ChuckE Law - Community Lawyering in Miami

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.