need to find the money to keep those individuals employed…[i]t’s not fiscally responsible.”
The Chief points out the problem with state initiatives for local programs. Can you rely on continued funding? Its akin to someone ‘buying you a house’ by making the downpayment, then handing you a mortgage. State government pays for the initial cost of hiring the officers (and takes the credit), then muncipalities are at the mercy of the state to continue providing the money in future years.
Think I’m exaggerating the issue? Ask those communities that played by the rules of the much-heralded Smart Growth Housing Trust Fund which is now “$8 million short of what it will be required by law to pay to these communities“.
October 4th, 2007
So, back to Randal O’Toole’s Debunking Portland. Everyone would have to admit that a key goal of the whole Portland effort was to reduce the use of cars. So a couple of decades, if not more, into this experiment and how are we doing?
Overall Transit Usage is Down
- “More than 97 percent of all motorized passenger travel (and virtually all freight movement) in the Portland area is by automobile.”
- “Portland transit usage grew faster than driving in the 1990s,” but “transit’s share declined in the 1980s, when the region’s first light-rail line was under construction. In 1980 more than 2.6 percent of motorized passenger travel in the Portland area used transit. By 1990, that had fallen to 1.8 percent. Over the next 12 years, it slowly climbed to 2.3 percent but still remained well below the 1980 level. Since 2002 it has stagnated or slightly fallen.”
Transit Usage as a Percentage of Commuters is Flat or Even Down
- “During the 1970s, TrMet made many improvements in bus service, including building a downtown transit mall, increasing bus frequencies, and providing commuters with park-and-ride stations. Between 1970 and 1980, total transit ridership tripled and the share of commuters taking transit to work increased from 7.0 to 9.8 percent.”
- Cost overruns on the first light-rail line forced TriMet to raise bus fares and reduce service. By 1990, four years after the light-rail line opened, only 6.7 percent of commuters rode transit to work — less than in 1970. Ridership recovered in the 1990s, but…only [to] 7.7. percent… buses in [Seattle] carried a smaller percentage of travel than Portland in 1980, but were ahead of Portland’s bus-and-light-rail system in 1990 and 2000.
Transit Usage as a Percentage of Downtown Commuters is, hmm, Down
- “In 2001, TriMet was proud to say that 46 percent of all downtown Portland workers rode transit to work. Only 11 percent of Portland-area commuters work downtown, so on a regional level this is not very important. But transit did help relieve congestion and parking problems in the downtown area. By 2005,” because of service cuts after the 2001 recession and the gargantuan debt payments due to the expansion of the light rail elements of the network(sound familiar, anyone?!), “the number of downtown workers communing by transit declined by more than 20 percent, while the number driving to work increased. The result was that transit’s share of downtown commuting fell to just 38 percent.”
So, what about this experiment has worked? We have enough regulations at every level. One prays that we continue to resist Urban Growth Boundaries…
September 21st, 2007
I walk to work, and I cannot for the life of me understand how people can sit in traffic for hours.
I love cars–especially fast cars.
Schizophrenic? No, just a pretty even-handed observer of the Smart Growthies’ passion for mass transit and walkable cities and the car-lovers’ and business’ passion for get up and go.
I have given up on seeing an absolutely objective narrative of how well or poorly Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary/transit-oriented development experiment has gone. I would note that Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, long-time resident of Portland and author of the about to be released The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and Your Future, is as systematic an analysis as I have seen. And he has some pretty compelling evidence that the Portland experiment is failing by many key measures.
O’Toole concludes in Debunking Portland:
Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region’s authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980. And developers have found that so–called transit–oriented developments only work when they include plenty of parking.
More soon…
September 20th, 2007
I like “Sesame Street,” as I don’t think pre-school children should be exposed to the latest in advertiser-driven brain-stem stimulation. I also enjoy “Greater Boston.”
That said, I do object to the Olympian enshrinement of Ken Burns, Buster Bunny, and Emily Rooney in WGBH’s new technicolor monstrosity of a road hazard. How can a place that really, really needs $20 gifts from Inspector Lynley-loving librarians toss so much coin around?
Is anyone else nervous about Boston’s annexation by Nonprofitstan? Private citizens and businesses default and run, bridges rot and slot machines jingle as colleges and “non-commercial” media outlets splurge on name-brand architects.
[Black Kettle Alert: Yes, Pioneer is a nonprofit too. If anyone would like to engage Renzo Piano or Rafael Moneo to redesign PI World Headquarters, I'll retract this entry.]
September 19th, 2007
Ross Gittell in the New England Journal of Higher Education/Summer 2007 edition (”Demographic Demise”) neatly summarizes why the New England region should be concerned about future growth. The data on our inability to recruit and retain the 25-34 cohort is pretty dramatic.
Overall, New England’s population grew by only eight percent—far less than the national average of 18 percent. Yes, but we get quality and energetic, bright young workers, right? Wrong.
- Even granting the ballooning of the baby boomer population, and therefore a seven percent decline in the 25-34 year old set nationwide, Gittell notes that “most alarming” is that the 25-34 set declined by about 25 percent in New England over the 15-year period. All NE states were in the bottom 10 nationwide—all had drops of 20 percent or more.
- Contrast that to the Mountain, Northwest and Southeast states that grew by more than 10 percent. The top ten states actually grew—NV by 60, UT 45, AZ 31, ID 21, CO 17, GA 16, OR 12, NC 9, TX 8, and TN 2.
Gittell cites the 2003 Boston Chamber/Boston Consulting Group survey of more than 2,000 area college graduates, which found that half of them leave the area after receiving their degrees. Reasons for leaving were not strong ties to other areas, but rather:
- Quality of job opportunities
- Connections between employers and near graduates
- The cost of living – especially housing
- Experiences offered in the region and the palette of entertainment and socializing opportunities
As the baby boomers snake through the life cycle, will the boom we’ve enjoyed over the last 40 years be located elsewhere?
We are past the phase of serious thought. Time for action. Gittell focuses on reason #2, so see his recommendations on that. To address reason #1, and how to make Massachusetts more business friendly start with Pioneer’s Measuring Up? To address #3, start with Pioneer and Rappaport’s study from 2006. We have more coming on that this fall.
I like my job and I have a house, so #4 is what kills me. How about letting bars serve food till 2 a.m. and reduce the restrictions on outdoor dining? And how about making Downtown Crossing all that it can be? Can it be that hard?
September 4th, 2007
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