Houses are less affordable since the election

As if this country didn’t already have an affordable housing crisis, a new report says: U.S. homes are less affordable now than they were before the general election, driven higher by mortgage interest rates up roughly 50-basis points since Nov. 8, according to a new report from Black Knight Financial Services. You can read more …

Some beautiful (and empty) buildings await your vision

CityLab shares this, “Pretty Vacants: The Coolest Empty Buildings in America.” Haven’t you ever thought of that? In a drive past an abandoned building, what could be there? The closest on this list to me is in Providence, the Superman Building (where summer tours were heavily attended), but Connecticut — particularly the state’s cities — …

When building affordable houses…

…what about large families, both those with multiple children and multi-generational ones? New developments — gentrification — are squeezing out big families. I wrote this for The Hill.

If we really want affordable homes…

We should insist on them, no exceptions. I wrote this for The Hill.

Hourly wage needed for decent apartment is rising everywhere

The National Low Income Housing Coalition has released its annual report, “Out of Reach.” Connecticut has the eighth-most-expensive housing wage in the country. A housing wage is the amount of money an employee must earn in order to afford a decent apartment. In Connecticut, where our minimum wage is $9.6- an hour, a person must …

Oopsie! Check out this report on white segregated subsidized housing…

This is not how things are supposed to work. At all. The University of Minnesota’s Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity just released a report, “The Rise of White-Segregated Subsidized Housing,” that looks at what they call a new category of subsidized housing—one catering to whiter and comparatively more affluent people than the typical residents of affordable developments. IMO …

When housing’s too expensive…

…here’s who you lose: Teachers, firefighters, teachers, and other middle-class workers. From Nathan Heller, at The New Yorker: The quandary became flagrant last week: news circulated that the Palo Alto City Council had moved to explore subsidized housing for families earning between a hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. The …

Another good argument for affordable housing

This says that a lack of affordable housing also creates a lack of teachers. So some districts are supplementing teachers’ benefits with help toward rent or mortgage. Pulled from the article: As South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard said in his recent State of the State address: “The quality of education suffers when the schools cannot …

Do you know ALICE?

That’s Assets Limited, Income Constrained, Employed in the state? Here’s the latest update. It includes: Housing is a universal need, and affordable options for ALICE families are limited.  Throughout much of Connecticut, the cost of available housing is too high relative to the actual incomes of ALICE households.   Half of all renters and more …

If you’ve nothing better to do…

…I’m on “Where We Live” on WNPR at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, talking about how zoning can serve (and often does, in Connecticut) as the last legalized bastion of racism and classism. The show will also explore a recent study from Partnership for Strong Communities, which you can read here.