We have seen an historic sea change in this nation–not only in the election of Barack Obama, but in the ascension of hundreds of progressive candidates to our State Houses and Congress. To make real this promise of change, however, we must ensure that our elected officials live up to the ideals that promote equity and opportunity.
In the coming months, the Obama Administration will begin its transition to power and the strengthened Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress will get to work. We ask that they keep these Four Principles for Equity in mind in every decision they make:
Sustain the deep levels of democratic participation and civic engagement shown during the 2008 presidential election campaign.
Build an economy that expands opportunity for struggling families and revitalizes distressed communities.
Make affordable housing available to all, recognizing its historic role as a gateway to opportunity and asset-building.
Invest in building strong, healthy communities across America.
All Americans–especially those in low-income communities and communities of color–deserve a chance to participate and prosper. We have a real opportunity today to make the change we seek–but we must all work and push and fight together to make it happen.
What principles do you think should guide the Obama Administration? Weigh in the comments!
Actor Wendell Pierce and trumpeter Terence Blanchard have come back to their old neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park, and are poised to take over one of every nine properties there — so they can build and sell affordable homes,
On Monday, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority will vote on an agreement to transfer 114 abandoned and vacant properties to Pierce and Blanchard’s Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corp. It’s a big moment for the star of HBO’s cop drama “The Wire,” the Grammy-winning musician and some of their childhood buddies and fellow investors, who want to return New Orleans’ first middle-class black subdivision to its pre-Katrina glory.
More families with children are becoming homeless as they face mounting economic pressures, including mortgage foreclosures, according to a USA TODAY survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the nation.
Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.
In the midst of the predictable partisan exaggerations, distortions and occasional lies that close election races generate, ACORN has become the focus of an extraordinary amount of attention over our voter-registration program. We submitted nearly 40,000 voter registration applications in San Diego and throughout California, and 1.3 million nationwide. In communities across the country, anxiety about the direction of our country, and more specifically our economy, is driving much of the interest in this year’s presidential election. Voter turnout is expected to be of historic proportions. What is surprising is that these attacks, issued from partisan sources, have become relentless, and wildly exaggerated. We’ve even been accused by some Republicans of causing the global economic crisis.
The truth, plain and simple, is that no illegal votes will be cast as a consequence of ACORN’s voter-registration program. In fact, illegal votes constitute fewer than 1 out of a million votes cast, and no illegal vote has ever been tied to ACORN, in spite of the almost 2 million registrations we submitted in 2004 and 2006. The small percentage of problematic cards that we have submitted to local election boards in 2008 - and that we are required by law to submit, even cards that we can plainly see are invalid - will not result in any illegal voting, contrary to over-the-top partisan claims. The irony in these attacks is that our registration drive and get-out-the-vote program is nonpartisan.
The presidential candidates will meet tonight for their third and final debate in the midst of an increasingly grim economic crisis. As we watch the daily news of economic twists and dramatic policy announcements, we must keep our eyes on the bigger picture - how we could emerge from these tough economic times in a more equitable and opportunity-rich America.
No doubt much of the discussion tonight at Hofstra University will focus on the myriad bailout proposals floating around DC these days. While this crisis escalated dramatically on Wall Street, the long-term solutions must extend to every neighborhood — so every child can attend a high-performing school, every small-business owner can get 21st-century broadband access, and every American can find an affordable home, earn a decent wage and live in a healthy community.
To truly renew America’s promise, we must have an administration committed to economic policies that lift up all people. So, as you watch the debate tonight, listen to how the candidates answer questions like these:
What are the candidates’ plans for investing in our core infrastructure - our bridges, our transit, our schools, our broadband, even our water and sewer systems? These investments will lay the groundwork for our nation’s future global economic competitiveness. In the shorter-term, they hold the promise of bringing new good-paying jobs, expanding economic opportunity, and injecting much-needed stimulus into communities choked by unemployment. This could be the cornerstone for a broader longer-term national jobs strategy.
How does each candidate plan to make sure all families have access to safe, decent and affordable housing? The “housing crisis” in America is not just rooted in bad mortgages that have left families with more debt than their homes are worth. It’s also about the long-term viability of neighborhoods. How will the candidates facilitate the purchase of foreclosed properties by states and localities to invigorate growth and preserve affordable housing options? Fixing the underlying problems is key to stopping this crisis and revitalizing neighborhoods in cities, suburbs and rural communities.
How will each candidate make sure all Americans live in healthy communities? Neighborhoods with parks, open space and easy access to healthy food - and free from violence and environmental hazards - are a crucial building block for health and economic and social equity.
Once elected, how does each candidate plan to make sure that Americans are invested and engaged in the democratic process? How will they ensure all Americans’ voices- regardless of race or economic status - are heard?
These issues -infrastructure and economic competitiveness; jobs, housing, health and democracy - should be at the heart of any serious discussion on the future of this nation. I’ll be tuning in tonight to find out.
(Note: This post was authored in part to coincide with Blog Action Day Oct. 15, when “almost 10,000 blogs, vlogs and podcasts with millions of readers will post on the topic of poverty.” Check it out.)
Did poor and minority borrowers cause the housing crisis?
That seemed to be the consensus from the fight over the failed $700 billion bailout bill. As Congress and the Treasury Dept. debated how to fix the mortgage mess, the battle over what caused it took hold.
A prime suspect soon emerged: The government forced banks, lenders and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make loans in poor neighborhoods to meet affordable housing goals and regulations. The loans went bad, setting off the market meltdown.
A top Madison Police Department official says the city should reduce or freeze building low-income housing because the tenants are overwhelming police services.
In addition, Jay Lengfeld, captain of the West District, wrote an e-mail to Madison Alderman Thuy Pham-Remmele, 20th District, on Monday in which he suggested the city should license landlords to “weed out the bad ones” and give landlords more leeway to reject applicants with a history of bad behavior.
The Census Bureau recently released the official numbers on income and poverty last year (2007) in the United States. Let me underscore a few of the key facts that these data illustrate.
First, poverty did not fall to any appreciable extent during the economic expansion of the 2000s. This is quite unusual. Figure 1 shows the poverty rate and the unemployment rate. In past decades, these two indicators have moved together. When unemployment fell in the 1980s expansion, so did poverty. Unemployment and poverty both fell rapidly in the strong expansion of the 1990s. But when unemployment fell after 2003, poverty remained essentially flat.
As soon as Louisiana homeowners could take stock of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, thousands of them had to turn their attention back to the Road Home program and their ongoing efforts to collect grants to repair damage caused three years ago by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
More than 3,100 Road Home applicants still have active appeals to fret over — and some worry that highly touted reforms to the process carried little impact.
Another housing crisis may be looming even as the mortgage meltdown continues and as Americans who once dreamed of home ownership see their properties foreclosed. The Housing Act of 1937, imposed in the wake of the Great Depression, and amended a number of times in the 1970s, is reaching a crossroads — and close to five million Americans who depend on subsidized public housing may soon have to figure out where and how they are going to live.
That’s because under the provisions of Section 8 of the historic law a significant change will be under way in the next few years. As a result, building owners who participate in the program — receiving subsidies from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in exchange for taking in lower-income renters — will be able to opt out of those contracts. And many are thinking of doing just that. America’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, will be severely affected as will many smaller communities.
In 1999, Geoffrey Canada, president of a respected non-profit for families in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, embarked on an “outsized and audacious” endeavor. Programs that helped dozens or even hundreds of kids, he’d concluded, weren’t enough. So he traced out a 24-block “children’s zone” and blanketed it with social services: a health clinic, parenting classes, an intensive charter school, after-school tutoring and more. The idea, says author Paul Tough, was to create “a safety net woven so tightly” that kids couldn’t slip through.
Tough, an editor for the New York Times Magazine, spent five years following Canada’s efforts as the zone grew to 97 blocks. USA TODAY spoke with Tough about his new book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (Houghton Mifflin, $26).
Trouble the Water tells the story of a young New Orleans’ couple—trapped by the deadly floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina—who courageously survive the storm and its calamitous aftermath. It chronicles their flight from home and their quest to rebuild their lives and Lower Ninth Ward community.
This powerful story vividly illustrates community fortitude in the face of adversity.
Foremost, it is a tool for discussion and action around the ongoing rebuilding of one of our nation’s most valuable treasures.
You can play an important role in the rebuilding effort.
There are a number of action steps to get the word out about the film and the issues it raises. Download the “Take Action” brochure for details.
Also check out the Trouble the Water site for more info on what you can do to make sure New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is not forgotten on the domestic policy agenda.
In the meantime, if you’ve seen the film, tell us what you think.
Don’t forget to read the policy recommendations in the report, A Long Way Home. Let us know if you’d like to join the thousands of folks who’re working to help New Orleans and other Louisianans make it home.
Most storm-beleaguered Louisiana homeowners did not receive enough Road Home money to completely rebuild their homes, and limited recovery dollars will only help replace a portion of the state’s damaged rental units, according to a report to be released today.
The group PolicyLink produced the report, called “A Long Way Home: The State of Housing Recovery in Louisiana 2008,” after analyzing three major federally funded housing-recovery programs: the Road Home and the state’s small and large rental-repair programs. Researchers concluded that “enormous obstacles” blocked the recovery for homeowners, most of whom faced shortfalls to rebuild, and renters, who cannot find moderately priced places to rent.
NEW YORK (AP) — Flooded subways. Bridges deteriorating in the hot sun. Rising seas nipping at the edges of Manhattan. Those scenarios are up for review by a panel of scientists, government officials and private sector representatives studying how the city’s infrastructure will hold up to climate change.
The Climate Change Adaptation Task Force met Tuesday for the first time as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to address global warming in New York City, which already includes orders to switch the city’s taxi fleet to hybrids by 2012 and to retrofit city buildings to meet greener standards.
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.
The New Republic has a fascinating story up on the supposed “demographic inversion” happening in America’s urban cores. The piece starts — as many articles on the future of urbanism do — with a little allegory about Chicago. As a former denizen of that fair city (and a former newspaper reporter in the southern suburbs that are on the receiving end of much of the changing demographics), I have to say many of Alan Ehrenhalt’s observations ring perfectly true.
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be “demographic inversion.” Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing Magazine, wants to call this dramatic shift in urban-vs-suburban populations something other than gentrification. It seems to me that calling it “demographic inversion” could be seen as a nice linguistic trick to make the phenomenon seem natural and inevitable, without having to deal with all those icky reprecussions associated with gentrification.
Along those lines, it’s worth checking out the recent PolicyLink report on reviving smaller industrial cities, “To Be Strong Again.” The report highlights many best practices on how to equitably and fairly renew the promise of urban downtowns.
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.
