Housing

The city council in Richmond, California, voted last week to cap how much rent landlords could charge tenants in the San Francisco Bay Area city where rents have increased an estimated 30 percent over the last four years.

In Seattle, where tenant activists say some renters complain their rent has increased by as much as 150 percent, two city council members last week hosted a packed town hall meeting to debate whether to impose rent controls — a move that could put the city at odds with the state.

Similar proposals to limit what landlords can charge each month are emerging in other California cities, such as Lafayette City and Alameda, as the price of rental housing skyrockets nationally amid greater demand and flat wages.

“Rents are higher than they’ve ever been. Wages are declining. There’s a huge, huge gap between wages and housing costs,” says Peter Dreier, former housing director for the City of Boston and chairman of the urban and environmental policy department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

“Not surprisingly, there’s renewed talk about ways to protect renters,” Dreier said. “Rent control is part of the toolbox of policies that local governments can adopt without waiting for a big infusion of federal funds to create more affordable rental housing.”

Even in cities that have had rent regulations for decades, such as New York, the issue of affordable rents remains contentious. New York tenant groups cried foul when Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers last month extended the state’s rent-stabilization laws to maintain controls on more than a million apartments, while allowing landlords to raise rents as much as they want on apartments that became vacant.

Rent control, in which cities set limits on how much landlords can raise rents on existing tenants, has always been a bone of contention, inspiring legal challenges all the way to theU.S. Supreme Court. (So far, rent control has been upheld.)

Advocates argue government controls are necessary to protect middle- and low-income renters from price gouging. But the apartment industry and some economists argue rent regulations don’t work and only serve to drive up the cost of housing in tight markets.

“It doesn’t serve the people who need it most,” said Jim Lapides, spokesman for the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), an advocacy organization for the apartment industry based in Washington, D.C. “It hurts mobility,” he said, because people who have rent-controlled apartments tend to hold on to them.

One thing all agree on: There simply isn’t enough housing stock to accommodate the ever-growing number of renters in many of the nation’s most congested cities, particularly on the East and West coasts.

According to a March report by the National Association of Realtors, the gap between rental costs and household income is widening to unsustainable levels. This is partly a result of greater demand because homeownership is out of reach for many people following the 2007 housing crash that exacerbated the Great Recession.

City vs. State

In New York, rent control laws date to right after World War I, when there was a pent-up demand for housing. With rental housing at a premium, landlords took advantage, often jacking up rent as much as 100 percent. The concept of rental control was revived nationwide during World War II, when housing construction was put on hold.

In an effort to keep families in their homes, the federal government imposed rent controls. Those controls were lifted after the war, and only a handful of states still allowed them. But by the 1960s and ’70s, tenants began to push back.

“The rent control movement of the ’60s and ’70s was forged by low- and middle-income tenants, both of whom had their back against the wall,” Dreier said. “That’s now happening again. It’s the real estate industry versus the tenants.”

It’s difficult to gauge how many cities still have some form of rent control on the books, though estimates run into the hundreds.

But only the states of California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York, plus the District of Columbia, have rent control laws, according to industry group NMHC.

Massachusetts allowed rent control — only pricy Boston and nearby Cambridge and Brookline had it — until 1994, when voters narrowly voted against it. In 2008, California voters defeated Prop 98, which would have phased out rent control in the state.

Thirty-five states, including Washington state, have laws specifically outlawing or “pre-empting” rent control. Eleven states have no rent control or preemption laws.

“For the most part, housing and rent control is a local issue,” said Doug Farquhar of the National Conference of State Legislatures. “You don’t see the state getting too involved with landlord-tenant laws. A city … would adopt something and the state would stay out of it. But if a state will say, ‘We will pre-empt you,’ the city cannot come up with rent control.”

This often pits cities against states and Seattle versus Washington state could be next.

In Seattle, where the median rent is $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment, Mayor Ed Murray, a Democrat, declared affordable housing an “emergency” situation and appointed a housing task force. So rent control is being talked about again.

Standing in the way, however, is state law that prohibits cities from imposing controls, said Roger Valdez, director of Smart Growth Seattle, a nonprofit in favor of housing development, rather than rent control, as a solution to the housing shortage.

The Washington Legislature isn’t likely to pass rent control legislation, though, said Valdez, who contends that’s a good thing.

“We need policies that encourage people and support them with the choices they want to make about their housing,” said Valdez, who at last week’s town hall meeting in Seattle debated against rent control — something he calls “a cheap way out.”

Kshama Sawant, one of the Seattle City Council members who hosted the town hall meeting, disagrees.

“Rents have reached stratospheric levels,” said Sawant, who is an economist. “We need to build a mass movement that becomes deafening, so politicians [in the Washington Legislature] are forced to back down. We need to fight this tooth and nail.”

Problem Acute in Big Cities

Today, 42 million people, or about 36 percent of the population, rent their housing, according to NMHC. The median rent nationally was $905 in 2013, up slightly from the previous year, according to the U.S. Census American Community Survey.

But in big cities, that price tag is far higher. In San Francisco, which has rent control, median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,500, according to a June report by Zumper, a national rental listing service that also tracks real estate trends. Following are New York at $3,100, Boston at $2,230, San Jose at $2,120 and the District of Columbia at $2,100.

Rent control laws can work in a variety of ways. In New York, for instance, there is a difference between rent-controlled apartments and rent-stabilized apartments.

Rent-controlled apartments are rare and apply to buildings constructed in New York City before 1947. This law limits the amount of rent a landlord may charge a tenant and restricts the landlord’s ability to evict. Rent-stabilization laws cover apartment buildings built after 1947 and before 1974 and provide protections to tenants. Rent increases are set by a board made up of nine members, including two tenant and two landlord representatives.

In 2012, a New York landlord took his case to the Supreme Court. James Harmon owned a brownstone on the Upper West Side. One of his long-term tenants had lived in a one-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment since 1976. She paid $1,000 a month — far below the market value. Harmon argued that rent control amounted to an unconstitutional “taking” of his property. The Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

Fighting for Decades

Lennie Siegel has been fighting for rent control and affordable housing in his hometown of Mountain View, California, since the 1970s. In 1980, he pushed to get rent control on the ballot — only to see it defeated in a special election in 1981.

Today, rents in Mountain View have shot up as high-income earners flock to the Silicon Valley town to work at high-tech companies like Google.

“Our area has too many good jobs” and not enough good housing, said Siegel, who now sits on the city council. “People are paying more than they would expect for the quality of the unit they’re getting.”

Meanwhile, he said, low-income people are getting pushed out of the market, along with middle-class workers such as teachers, tech workers, even doctors.

But Siegel, who ran for office on a housing development platform, said that while rent control can help some people, he’s no longer convinced that it is the solution.

“Rent control is a Band-Aid,” he said. “The long-term solution is keeping supply and demand in balance. Unfortunately, cities around here are much more welcoming of employment growth than they are of housing growth.”

Read Original Article – Published July 27, 2015
As Rent Skyrockets, More Cities Look to Cap It

Anchorage is struggling with how to address serious and expensive problems stemming from chronic homelessness. On Tuesday, the new mayor’s administration announced a dramatic plan to more than double the city’s capacity for housing the most severely affected population living on the streets. The sudden move isn’t without controversy.

Melinda Freemon is the director for the Department of Health and Social Services, and she says the addition of 56 housing units fits within Anchorage’s Comprehensive Plan for addressing homelessness.

“DHSS is supportive of this model because it is considered the nationwide best practice: permanent supportive housing actually does end chronic homelessness for high users of safety centers across the nation,” Freemon says.

The plan also funds “intensive case management,” the official term for the comprehensive help clients receive to regain control over their lives.

“They provide assistance with accessing medical care for the tenants, they provide them with shopping opportunities, employment opportunities,” Freemon says. “They would facilitate substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and all of the services that go along with helping people retain their housing.”

Providing shelter and help is not cheap, but advocates and city officials are quick to point out the cost of treating symptoms instead of the causes of homelessness is even more expensive. The municipality has spent millions of dollars on studies proving how costly it is just managing the most high-cost users of emergency services.

That’s partly why news from the mayor’s office was such a surprise: the Administration is chipping in just $200,000, but the funding is essential for accessing a much larger pool of grant funds $3.5 million ($3,595,717 to be exact) for a multi-year budget paying for the treatment. Originally that money was dropped into the city’s budget by the Sullivan Administration for a controversial pilot program that would have sent 10 people for a short-term course of aversion therapy in Seattle. Now, the funds are helping renovate the Safe Harbor facility by 4th Avenue and Sitka Street to accommodate long-term tenants.

“All the units needed upgrading–so just new flooring, new paint on the wall, but in order to make it serve a special needs population or a highly disabled population, like many people who are long-term homeless, we’ve had to make some safety improvements.”

Corrine O’Neill is a housing director at RurAL CAP, which is administering the project. The statewide nonprofit bought the Safety Harbor facility last winter, but had struggled to find funds to keep it up and running.

“And Rural CAP felt it was really important to save this housing and that it would exacerbate the homeless problem in Anchorage if we didn’t save these assets. But we also inherited some of the same struggles they had in terms of operational costs.”

Long-term residents are expected to start moving in by September. The funding will also make vouchers available for subsidized housing spread across different parts of the city. The project will end up similar to Karluk Manor, a wet-housing facility that’s just a few blocks away–a factor that’s hardly insignificant for critics of the plan.

Christopher Constant is president of the Fairview Community Council, and says the neighborhood wasn’t consulted ahead of the decision to support more long-term supportive housing–an issue with a contentious history in the area.

“We take on more as a community than any other neighborhood in this town–between Mountain View and Fairview, you know, we are the city’s social service epicenter,” Constant says.

Constant says it’s not only unfair to residents, but it makes for bad treatment policy, keeping those people in the middle of treatment within the same geography and social circles they may be struggling to get away from.

A spokesman for the Berkowitz administration says the president of Mountain View Community Council was contacted about the plan, along with the chair and vice-chair of the Anchorage Assembly.

Much of the conversation at Monday’s Juneau Assembly meeting centered on housing and how Juneau could grow as a city.

The Assembly approved $72,000 for a grant incentive program which gives homeowners cash to construct accessory apartments. Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl called the plan a “premature” use of limited funds.

“We haven’t heard from the public about what the recommendations are. We haven’t heard from the consultants about what the recommendations might even be and we’re using money quite frankly probably to incentivize things that are already, probably going to happen,” he said.

Kiehl said a housing action plan is already in process, further input is needed to make sure the funds are used wisely.

“An old saying is keep your powder dry. In this case, I think we need to keep the taxpayers’ cash dry,” he said.

In 2012, the Juneau Economic Development Council found the city needed hundreds of new units to improve the tight market for renters.

Assemblywoman Kate Troll said there is nothing in the housing action plan that suggests this is not a good move.

“The affordable housing commission is very engaged in this issue,   and they still feel very strongly in terms of trying to make a difference, a big difference on the ground for the smallest amount of money, this is a very worthwhile program,” she said.

Kiehl was the only Assembly member to vote no.

Later, zoning changes near mile 7 of Glacier Highway were discussed–a move some said could help with Juneau’s housing problem. The area is zoned for single-family homes. The ordinance would more than triple the density.

Dave Hanna testified it would “unfairly change the character of the neighborhood.”  Not fix Juneau’s housing problem.

“Now we’ve heard density is the answer to our housing problem here in Juneau but we also hear Juneau is sorely underserved in the single-family market. We really need more single-family homes here,” he said.

At an April meeting, the planning commission recommended denying the proposed rezone. The Assembly approved the ordinance with Assemblywoman Kate Troll and Assemblyman Jerry Nankervis voting no.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the story attributed a quote to Assemblywoman Karen Crane but it was Assemblywoman Kate Troll who said it. We regret the error. 

Clients of the Brother Francis Shelter in Anchorage are agitating for change. They are frustrated with the way they are being treated at the shelter and with some of the policies. Catholic Social Services, which runs the shelter, is trying to work with them to improve the situation.

Celia Harrison started staying at Brother Francis back in March, when she felt like she could no longer safely stay in her housing in Soldotna. Since then, the former nurse has been writing about her experiences extensively on Facebook. Her posts include positive things, like small kindnesses, and detailed stories of staff being loud in the middle of the night or her belongings being soaked by flooding in the shower room.

“For a very long period of time, I would write at least one incident report every day about things that went on,” she said. “Things that the staff were doing and other problems.”

Harrison says her complaints made a difference: people are no longer allowed to bring food into the sleeping areas and mats are laid out to give people more space. But Harrison says one thing has not improved. She says some staff members at the Brother Francis Shelter bully the clients.

“I’ve even witnessed them setting people up to get a reaction so that they can use that reaction to throw people out. And it’s not all of the staff. It’s the bullies.”

Harrison lists incidents of individuals being accused of drinking when they haven’t and others being given special privileges. She is not alone in her concerns. Mari Burt and a half a dozen other individuals who use the facility started discussing the problems weeks ago. Burt says they tried to contact Catholic Social Services staff and received some follow up, but not enough.

CSS Executive Director Lisa Aquino says the organization takes every complaint seriously. They log them and try to respond to them as best they can.

“We never want our clients to feel bullied, period,” she states. “When we have heard complaints about bullying or about questioning actions that our staff take, we always follow up on that. We always address that if it’s with a specific staff person, our management addresses that with them. And we also talk about the larger issues as a group and as a staff.”

Aquino says in the past they have terminated staff members if they are not a good fit for the program. But the director says the staff is working with a very diverse population with different mental and physical health needs. In the shelter, they have to find a balance of respect and safety for the 240 people who sleep there every night.

“We face the challenge of trying to support all of our guests at the Brother Francis Shelter and treat them with dignity and respect, and to provide them with the individual care that they need as a person while at the same time thinking of the overall health and well-being of all of the clients at the shelter.”

To help do that, they train staff about the culture of poverty, mental health issues, trauma informed care, and de-escalating conflicts. But Aquino says with fiscal, legal, and social constraints, they can’t monitor all areas at all times.

Mari Burt says she has sent Aquino an email on Wednesday requesting a community dialogue at the shelter about the guests’ experiences with bullying. If it does not happen, they’ll hold a public protest. Burt and Harrison have already contact the mayor’s office.

In 2000 the world’s leaders agreed on an ambitious plan to drastically reduce global poverty by 2015. Called the Millennium Development Goals, the targets spurred an unprecedented aid effort that brought lifesaving medicines and vaccines to millions of people and helped slash the share of people in the developing world who live in extreme poverty from 47 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.

Now nations are hammering out an even broader set of goals for 2030. But many of the people who work to end poverty fear the list has gotten out of control. By prioritizing so many issues, do you risk prioritizing none?

“You do risk a real dilution of focus and energy and resources,” says Mark Suzman, who oversees global policy advocacy for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “The worst case scenario is we might actually see some regression in some key areas where we have had so much momentum.”

To understand why the new set of targets — they’ll be called the Sustainable Development Goals — have become so voluminous, you need to go back to the astonishing, sleeper success story of those original Millennium Development Goals.

For an agreement that’s widely considered revolutionary, the MDGs, as they’re known, had a pretty humdrum beginning.

Mark Malloch-Brown was part of a small group of top United Nations officials who largely wrote the Millennium Development Goals. He sums up the process as “brilliantly simple.”

“It was myself and some chums in a room kind of thing.”

The process was so casual, they almost forgot something:

“Happily having sent these things to press, I ran into a smiling German colleague in the corridor … who was the head of the environment program. I remember my blood falling to my ankles as I said, ‘Oh goodness me, we’ve forgotten the environment goal!’ ”

They stopped the presses and added the goal “Ensure Environmental Sustainability,” bringing to the total to eight.

A big reason this could all be so low-key was that at the time, people didn’t expect much to come of the goals. “It’s not as if 2000 was the first time that the U.N. has come out and set lofty global goals,” says the Gates foundation’s Suzman. (The foundation is a supporter of NPR.)

But Suzman, who once worked with Malloch-Brown at the U.N., says the very simplicity of the Millennium Development Goals ended up making them uniquely powerful. International aid to poor countries had gotten kind of scattershot during the 1990s. Reducing the global agenda to eight narrowly defined priorities helped channel everyone’s energies — and money.

“What the goals did by prioritizing and focusing was actually put together major international donors, civil society partners on the ground, national governments focusing on the same sets of issues,” says Suzman. “And that allowed for a focusing of both policy change and resources and attention.”

Countries and donors could track how they were measuring up against the targets, and this often spurred them to try harder. The upshot: More than 6 million lives have been saved thanks to malaria prevention and treatments; 12 million people in poor countries now have access to HIV/AIDS drugs; and thanks to expanded measles vaccination of children, more than 15 million deaths were averted.

The world hasn’t met every single Millennium Development Goal. And a lot of the rise in poor people’s incomes was the result of economic growth in China and India.

Still, says Suzman, “the last decade has seen arguably the greatest improvements for the largest number people on the planet in the most countries than has ever happened in human history.”

So as people started talking about what should replace these goals when they expire this year, there was one thing everyone agreed on: Something this important should no longer be drafted by a bunch of technocrats in a room at the U.N.

“Oh, it’s hugely different,” says Thomas Gass, an assistant secretary-general at the U.N. in charge of coordinating the process this time around. “This time it was a two-year process that involved all the member states, that invited interest groups and civil society to come and provide their inputs, their comments.” They also polled about 7 million people.

Malloch-Brown, the former U.N. official who helped draft the Millennium Development Goals, says the inclusive approach this go-round is admirable and important. But there’s a downside.

“We are victims of the success of the original goals,” he says. “They’ve so much driven decisions about funding by both governments and donors that everybody, whatever their issue, wants to make sure they’re included.”

The result: The current draft — which is expected to be adopted pretty much as is at the U.N. this fall — lists more than double the number of original goals, and quadruple the number of subtargets. In total the Sustainable Development Goals consist of 17 goals and 169 subtargets.

A lot of the goals expand on unfinished business in areas like reducing child and maternal mortality, fighting disease or boosting incomes. For instance, the original goals called for cutting in half the share of people living in extreme poverty — meaning people who get by on less than $1.25 a day. Now the aim is to get the share down to zero.

But a wealth of new topics is addressed, with targets such as “promote sustainable tourism” and “provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities.”

“All of them are incredibly important,” says Suzman. “There’s not a single one of the 169 targets that you would look at and say, ‘That’s a bad thing.’ ”

But, he says, “the challenge is, how do you use those to prioritize?” The power of the Millennium Development Goals was that they were “realistic, measurable, and relatively few in number.” By expanding the list into such a holistic, broad vision, “you risk not having that energy and direction that came from the Millennium Development Goals and that turned into action on the ground.”

The U.N.’s Gass counters that this criticism misses the point of the Sustainable Development Goals. The objective isn’t just to update the original goals. It’s to usher in a whole new chapter — even a whole new paradigm — for eliminating global poverty.

“The strength of this new agenda is not its focus or its help to set priorities,” he says. “The strength of this new agenda is that it can and must become a new social contract between governments and their people.”

He says to really eliminate poverty you need more than just aid from rich countries or donor organizations. It’s about poor countries taking the lead, bringing in private investment to expand their economies. And above all, it’s about citizens expressing what they want and holding their governments to account.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

More than 150,000 U.S. families are homeless each year. The number has been going down, in part because of a program known as rapid rehousing, which quickly moves families out of shelters and into homes.

But new research by the Obama administration finds that for many families, rapid rehousing is only a temporary fix.

It seemed like a good idea back in 2009 — when the recession had pushed thousands of families into homelessness. Rather than stay in shelters, families would get rental assistance for a few months — maybe a year — until they could get back on their feet.

“What rapid rehousing did is say from the moment a family walks in, how can we get you out of here as quickly as possible and back into a home of your own,” says Jennifer Ho, a senior adviser on housing and services at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

As part of the Economic Recovery Act, Congress approved about $1.5 billion for the program, making it a key tool for reducing family homelessness.

But Ho says new research by HUD has raised some red flags.

“Rapid rehousing is not a magic solution,” she says.

Her agency has found that families that get rapid rehousing are just as likely later on to face the same housing problems as families that stay in shelters: Many of them end up returning to a homeless shelter, doubling up with family and friends or moving from place to place.

Jordan McClellan, a single mother of three in Washington, D.C., knows this all too well. She’s gone from program to program, never getting far from the brink of homelessness.

“There have been many days where I just wanted to give up,” she says. “I felt nobody heard me, nobody cared.”

It began eight years ago when McClellan had two small children and was pregnant with her third. She lost her telemarketing job and was evicted from her apartment.

As many families do, she went to live with a parent, but that didn’t work out. So she moved into a homeless shelter for a year, then transitional housing where her rent was subsidized. When she got a job as a medical assistant, her subsidy went down.

“And literally, the month that my rent went up, I lost my job,” says McClellan.

But the rent stayed high for several more months, leaving her in debt and facing eviction.

Then McClellan was told she was moving to a new program called rapid rehousing. She became eligible for more rental aid, but it would last only a year. Then she’d be on her own.

“The way the program is set up, every four months, your rent goes up 10 percent to get you by the end of that year in a place where you can pay the full market rent,” McClellan says. “And mind you, market rent at my unit was $1,700.”

The assumption was that at the end of the program, McClellan would have a job. But instead, she had hip surgery and was unable to work. She says she was told she could get a three-month extension, “but that extension was contingent upon me having surgery on my other leg.”

McClellan knew the additional surgery would make it more difficult to get a job and be able to afford her own place.

So McClellan sought help from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, where Marta Beresin is a staff attorney. Beresin says rapid rehousing is intended for families who face a short-term crisis, not those like McClellan who have a whole host of problems. For some of Beresin’s clients, rapid rehousing became more like rapid revolving door.

“Oftentimes, families who had been doing everything they could to increase their income, and be able to afford the rent in their unit, but just weren’t there yet, and they were being cut off, they’re being evicted and they were coming back into shelter,” the attorney says.

Laura Zeilinger, Washington, D.C.’s new director of human services, says some of the complaints about the program are legitimate. In the past, she says, the city sometimes used rapid rehousing in a punitive way, as a stick to motivate families to get work, even though they clearly needed more help.

She’s trying to change that, Zeilinger says, “to really support families differently, to say we really believe in your potential to be able to make it in the long run and we are here with you to support you in doing so.”

This includes providing other services, such as job training and education, that people need to be able to afford their own place.

But Zeilinger defends rapid rehousing. She says it’s been a big success for many families and that it’s more stable and less expensive than putting a family up in a shelter. HUD estimates that costs about $60,000 per family, per year.

She and others in the field take issue with some of HUD’s findings, noting that the study looks at only 12 communities, over a limited time period. And, Zeilinger says, there are few alternatives. Ho, of HUD, agrees that the goal is to improve rapid rehousing, not to replace it.

In Jordan McClellan’s case, things are looking up. She has just landed what almost everyone, including HUD, agrees is the best way to help homeless families. She has received a permanent housing voucher and in March was able to use it to get a new apartment. She has to pay up to 30 percent of her income in rent, but there’s no time limit, so she finally has some stability.

“You know it’s a sense of security, like OK, I have a roof over my head, now I can focus on everything else,” McClellan says. “Now I can focus on getting a job and, you know, moving forward in life.”

But the waiting lists for such vouchers are years, even decades long, in communities across the country. And no one expects Congress to fund more anytime soon, which is another reason rapid rehousing, and how it works, are getting a closer look.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.