street roots
February 6, 2009
ELSEWHERE
N.O. advocates seek Congress's
intervention to save housing
Housing advocates in New Orleans are hoping
Congress will intercede in the plan to save a public
housing building damaged in Hurricane Katrina in
2005.
The building was one of the "Big Four" buildings
at the center of a suit against the Housing Authority
of New Orleans and HUD, daiming they violated the
Fair Housing Act by failing to repair and reopen the
developments. The suit was brought by a grouip of
displaced, housing residents of the buildings. On
January 26, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld
a judge's 2006 decision that allows continuation of
the demolition of the public housing complexes.
In upholding the district judge's decision, the
federal appellate court stated that "the record
indicates that it was reasonable for the district court
to conclude that there were no illegalities in the
demolition application approval process." The
residents claimed the building was easily repairable,
and one of the few remaining options for people
needing public housing.
Three of the four developments have been
completely razed, and demolition on the fourth has
begun. Advocates hope Congress will intercede
before the demolition is completed, which is
scheduled for March of this year.
Study indicates homes with
lower prices decline faster
On Jan. 27, Standard & Poor's published its most
recent set of monthly Home Price Indices, revealing
that lower cost homes continue to see the greatest
price declines, suggesting lower-income
Looking at the change over the past two years,
housing prices in the lower cost tier (bottom third of
the housing market) have declined 34 percent, while
the prices of houses in the higher cost tier (top third
of the housing market) have declined by 20 percent,
on average, across metropolitan areas.
Some of the steepest declines have been in cities
such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and San
Francisco. In comparison to the average
metropolitan area, all of these cities saw larger
declines (approximately 40%) in prices for lower-tier
homes since 2006.
Portland and Seattle, however, bucked the
national trend and saw much smaller declines in
low-tier housing prices. Portland saw low-tier
housing prices, those priced below $232,305, fall 10
percent, while high-tier homes, those priced above
$325,253, saw nearly equal losses of 12 percent.
Seattle's housing market displays similar trends to
Portland, with little difference in the price declines
between low-tier housing and the high-tier housing.
Standard & Poor's housing price data is collected
from 17 regional metropolitan areas. The index is a
repeat sales index, which measures changes in the
sale price of the same homes over time.
City housing director resigns post
Will White steps aside as city restructures its affordable housing programs
BY JOANNE ZUHL
STAFF WRITER
or five years, Will White has been at
the helm of the city's Bureau of
Housing and Community
Development It’s the arm of the city that
administers the 10-year plan to end
homelessness, among other projects
related to housing the city’s poor and
homeless. On Feb. 2, White announced he
was resigning from the bureau, just as the
department itself undergoes a major shift
in priorities and obligations.
Soon, that bureau will be all but history,
replaced by a new Housing Bureau still
being crafted by new housing
commissioner Nick Fish. While the
roadmap for the city’s new affordable
housing structure is in it’s early stages, it’s
envisioned that the new bureau will
consolidate affordable housing efforts
formerly divided among city and the quasi-
govemment bureaus the Portland
Development Commission.
F
Joanne Zuhl: How is the new bureau's
administration going to be different from
your role with the BHCD?
Will White: It will be a larger
responsibility with roughly double the
number of people and double the amount
of resources, and there will be a broader
mission. BCHD was focused primarily on
creating opportunity for low-income
people including those with no home
whatsoever. The new Bureau of Housing
will be responsible for the whole
spectrum, from homelessness to
J^.: What is your take on the
restructuring underway that will
essentially dissolve the BHCD, create a
new Bureau of Housing, and redistribute
affordable housing and economic
development priorities with the Portland
Development Commission? In this
economic climate, is this the right time to
change everything?
W.W.: I think it is. This is going to
create a much stronger and more focused
housing system that is less fragmented
compared to what is happening right now,
and I’m hoping it will also result in a
stronger Portland Development
Commission as they narrow their focus
more to economic development and
incorporate the BCHD’s Economic
Opportunity Initiative. It will leave the new
Bureau of Housing focused really on
housing and homelessness, and PDC
focused just on economic development and
not having one of their departments
focusing on housing.
There will still need to be strong
collaboration between the two, because
the new bureau will be responsible for the
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TIF set aside for urban renewal districts
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I think this is a good time to make the
cnan^^t^"
It’s something that I’ve pushed for a long
time. In particular, I would say there
hasn’t been a clear and direct alignment
between the setting of broad policy, the
allocating of resources to support that, and
the implementation of those policies. So
the responsibilities have been dispersed,
and each of the organizations responsible
for carrying those responsibilities out
report to different leadership, and so it
made it hard to have a unified system
where everybody was naturally moving in
the same direction.
J-Z.: Will this effect the development of
the 10-year plan to end homelessness?
How do you hope it will continue?
W.W.: I think that’s not completely
clear. That will be a matter for the housing
commissioner and the City Council to
clarify, and I’m assuming there’s no
reduced commitment to the 10-year plan.
J«Z j What advice do you have for your
successor?
W.W.: This person is going to be
stepping into a very big job. There are
some major challenges that include the
fact that the financing systems that
generate the housing that we work to
produce are seized up right now. The
banks aren’t lending, bonds are not
available, tax credit investors are not
investing in equity, so there’s that whole
frozen market issue that Congress is
trying to deal with.
Secondly, there is the need to design an
entfrply new bureau structure, and how it
should be organized to carry out its new
mission.
And thirdly, the blending together two
disparate cultures, the PDC and the
BHCD, so there’s going to be leadership
needed on a number of different levels,
organizational development, establishing a
new culture, and being on top of all of the
complex technical requirements to meet
the varying and sometimes conflicting
requirements of money. So it’s going to
require a very smart, committed, inspiring
new leader to be successful, but at the
same time I think the opportunities are
huge. It’s going to be an unprecedented
amount of resources, potentially bringing
together some skilled people from two
organizations in combined thinking into
new and better ways to carry things
forward.