ChuckE Law - Community Lawyering in Miami

Good article in the Sunday NY Times on the demolition of public housing in Atlanta. Begins with praise by Renee Glover but then gives good coverage to critics. Over the past 15 years, Atlanta has bulldozed about 15,000 units, spread across 32 housing projects, some of which once contained as many as 2,500 residents. . . . Critics of the demolitions worry about the toll on residents, who must qualify for vouchers, struggle to find affordable housing and often move to only slightly less impoverished neighborhoods. Especially in a troubled economy, civil rights groups say, uprooting can lead to homelessness if more low-income housing is not made available. Lawsuits have been filed in many other cities, generally without success, that claim that similar relocations violate residents’ civil rights and resegregate the poor. . . Over all, 195,000 public housing units have met the wrecking ball across the country since 2006, and over 230,000 more units are scheduled for demolition,...

From the National Low Income Housing Coalition Memo to Members June 19, 2009 House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank (D-MA) and Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) wrote to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan on June 15 asking that HUD issue a one-year moratorium on the demolition or disposition of public housing units. In the letter, Mr. Frank and Ms. Waters note that 120,000 units of public housing have been lost within the last 10 years, and that public housing is being lost at a faster rate than it is being replaced. This loss effectively exacerbates the “affordable housing needs of our most vulnerable populations,” the letter states, and forces families to live in increasingly substandard living conditions. Mr. Frank and Ms. Waters underscore the idea that preservation of pre-existing affordable housing units is essential because other affordable housing mechanisms, including housing vouchers, will not be useful if ther...

The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity held a hearing on June 4 on its draft Section 8 Voucher Reform Act (SEVRA). Subcommittee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) is expected to introduce the bill in coming weeks. The draft bill includes many provisions widely supported by housing advocates: an authorization of 150,000 new vouchers; rent simplification provisions, which would allow housing agencies to recertify the incomes of people on fixed incomes every three years instead of annually, as is now the case and would allow housing agencies to use income verified by other federal programs; new rent provisions are also intended to encourage residents to increase their earned income; increases in voucher holders’ ability to live in neighborhoods of their choosing; protections for tenants in other federally subsidized properties who are at risk of losing their assistance; expansion of housing agencies’ ability to project-base vouchers. Several organizatio...

President Obama signed “The Protecting Tenants in Foreclosure Act” on May 20, 2009. This bill includes a nationwide 90 day pre-eviction notice requirement for tenants in foreclosed properties. The provisions of the bill are effective on enactment, May 20, 2009. Specifically, the new law will require that the new owner after foreclosure must provide bona fide tenants with 90 days notice prior to eviction and allow bona fide tenants with leases to occupy the property until the end of the lease term (unless the unit is sold to a purchaser who will occupy the property in which case the tenant must be given 90 days notice to terminate the tenancy.) The National Low Income Housing Coalition has detailed information explaining the protections in the new bill.

Thanks to the National Housing Trust The National Housing Trust has a briefing paper on the new Weatherization money. As NHT states, the money should be targeted to preserving affordable multifamily housing. It can be an extremely important piece of financing for preservation of existing multifamily housing. The following is an excerpt from the National Housing Trust paper. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) included a dramatic increase in funding for Weatherization. But many state policies will need to change for families and seniors in multifamily housing to benefit. One-third of households are renters and energy retrofits of rental housing are eligible under the Weatherization program. Older multifamily housing- which is home to many of our nation’s low and very low-income residents- is at risk from disrepair and in need of renovations. But in many states, Weatherization funding has significantly favored single-family housing. Right now, state administering agenc...

Thanks to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty S. 896, the Mckinney Act reauthorization bill, as passed by the Senate on May 6, 2009 also included an important renter protection amendment offered by Senator John Kerry (D-MA). Senator Kerry's amendment would require that in any foreclosure made "on a federally-related mortgage loan or on any dwelling or residential real property after the date of enactment", tenants in such dwellings with bona-fide leases or tenancies would have the right to remain in the unit for the remainder of their lease and would have the right to 90 days notice prior to eviction. A recent review of state foreclosure laws by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and the National Low-Income Housing Coalition found that renter notification laws are uneven across states and in only a few states did tenancy survive foreclosure (for a copy of the report click here, Without Just Cause .) The Senate passed its version of S. ...

The U.S. HUD website announces that the Miami-Dade Housing Agency is receiving over $19,000,000 in stimulus funds specifically targeted to repair or replace dilapidated public housing. There has been no local coverage and I have no idea how it is being used. However, given the history of the Housing Agency and the recent resignation of Jose Cintron, the most recent short lived Director, it is very important to keep an eye on it. HUD has issued Q & A on how the funds can be used which seems to give PHAs very wide latitude. It could be used to replace the units destroyed in Scott Homes. Or to repair some other public housing properties needing help. If it is used in ongoing projects there is no requirement for tenant participation but any project not listed in the PHA Plan requires a formal change in the Plan which will require some transparency.

From ShelterForce Winter2008 This is what we should do on the Scott Homes site in Miami. On Chicago’s Near West Side sits a 70-year-old Depression-era building, the sole remaining structure of the Jane Addams Homes, the first federal government housing project in Chicago. The building—part of one of three demonstration projects in Chicago built under the Public Works Administration Act—will be the future site of the National Public Housing Museum. The Chicago Housing Authority, which owns the building, chose it to serve as the museum’s home in August with the hope of changing the image of public housing residents, CHA Commissioner Michael Ivers told the Chicago Tribune. Modeled after the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, the museum is slated for a December 2011 opening. It will trace 70 years of public housing through the stories and artifacts of six decades of residents of the red brick Addams buildings along Chicago’s West Taylor Street.

By Peter Marcuse ShelterForce Winter 2008 I hate to write these words—but President Bush was right. Speaking on Wall Street just before the G20 meeting, he said: “The crisis was not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” Indeed. The crisis was not a failure of the system; it is how the system works. And the answer is not to reinvent the system, but to reject it and try something new. It is the private housing market system itself that produces these crises in housing, not because it is failing, but precisely because it is working. Housing is only provided to those who can pay enough for it to make a profit for its supplier. There is an obvious injustice in the results of such a system—today, there is not a single city in the country in which a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can afford even a one-bedroom apartment, a situation in which African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants, and women suffer in grossly disproportionate n...

I found a great analysis on the Tax Foundation website which compares the amount of money each state sends to Washington versus the amount they get back. The most interesting part is that those states who profit the most often have state politicians who argue most strongly against “big government.” For example, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin rejected the $288 million of the federal economic stimulus package. However, this chart shows that in 2005 Alaska sent $24 billion to Washington in taxes and received back over $42 billion. Gov. Jindal in Louisiana is also rejecting $98 million in stimulus money. But Louisiana, in 2005, sent slightly more than $20 billion to Washington and received back almost $40 billion in federal spending. While I haven’t done an analysis, just looking at the Tax Foundation chart there appears to be a high degree of correlation between Republican states and those states which receive a lot more from the federal government than they pay in. Maybe if thes...

The New York Times today ran a major story on the largely empty Icon Brickell condo towers in downtown Miami. " Miami Condo Colossus Is Monument to Excess " (NYTimes 3/11/09) The article describes the 1,646 condominium building developed by Jorge Perez' Related Group: But instead of representing a triumph for Mr. Perez, 59, Icon Brickell has become a symbol of the excesses of the building boom in downtown Miami. Since 2003, 83 towers with nearly 23,000 condo units have been added to the downtown skyline, from fancy Brickell Avenue through the more modest Biscayne Corridor, causing an oversupply of epic proportions in this city of 400,000 people. As of Dec. 31, almost 45 percent of the new condos remained unsold, according to Peter Zalewski, the owner of Condo Vultures Realty, who represents investors seeking to buy condos in bulk and rent them out until the market recovers. Not exactly news to anyone who lives in South Florida. So what is the Florida Legislature doing...

Although the public face of the foreclosure crisis is single family homeowners, tenants are bearing a disproportionate amount of the pain. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that nationwide tenants comprise forty percent of the families facing eviction due to foreclosures. And that those families are overwhelmingly in lower income neighborhoods. ( Renters in Foreclosure , NLIHC 12/08) LOCAL GOVERNMENTS RESPOND Across the country many state and local governments are responding with emergency measures. An excellent article " Tenants:Innocent Victims of the Nation's Foreclosure Crisis " in the Albany Government Law Review recounts some of the recent efforts. ● Some states and cities are enacting laws that provide tenants more time to prepare for eviction by requiring notice to the tenant that the foreclosure process has started. (Ohio;Chicago) ● Others involve plans to mitigate post-foreclosure impacts on tenants that range from including emergency re...

I want to make everyone aware of a couple of extremely useful sites for mapping local data. One site is specifically focused on foreclosures. Thanks to Steve Fischback an advocate in Rhode Island. Wanted to alert advocates of a mapping tool that incorporates foreclosure data. The data is available at the zip code level but the data is now almost a year old (June 2008). However, it does give advocates a powerful tool to identify foreclosure hot spots. The tool is available at Foreclosure-Response.org, a new website offering resources intended to help states and localities respond to the foreclosure crisis. This site is maintained by the Center for Housing Policy, KnowledgePlex, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and the Urban Institute. http://www.foreclosure-response.org/index.html In addition, an even more powerful site, which includes much much more information (maybe too much!) is beta.dataplace.org . Both of these sites allow mapping to the census tract level.

No postings since the election. Too much information and no time to think. For the time being I am going to try to digest some information for Miami and Miami-Dade communities. Hope it is useful.