A recap of this week’s equity news

“Low-Income Borrowers Blamed in Bailout Crisis,” - Washington Independent

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.

“Police official says city should limit low-income housing,” - Wisconsin State Journal

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.

“How Can We Reduce the Rising Number of American Families Living in Poverty?,” - Brookings Report

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.

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

 ”Report: Road Home falls short,” - The Times-Picayune

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.

“More families requesting free or reduced lunch,” - USA TODAY

The troubled economy may be prompting more families to turn to federal school nutrition programs that aid poor children, a survey suggests.

For the first time since 2004, a majority of cafeteria operators say the number of children getting free or reduced-price lunches has risen.

“Can NY infrastructure handle floods, intense heat?,”  - Associated Press

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.

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:

The Washington Post yesterday featured an interesting look at the “cadre of young black activists…using the Internet in an attempt to eclipse traditional civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and hit the refresh button on the civil rights movement.”

Led by the bright and innovative folks at ColorofChange.org, the movement is gaining steam, influence and members every day. The movement has carved a niche for itself by rallying around traditionally overlooked issues like the Jena 6, the demolition of New Orleans public housing and even the relatively wonky concerns about a FEC commission nominee’s questionable stands on voter suppression issues.

Blogger Gina McCauley, 32, who is organizing the first conference of nonwhite bloggers this summer in Atlanta, said that what Jones and Rucker have started “can potentially become a new Niagara movement,” a reference to the small contingent of black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who met near Niagara Falls in 1905 to form an organization to oppose segregation. The organization eventually became the NAACP.

Others have another name for the new efforts by black bloggers: Civil Rights 2.0. Blogger L.N. Rock said that if abolitionist Frederick Douglass, former congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin and “people like that were around today, they would have blogs.”

The organizing and policy potential of this movement is limitless. We’re already seeing real on-the-ground progress. By supporting and patronizing these sites, we can unleash another major force in the Equity Movement.