June 27, 2005
Community Land Trusts for Permanently Affordable Homeownership
in California Affordable Housing Deskbook, Solano Press, forthcoming.
Written for local elected officials and housing program administrators, this chapter explains how Community Land Trusts operate and places them within a continuum of other policy alternatives.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)
Organizing for Community Control over Neighborhood Development
When change happens in low-income neighborhoods it is generally driven by forces far outside the community. This can make people feel powerless and irrelevant. The response, naturally enough, is often to organize for power. In one sense, power is the ability to make the political and economic institutions pay attention to you and to your needs. Power brings resources to the table and often is the only way for communities to avoid the worst abuses of urban development. But power is just a beginning. Beyond power there is control.
A lot of community development corporations (CDCs) grew out of community organizing struggles and many have developed into effective organizations with the professional capacity to make a real difference in their neighborhoods, but along the way many have lost some of their connection with those communities. Few CDCs have organizers on their staff and those that do often focus their organizing work on advocacy around public policy issues rather than integrating their organizing with their development work. Part of the problem is that, in spite of the long history of organizing in most low-income communities, it is not entirely obvious how to relate organizing to the day-to-day detailed work of community development. Development professionals are afraid that the community will get in the way of getting things done, and organizers are afraid that professionals won’t give community members space to make meaningful contributions.
This paper describes a specific approach to integrating meaningful community leadership into a professionalized development organization. The approach was developed by the Planning and Organizing staff of the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation as part of a comprehensive community planning process focused on Oakland's Lower San Antonio Neighborhood.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
Beyond Lender Bias: The Struggle for Capital in a Networked Economy
There is no doubt that information technology has brought about huge changes in world financial markets. Markets which used to be largely isolated are now inextricably interconnected by a real time network of transactions in which, generally, capital flows instantly to the highest bidder regardless of the location of that bidder on the globe. We might expect this trend, which Richard O’Brian calls this “the end of geography,” to be good news for low-income communities. One could conclude that the development of an integrated and standardized financial network, by reducing the role of potentially biased individual lenders, could reduce racial and income discrimination and move the economy toward a situation where capital is allocated based entirely on the real value which various
sectors contribute. And yet low-income urban communities in America and elsewhere appear to be experiencing increasing capital shortages.
This paper identifies an emerging structural logic of the financial system under which investment decisions are made by a network that relies on previous transactions as the main source for information about credit quality. The home mortgage market in the United States is examined as a specific case of this more general global financial market transformation. Data relating to the secondary market for single family home mortgages in the Oakland, CA metropolitan area is employed to provide empirical support for the argument that the emerging financial network itself has distinct geographic preferences which place low-income and minority neighborhoods at a systematic disadvantage in the competition for capital.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2005
Financing Deed Restricted Housing
Housing California Conference
May 2005
One of the challanges of developing affordable homeownership is that every financing source has its own requirements related to resale price restrictions and they do not all fit together easily. This workshop provided an overview of several of the most common sources of financing available to developers of permanently affordable homeownership in California including Fannie Mae, FHA, California Housing Finance Agency, CalHOME and the Federal HOME program.
Prepared with Jerry Rioux and Heather Gould.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)
Preserving Affordability in Inclusionary Housing Programs
This half day workshop was offered as part of a training series organized by the Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California for local housing activists working toward local inclusionary housing ordinances.
DETAILED AGENDA:
Goals:
To give participants an opportunity to discuss and think about the social objectives of affordable homeownership programs and specifically about the tradeoffs between wealth creation and preservation of public subsidy.
To familiarize participants with a wider range of alternative approaches that balance those interests differently
To encourage critical thinking about existing programs and to model the kinds of questions that policy makers and program managers might ask to insure that their programs are appropriate to local circumstances.
To expose participants to techniques for mathematically modeling long-term affordability and the consequences of program design choices.
Handouts:
Agenda
One case study
Example spreadsheet comparing approaches
Materials:
Powerpoint projector and laptop with speakers
Flipchart and markers
Sheets of 8.5x11 paper and tape
Spare pens and blank paper
Total Time: 3 hours
1:00 Opening
OK you just won your campaign and now developers in your community will be building affordable units into every new project. Low-income homebuyers will, at last have some homes within their price range. If you have done your advocacy work well, your program will produce brand new homes that look a lot like the market rate homes that they are built alongside but sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the neighboring homes. What keeps the low-income families that move in from turning right around the next day and selling at market rate and pocketing all of that money? Would that be wrong?
Audience response about preserving the stock, requiring people to live there for a fixed period, resale restrictions, shared equity, etc.
Overview of workshop: this is a workshop about “WHY” we have affordable ownership programs. This is a workshop about thinking harder about the goals.
Who I am:
I noticed that local ownership programs varied very widely in how they balanced asset building and maintaining affordability. The only common factor was that the program managers were sure that what they were doing was “Fair”. How can we talk about “Fair” without knowing the goals of these programs? To most people what seemed fair was actually just the option that was most familiar. But there are a lot of options and while some may be truly unfair, it seems like there really is not a “most fair” approach. That is bad news because it means we have to do some hard work to balance different interests and clarify our values.
1:15 Small Group Discussion: 15 Minutes
Given the costs and subsidies required, and the developer’s goals…
How should they handle the potential increases in the value of these homes?
Should the homeowners be allowed to keep all of the increase in price?
Should they have to return all of the increase to the developer or something in the middle?
Large Group Discussion: 10 Minutes
One or two present what they came up with.
What are some other options?
1:40 Video – Race the power of an Illusion
Show a brief excerpt from this PBS video about race in America. The clip presents the story of how homeownership in postwar America functioned as a great wealth generator for white families while, housing market descrimination and federal lending policies meant most African-American families were unable to buy homes and those that did earned little equity.
Discussion about how home equity can dramatically change people's lives and the futures for their children.
2:10 Flash Presentation: Understanding Subsidy Retention – 20 Minutes
Animated presentation demonstrating the underlying economic differences between different approaches to preserving homeownership subsidy.
2:30 Continuum of Subsidy Preservation Mechanisms – 15 Minutes
Full group discussion focused on placing different approaches that participants are familiar with on a continuum between models that allow homeowners to earn unlimited equity and those that preserve public subsidy perfectly.
Make a large post-it for each option
- Grants
- Forgivable Loans
- Interest Free Deferred loans
- Deferred Interest Loans
- Shared Equity Loans
- Resale Price Restrictions
--- Appraisal Based
--- Indexed
--- Mortgage based
2:45 Other Factors to consider in program design:
Every program needs:
1)A pricing formula, which defines the maximum price at which the housing may be rented or resold; a cap intended to maintain rents and resale prices at an affordable level for some targeted class of low-income or moderate-income persons while providing a modest build up of equity if homeownership is involved;
2)a legal mechanism by which the pricing formula is contractually imposed on the housing’s current (and future) owners; and
3)An administrative structure for monitoring and enforcing any restrictions on price (and use) imposed on the housing.
Some other issues
Owner Occupancy/Subletting
Longevity/stability: Do you want people to stay?
Improvements: Do you want people fixing their homes up?
Administration - Outsourcing
Monitoring
Dealing with law suits
Marketing resales
3:00 Detailed Comparison of Two Mechanisms
Case #1: Shared Equity Loan Agreement
Small Group Activity: - 15 Minutes
Handout two legal documents and ask groups to summarize the relevant terms and identify some potential strengths and weaknesses of each approach to preservation of subsidy. Under what circumstances would this approach make sense?
Full group discussion: - 15 Minutes
Did all the groups come to the same conclusions?
Which of these two approaches works better?
Which preserves affordability best?
Which generates the most wealth creation?
Which is easiest to administer?
Do these approaches work as well under different assumptions about inflation and interest rates?
3:30 Modeling Long-Term Affordability Under Changing Market Conditions
(30 Minutes)
Project at an Excel spreadsheet which compares the several alternative resale price restriction formulas under several different interest rate and price inflation scenarios.
4:00 Adjourn
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2005
Understanding Market Data
LISC Urban Forum 2005
San Francisco, CA
May 2005
This workshop provided a general overview of sources of online market data including where to get it, how it might be useful in commercial revitalization programs as well as what some of the limitations of public data are. The handout provides an annotated reference to data reports available from ESRI which places the data in context and points out some of the problems with the data and techniques for reality checking these reports.
Hendout:Understanding Market Data - PDF (700k)
Powerpoint:
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)
Homeownership: Equity Building vs. Permanent Affordability
Nonprofit Housing Assn. of Northern California
San Francisco, CA, October 2003
This workshop at a regional housing conference outlined tradeoffs in the design of affrordable homeownership programs between maintaining long term affordability and generating wealth for homeowners.
Handouts:
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)
Critical Factors in Mixed-Use Development
Nonprofit Housing Assn. of Northern California
San Francisco, CA, October 2003
This workshop featured a pannel of private developers discussing the unique challanges of complex mixed-use real estate projects. Panelists incuded Libby Seifel of Seifel Consulting, Oz Erickson of the Emerald Fund and Michael Covarrubias of TMG partners.
The PowerPoint handout highlights some common challanges and resources for developers and features a case study of the Emerald Fund's Ocean View Village.
Handouts:
- Powerpoint: Critical Factors in Mixed-Use Development - PPT (2.1M!)
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
Financing Commercial Development
LISC Urban Forum II:Commercial Revitalization Conference
Philadelphia, PA, October 2003
This workshop featured presentations from several lenders on financing products available for neighborhood commercial real estate development projects. The PowerPoint handout provides an overview of types of financing sources and some common lender concerns related to these projects.
Handouts:
- Powerpoint: Financing Mixed-Use Projects - PPT (316K)
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)
Working with Local Governments
Insitute For Community Economics
Community Land Trust Conference
Syracuse, NY - November 2003
This workshop presented at the national Community Land Trust Conference in 2003 discussed challanges that community based housing developers face in working with local governments. One key question was what happens when the nonprofit developer wants to build permanently affordable housing with local funds available under a program that does not require (or anticipate) long term affordability.
Handouts:
- Activity: Responding to concerns about the CLT model - MSWord (23K)
PowerPoint:
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)
Web Development for Community Land Trusts
Insitute For Community Economics
Community Land Trust Conference
Syracuse, NY - November 2003
This workshop, delivered at the 2003 Community Land Trust Conference, outlined goals for Land Trust online communication and described some of the tools used to produce web sites for CLTs. The PowerPoint features examples of some of the more compelling CLT web sites.
Handouts:
- CLT websites, some key features - PDF ( 3.1M!)
- Handout: Some web links - MSWord (26K)
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
Commercial Revitalization 101
LISC Urban Forum 2005
Commercial Revitalization 101
May 23, 2005
This two part workshop provided a broad overview of the field of commercial district revitalization. Part one focused on framing the problems that commercial revitalization programs are attempting to solve and outlining the general techniques available. Part two covered planning for commercial revitalization and development of a specific economicaly viable strategy as well as organizational models for managing revitalization and maintaining momentum over time.
Handouts:
Key Elements of Successfull Revitalization Programs
Planning for Commercial Revitalization
Powerpoint:
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)
