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
A recap of this week’s equity news.
“8,800 Road Home properties to return to private hands, ” - Times Picayune
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.
“Homeless numbers ‘alarming’,” - USA Today
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.
“ACORN fights back,” - San Francisco Chronicle
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.
A recap of this week’s equity news
”Road Home fix falls short,” - Times-Picayune
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.
”Low-Income Housing: Another Crisis Looming?” - TIME Magazine
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.
“Author tracks one man’s quest to fix Harlem,” - USA TODAY
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).
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.
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 recap of the week’s equity news
“Study Shows Colorado Has Largest Rise in Child Poverty,” New York Times
DENVER — Colorado experienced the nation’s largest rate of growth in impoverished children from 2000 to 2006, according to a study released Tuesday.
The study, by the Colorado Children’s Campaign, a nonprofit group that focuses on child welfare, said that the most recent census data show that 180,000 children — 15.7 percent of the state total — were living in poverty in Colorado in 2006, a 73 percent increase since 2000.
“Jammed Transit Systems Running on Fumes,” MSNBC, June 11
Transportation experts who have pushed mass transit since the 1970s are getting their wish as soaring gas prices persuade Americans to abandon their cars for buses and trains in record numbers. But as the adage says, be careful what you wish for.
Mass transit ridership is at its highest point in 50 years, according to research by the American Public Transportation Association. For many riders, it just got too expensive to drive.
“How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed the Crisis,” Washington Post, June 10
In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.
Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more “affordable” loans made to these borrowers. HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing.
“Below the Line: The Changing Face of American Poverty”, the provocative series featured on the Tavis Smiley Radio Show, has profiled a vast range of people living at or below the poverty line in the United States. 
The series has critically examined what it looks like to be poor in America today, by telling stories as varied as the young, African American, single mother of two children who lost her job at Enron only to find herself making less than $10,000 a year as a nursing assistant; a young married couple, graduate student and carpenter, trying their best to sustain a family of five on the land by growing a community garden; and the Ethiopian immigrant working full time at a meat packing plant, and part time as a child care provider in rural Minnesota.
Angela Glover Blackwell frames each installment from a public policy perspective, while respective experts offer insight and strategic solutions for the foreclosure crisis, living wage, inadequate health care, homelessness, transitional housing, and ex-offender re-entry, along with other issues faced by a growing number of Americans.
Now you can catch the entire series right here on EquityBlog:
Episode One
The series begins with Terreal Grant of Baltimore who is coming out of poverty and drug addiction with help from the Thompson Mobility Program [PDF].
[17 minutes | MP3]
Episode Two
The second installment features Cici Youngblood, a college graduate who describes her path to poverty as “riches to rags” and Jeff Page, a former DJ who went from fame to a downward spiral into homelessness after cancer. Both profiles illustrate how poverty is compounded by health and how successful programs (e.g. Rainbow Apartments) in Los Angeles’s Skid Row community work to meet these challenges.
[17 minutes | MP3]Episode Three
Reporter James Mills shares the story of Abeba Adella of Minnesota. Originally from Ethiopia, Abeba left an abusive husband, raises two children alone, and works two jobs to barely avoid poverty.
[17 minutes | MP3]Episode Four
From Augusta, Georgia, reporter Charles Edwards speaks with two residents who struggle with less than the federal minimum wage. Richard Sparrow suffered a back injury and was shunned by employers as an insurance liability. Unemployed since 1996, Richard lives on less than 700 dollars a month, over half of which goes to medicine. Sunny Johnson, a former Enron employee, describes the sacrifices she makes with her wages from her day and night jobs.
[17 minutes | MP3]Episode Five
New Orleans producer Eve Abrams brings us the story of Vanessa Nevilles, who is struggling to find a job with health insurance, and Keith Carter who was shunned from employment after an arrest and a lengthy legal battle.
[17 minutes | MP3]Episode Six
Executive Producer Cheryl Flowers visits Mississippi to find two stories of poverty in small rural communities. Mississippi is home to one of the highest concentrations of poverty in America.
[17 minutes | MP3]Wrap Up
Dr. Cynthia Duncan, Founding Director of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire and Alan Jenkins, Executive Director of the Opportunity Agenda, joins Tavis Smiley and Angela Glover Blackwell for the series wrap up and analysis.
[53 minutes | MP3]Audio courtesy of The Tavis Smiley Show from PRI. Check your local listings for more from Tavis Smiley.
