A recap of the week’s equity news

“Dear Parent: Your Child Is Fat,” - Time Magazine

School children across England will soon have their Body Mass Index (BMI) tested as part of a new effort to tackle the growing problem of childhood obesity. Parents will be sent a letter telling them whether their child is underweight, a healthy weight, overweight or very overweight. The letter will also include leaflets giving advice on eating healthily, physical activities their child might do and the risks of being overweight.

So, are parents really failing to notice their little angels piling on the pounds? Yes, says the U.K.’s Department of Health. “Today, when more children are overweight compared with previous generations, it can be harder for parents to objectively identify if their child is overweight,” says a spokeswoman from the Department of Health. “Research shows that most parents of overweight or obese children think that their child is a healthy weight. Some research showed that only 10% of parents with overweight or obese children described their child as overweight.”

“Black population deserting S.F., study says,” - San Francisco Chronicle

African Americans are leaving San Francisco because of substandard schools, a lack of affordable housing and the dearth of jobs and black culture, according to a report by a committee looking into the exodus.

The African American Out-migration Task Force, put together by the mayor’s office last year to figure out what can be done to preserve the city’s remaining black population and cultivate new residents, presented its findings at a public hearing Thursday called by Supervisor Chris Daly.

“America’s Fasting-Dying Cities,” - Forbes Magazine

Washington, D.C. - The turmoil of the mortgage market granted a temporary reprieve from hearing about the woes of America’s Rust Belt. That doesn’t mean things are better. Despite a decade of national prosperity, the former manufacturing backbone of the U.S. is in rougher shape than ever, still searching for some way to replace its long-stilled smokestacks.

Where’s it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities–Detroit and Flint–making the ranking.

The New York Times this weekend offered an interesting glimpse into what life is like for Section 8 residents who leave urban centers for the suburbs.

Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs.

Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents.

The piece focuses specifically on Antioch, Calif., a northern California city about 40 miles northeast of Oakland that has experienced an influx of Section 8 residents in the past decade.  It’s pretty clear the NYT article was written, at least in part, as a reaction to Hannah Rosin’s controversial piece in The Atlantic last month. I’ll let you decide how well it did in that regard….and you can also check out an interesting discussion about Rosin’s piece on EquityBlog, too.

More than 2,000 nationwide progressive bloggers, activists and policymakers have descended on Austin, Texas, this week for the phenomenal Netroots Nation conference. I am one of those folks.

One of the most interesting discussions so far has been “The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: Inside an American Tragedy.” Some of the nation’s leading thinkers and advocates on housing and economic issues came together to talk about how we can take some of the toxicity out of the broad debate over the subprime crisis. The experts — Mark Winston Griffith of the Drum Major Institute, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), Mike Hudson of the Center for Responsible Lending, and Hale Stewart of the indispensable economics blog Bonddad — all argued that the subprime crisis is increasingly viewed in the media as a problem caused by unscrupulous buyers. Instead, they said, the crisis was primarily caused by a failure or government regulation and a lending sector that had become completely disconnected from the consequences of failed loans.

“There has been a huge abdication of responsibility on the part of Congress in this crisis,” Griffith argued.

The panel listed in devastating detail all the ways that new loan products were created, marketed and sold to unsuspecting borrowers. In fact, many of the loans were DESIGNED TO FAIL, so as to force borrowers to come back to the in search of a new loan to cover costs. During times of increasing housing prices, these loan defaults simply brought lenders a flood of new financing fees and, basically, the value the home added between the original loan and the new one.

“They were parasitic loans,” said Miller, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee. “They were designed to take advantage of people and take away their life savings.”

The panel represented what appears to be a concerted effort on the part of Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos) to deal with policy issues, rather than merely political ones. The level of thought and policy innovation at this conference is among the best I’ve ever seen at a non-wonk event. I’d highly suggest checking it out next year. And I’ll try to post more from my time in Austin as the weekend rolls on.

A piece in the July issue of The Atlantic is stirring up quite a controversy. In “American Murder Mystery,” journalist Hanna Rosin tries to find the root cause behind the crime spikes in many of the nation’s mid-sized cities.

Her controversial culprit: the demolition of public housing and the spread of those using Section 8 vouchers out into other neighborhoods.

The article focuses largely on the surge of violence in Memphis, Tenn., and the findings of two married University of Memphis researchers — Richard Janikowski, a criminologist who had been tracking emerging crime patterns in the city, and his wife, Phyllis Betts, a housing expert who had been evaluating where residents went after the city demolished its public-housing projects.

Over dinner conversations, the couple realized the geography of their work was overlapping. They wondered if it was more than a coincidence.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals….On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.

The piece generated a fascinating back and forth on NPR’s new morning show The Takeaway today. The show’s host interviewed both Hanna Rosin and Xavier de Souza Briggs, an MIT professor of sociology and urban planning, to rebut Ms. Rosin. It’s definitely worth a listen.

Also, you can watch researcher Phyllis Betts talk about her findings in Memphis:

Housing Trust Funds have a long history of producing diverse affordable housing options at the local level.

Housing advocates have been working hard to bring this idea to scale and create a National Housing Trust Fund to build 1.5 million affordable units in 10 years. Most of the units would help people that pay over 50% of their income towards housing costs, something more and more Americans can relate to as costs of living rise.

But just as it seems we are inching close to securing much needed resources to build affordable rental housing, someone’s always got to throw a stumbling block in the way. As Monday’s editorial in the New York Times points out, the National Housing Trust Fund that has just emerged from Senate committee would redirect the first year’s pot of money to a foreclosure prevention program.

Sounds good, sure — but this is instead of the House’s version, which sends the money to rebuild much-needed housing on the Gulf Coast. The fact that the Gulf Coast’s own Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) is leading the effort to funnel money away from the Gulf is particularly painful, but would come as no surprise to those fighting to rebuild communities across the coast.

There is a severe need for funds to build affordable rental housing in the Gulf: in the most devastated parishes, Louisiana only has money allocated to rebuild 1/3 of the 82,000 units of rental housing destroyed; Mississippi has received waivers of low-income requirements on the vast majority of its recovery dollars and moved $600 million of its housing recovery dollars to rebuild their port; and Alabama currently only has the funding to help one-tenth of those that applied in Mobile County for help rebuilding their homes.

There is still a housing crisis in the communities of the Gulf Coast – almost 3 years out families are getting kicked out of trailers with formaldehyde fumes with nowhere to call home. One year of this Fund could significantly contribute to housing production in the Gulf Coast and help ease the immense need.

It’s unfortunate Gulf Coast residents are being forced to compete for money with those swallowed up in the foreclosure crisis. The politicians in Washington must figure out a way to handle both of these pressing housing crises with compassion and vision.

Photo of New Orleans’ Musicians Village by Flickr user Cherie’, used under a Creative Commons license.

The housing market may be tanking — and Bear Stearns may be heading for the hills — but this New York Times story shows just how hard (and random) it still is for working families to get into affordable homes:

Both women applied to buy a town house at below market rates at Copper Beech Village, an 80-unit community here that is now nearing completion. Both met the criteria for affordable housing and were entered into a lottery conducted by the Long Island Housing Partnership in conjunction with Patchogue Village and Suffolk County.

Ms. Blake was among the fortunate 40 chosen to buy a new home (drawn from 150 names, although 2,500 applications were submitted). She moved into her $158,000 town house last month.

Her friend, however, was not so lucky.

The unfortunate story of these two Long Island friends is being repeated every day across this country, as millions of families struggle to find affordable homes close to economic and social opportunity. Find out how to fight for more affordable housing with the PolicyLink Equitable Development ToolKit. Tips on other resources for advocates and residents are always appreciated…

(Thanks to Housing Authority of Bowling Green for the image)