Daily equity news

“Deficit Complicates Push on Jobs,” - The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders pressed President Barack Obama on Wednesday to extend more elements of the existing economic-stimulus package, and to possibly add tax cuts that were rejected the first time around, despite a record budget deficit that is giving some lawmakers pause.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal deficit for fiscal 2009 will be $1.4 trillion. That is somewhat better than the nearly $1.6 trillion the CBO projected in August, but much of the change stems from different accounting treatments for losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage companies the government took over last year.

“Putting America’s Diet on a Diet,” - The New York Times

On his first day in Huntington, W. Va., Jamie Oliver spent the afternoon at Hillbilly Hot Dogs, pitching in to cook its signature 15-pound burger. That’s 10 pounds of meat, 5 pounds of custom-made bun, American cheese, tomatoes, onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard and mayo. Then he learned how to perfect the Home Wrecker, the eatery’s famous 15-inch, one-pound hot dog (boil first, then grill in butter). For the Home Wrecker Challenge, the dog gets 11 toppings, including chili sauce, jalapeños, liquid nacho cheese and coleslaw. Finish it in 12 minutes or less and you get a T-shirt.

So much for local color. Earlier that day, Oliver met with a pediatrician, James Bailes, and a pastor, Steve Willis. Bailes told him about an 8-year-old patient who was 80 pounds overweight and had developed Type 2 diabetes. If the child’s diet didn’t change, the doctor said, he wouldn’t live to see 30. Willis told Oliver that he visits patients in local hospitals several days a week and sees the effects of long-term obesity firsthand. Since he can’t write a prescription for their resulting illnesses, he said, all he can do is pray with them.

“Universal healthcare coverage appears elusive,” - Los Angeles Times

As a key Senate committee prepares today to pass its plan to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system, senior Democrats are acknowledging that it may be impossible to provide coverage to all Americans — a central goal of President Obama and his congressional allies.

That is fueling growing alarm among hospitals and insurance companies, which have made universal coverage a condition of their support.

“Slums of Suburbia,” - Newsweek
Sorting through the rubble of California’s foreclosure tsunami.

John Cowgill is standing in the rain on quiet Victory Avenue in Manteca, Calif., a gridlike town of 65,000 people located just outside of Stockton. A realtor with PMZ, the biggest real-estate firm in the northern San Joaquin Valley, he is responsible for the vacant and vandalized house standing behind him; inside, grafitti covers the walls, the banister is torn off a staircase, and glass shards from a broken chandelier peak out from the carpeting. Blocks away, the road comes to an abrupt end as rows of neatly planted crops replace rows of houses.

“Look at this house and the one over there. What’s different?” Cowgill asks. At one house, the lawn is neatly trimmed and a small purple bicycle leans near the front door. At the other house, black iron bars are affixed to the door, a sight more commonly associated with the heart of the inner city than the outskirts of suburbia. Nearby, a rusty sports car sits in the driveway. “Manteca was a desirable place to live,” he explains. “But this Wild West financing meant anybody could end up here. That’s what this thing did. It scrambled communities.”

“Unhealthy glut of options: Fast food dominates eating choices in vulnerable Brooklyn neighborhoods,” - The New York Daily News

In Brooklyn, you are where you eat.

Close to 60% of the borough is overweight or obese, according to recent state Health Department data.

“Cutbacks pinch homeless programs,” - USA TODAY

The homeless are having more trouble getting help because of state budget cuts, and federal stimulus funding in September will fill only part of the gap, service providers for the homeless say.

“It’s a perfect storm” of falling revenue and rising need, says Joel John Roberts of PATH Partners, a group that advises communities on services for the homeless. “The holes in the safety net are getting bigger.”

Daily equity news

“Tennessee Experiment’s High Cost Fuels Health-Care Debate,” - The Wall Street Journal

In 1994, Tennessee launched an ambitious public insurance program to cover its uninsured. The plan, TennCare, fulfilled that mission but nearly bankrupted the state in the process.

 ”Poll: 57% don’t see stimulus working,” - USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Six months after President Obama launched a $787 billion plan to right the nation’s economy, a majority of Americans think the avalanche of new federal aid has cost too much and done too little to end the recession.

 ”New Orleans Neighborhood Housing Services to run $20 million home repair effort,” - The Times-Picayune

The city is negotiating a deal with the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services to run a home-repair program that would make nearly $20 million available to owners of storm-damaged property, according to a recent city memo describing the proposal.

Daily equity news

“First Lady Steps Into Policy Spotlight in Debate on Health Care,” -  The New York Times

WASHINGTON — She has become one of the Obama administration’s most visible surrogates on health care, announcing the release of $851 million in federal financing for health clinics, calling for tougher nutritional standards in the government’s school lunch program and urging Democrats to rally around the president’s efforts to revamp health care.

The high-profile emissary? Not Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, or Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House health policy adviser. It is the first lady, Michelle Obama.

“Highway spending isn’t the stimulus it was envisioned to be,” - Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington — In February, when Congress approved President Obama’s mammoth plan to stimulate the economy, transportation projects were supposed to be among the fastest-acting pieces of the $787-billion package.

All 50 states moved quickly to qualify for their share of the money. But since then the pace has slowed considerably, particularly in California and Florida, where the effect of the economic crisis has been especially severe.

“Orleans Wants Ex-Residents Counted,” - The Wall Street Journal
Census Bureau Says Mayor’s Plan to Boost Numbers Is Illegal

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is calling on former residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to claim their old city addresses in next year’s census, drawing criticism for trying to circumvent rules for winning federal funds.

The mayor — encouraged that New Orleans has thrown off its post-Katrina malaise to become the U.S.’s fastest-growing big city by percentage — wants the U.S. Census Bureau to grant an exception for its former residents, currently living elsewhere, who want to rebuild homes in New Orleans.

Daily equity news

“A First Lady Who Demands Substance,” - Washington Post
Michelle Obama Wants to Be Part of Events That Have Purpose And a Message — and That Parallel the President’s Agenda.

For weeks, Michelle Obama had been telling her staff and closest confidantes that she wasn’t having the impact she wanted. She is a woman of substance, with a background in law, public policy and management, who found herself relegated to role model in chief. The West Wing of the White House — the fulcrum of power and policy — had not fully integrated her into its agenda. She wanted more.

So, earlier this month, she changed her chief of staff, and now she’s changing her role.

“When jobs go, so do a city’s people,” - MSNBC.COM (Newsvine.com)

REDMOND, Wash. - For a cautionary tale, communities hard-hit by the current recession don’t have to look much further than Youngstown, Ohio.

Like many other manufacturing-dependent cities struggling in this recession, Youngstown’s economy was once booming mainly because of the success of one dominant industry. And also like those cities, Youngstown saw its fortunes fall fast and hard when that industry suddenly bottomed out, leaving many of its residents jobless and unsure what to do next.

“Unemployed Hit the Road to Find Jobs,”  - The Wall Street Journal

LINCOLN, N.H. — After seven months without a paycheck, Tim Ryan turned into a werewolf.

Laid off from a construction job, Mr. Ryan finally found work last month playing the wolfman at Clark’s Trading Post, a tourist attraction in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For $12 an hour, about half what he made before, he dons furry rags, a coonskin cap and an eye patch and jumps out of the woods when the Trading Post’s steam train chugs by, snarling and growling at passengers.

Daily equity news.

“Despite everything, more Americans see sunny skies ahead,” -   USA TODAY

 ”Not Paying the Mortgage, Yet Stuck With the Keys,” - Washington Post
Foreclosure Backlog Imperils Recovery

“How not to help the poor,” - The Boston Globe

Updates on this week’s updates equity news.

 ”An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It,” - The New York Times

FLINT, Mich. — Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

“Health, education cited as poverty breaker,” - AP

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Investing up front in early education programs and health care for children would save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the long run and help break the poverty cycle affecting millions of kids, a leading child advocate said Tuesday.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund, said it’s one of her group’s goals to end child poverty in this country in “five or six years” and work to dismantle the so-called “cradle-to-prison pipeline” plaguing minorities and the poor.

 ”New Orleans housing project is model for recovery,” - USA TODAY

NEW ORLEANS — Wendell Pierce, an actor best known for his role at Detective William “Bunk” Moreland on HBO’s The Wire, splits a lot of his time lately between Los Angeles and his hometown of New Orleans.

Pierce wants to make sure his push to rebuild one of the city’s most flood-wrecked neighborhoods — Pontchartrain Park — succeeds. The neighborhood of 1,000 homes was slammed with up to 10 feet of floodwater in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina and has been slow to rebound. Now a grass-roots plan that partners residents with the city is about to return the neighborhood to its mid-1950s splendor, developers and residents say.

Could innovative public policy and community-oriented homeowner education programs help avert the worst of the foreclosure crisis? The folks at the National Community Land Trust Network and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy think so — and they’ve got the numbers to back it up.

They have a great new report out today showing that Community Land Trustshave a significantly lower foreclosure rate than the national average.

But first, what exactly is a Communtiy Land Trusts (CLTs)? According to the report:

Owned by nonprofits, CLTs lease the land and typically sell the buildings on the land at below-market rates. This model benefits current and future homeowners. In exchange for purchasing homes at below-market prices, homeowners agree to limit the price of their homes when they sell, keeping them permanently affordable to future buyers while providing a fair return to the seller.

Although homeowners agree to forgo the possibility of big profits if their neighborhood’s property values go up, they receive in return the chance to own homes that they otherwise would not be able to afford.

The National CLT Network and the Lincoln Institute surveyed 1,930 CLT homeowners — about 60 percent of CLT homeowners nationwide — and found only 0.52 percent of low-income CLT homebuyers were in foreclosure last year. Compare that to the 3.3 percent nationwide. CLT homebuyers were six times less likely to be foreclosed on last year.

“It’s clear that community land trusts significantly lower the risks of owning a home,” said Roger Lewis, executive director of the National CLT Network. “While home foreclosures are devastating families and neighborhoods across America, community land trusts are proving to be a highly effective way to create and sustain stable neighborhoods. That’s partly because community land trusts don’t allow the kind of ‘too-good-to-be-true’ financing that has taken down so many American families.”

Take a moment to check out the full report (or at least the press release). For anyone who cares about the future of communtiies devestated by the coreclosure crisis, the report offers the first good news we’ve heard in a long time.

A recap of this week’s equity news.

 ”All Boarded Up,” - The New York Times Magazine

TONY BRANCATELLI, A CLEVELAND CITY COUNCILMAN, yearns for signs that something like normal life still exists in his ward. Early one morning last fall, he called me from his cellphone. He sounded unusually excited. He had just visited two forlorn-looking vacant houses that had been foreclosed more than a year ago. They sat on the same lot, one in front of the other. Both had been frequented by squatters, and Brancatelli had passed by to see if they had been finally boarded up. They hadn’t. But while there he noticed with alarm what looked like a prone body in the yard next door. As he moved closer, he realized he was looking at an elderly woman who had just one leg, lying on the ground. She was leaning on one arm and, with the other, was whacking at weeds with a hatchet and stuffing the clippings into a cardboard box for garbage pickup. “Talk about fortitude,” he told me. In a place like Cleveland, hope comes in small morsels.

The next day, I went with Brancatelli to visit Ada Flores, the woman who was whacking at the weeds. She is 81, and mostly gets around in a wheelchair. Flores is a native Spanish speaker, and her English was difficult to understand, especially above the incessant barking of her caged dog, Tuffy. But the story she told Brancatelli was familiar to him. Teenagers had been in and out of the two vacant houses next door, she said, and her son, who visits her regularly, at one point boarded up the windows himself. “Are they going to tear them down?” she asked. Brancatelli crossed himself. “I hope so,” he mumbled.

 ”YouthBuild: one stimulus model,” - The Christian Science Monitor
The program has turned lives around and builds affordable community housing.

Daniel Brito finished high school, but he didn’t know what to do next. His family, in a low-income Boston neighborhood, just wasn’t there for him. He was scared he’d be a failure.

Then a former teacher connected him with YouthBuild Boston, a local affiliate of a nationwide program that enables low-income young people to stay with their education and learn job skills while building affordable housing for their communities.

“Coalition plans two food stores in Detroit,” - The Detroit News
Community-operated sites would offer more nutritional groceries.

DETROIT — A Detroit neighborhood coalition seeking to bring healthy food to the city is eyeing two sites — one on the east side and one on the West — for the community-run grocery store it envisions.

The M.O.S.E.S. Supermarket Task Force, a partnership among neighborhood groups, churches and a union, among others, is designed to give residents greater access to healthy food through community-owned and run grocery stores.

A recap of this week’s equity news 

“N.A.A.C.P. Calls for Economic Equity,” - New York Times

BALTIMORE — The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated its centennial Thursday by calling on the Obama administration and Congress to spend more on education, establish a nine-month moratorium on foreclosures and ensure that the stimulus package is distributed equitably.

Federal lawmakers must guarantee fair hiring practices for new jobs at a time when black unemployment — consistently higher than it is for whites — is in double digits, the group said in a 38-page report describing its policy goals for the year.

“Wal-Mart eyes 12 Chicago ‘food desert’ sites,” - Chicago Sun-Times 

Wal-Mart is scouting 12 properties in Chicago’s “food desert” neighborhoods for new stores that sell groceries, a Wal-Mart spokesman said Friday.

About 500,000 Chicagoans live in food deserts with no easy access to mainstream grocery stores.

“Mixed-income housing debated,” - The Times-Picayune

Angela Glover Blackwell argued that a person’s neighborhood has become a proxy for his social mobility. Affluent areas tend to offer access to jobs, public transit, grocery stores and quality public education, and their residents often have longer life expectancy than those in poorer neighborhoods.

Blackwell said developers often try to lift up struggling areas by introducing market-rate apartments and hoping they will attract professional people who have a choice of where to live. But she said such a strategy sends the wrong message, by telegraphing that revitalization cannot come at the hands of the people who already live there.