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HUD mandates ‘affordable housing’ in affluent suburbs

joG said:
How much is affordable?
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This is nothing new. When I was a social worker I worked in Northern VA right outside of DC which ranges from super affluent to slums in a matter of miles. Back then it was the bright idea to buy housing in more affluent neighborhoods and convert them to section 8 housing... I always laughed that the project was based on the belief that poor people would become affluent via osmosis. What it really did was put poor, uneducated people into houses and neighborhoods that they would never be able to afford even if they made it to middle class. We are talking townhomes that were worth $700-800,000 on the open market, but were rented for $200 a month.

There was absolutely no chance for those people to ever live that well on their own.
 
jmotivator said:
This is nothing new. When I was a social worker I worked in Northern VA right outside of DC which ranges from super affluent to slums in a matter of miles. Back then it was the bright idea to buy housing in more affluent neighborhoods and convert them to section 8 housing... I always laughed that the project was based on the belief that poor people would become affluent via osmosis. What it really did was put poor, uneducated people into houses and neighborhoods that they would never be able to afford even if they made it to middle class. We are talking townhomes that were worth $700-800,000 on the open market, but were rented for $200 a month.

There was absolutely no chance for those people to ever live that well on their own.
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Sounds like the normal social program. There are some that work, but. ...
 
joG said:
Sounds like the normal social program. There are some that work, but. ...
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Well, all this program managed to do was waste millions of taxpayer dollars and create some sweet fixer-uppers for the local house flipping businesses.
 
jimbo said:
It's all about the ultimate goal of equality. Impossible to equal everybody up, so therefore the only alternative is to equal everybody down.
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Exactly!!!

Similar to wealth redistribution idiocy. It is an ideological difference.
Equal opportunity not equal outcome!
 
Glen Contrarian said:
"Yes, keep all THOSE people out of our gentrified estates! Now, Jones, hand me my perfumed scarf so I don't have to smell the Great Unwashed - they don't count, you know. Oh, I'm not referring to you of course, but it's all those other people who are poor - it's all their own fault, you know, because we who are wealthy are more intelligent and handsome - we simply are better people, that's all."
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:roll: :roll: :roll:

This is about gov't over-reach, not your fantasies about what you want the rich to think like...
 
Chomsky said:
I suspect the problem here Glen, is: Many citizens are fine with protecting one against discrimination in Constitutional terms (race, creed, gender, etc.), but have problems with the government interfering based upon purely economic terms (one cannot afford housing in a high-end area).

I'm not sure we have a societal obligation to those of extremely limited means, beyond providing basic life-sustaining housing and food subsidies. We can't guarantee affluence or affluent standards of living, nor should we.

Also, the article stated the following as HUD's goal: "The goal is to move low- and very-low-income people out of the city and into the suburbs."

That staement strikes me as absurd. Shouldn't the goal be: "To attempt to provide a reasonable quality of life *wherever* one happens to reside, rather than pick & chose individuals or locales"?

The personal concern I have with my above thoughts though, is with America having public education funding provided by local property taxes, which then skews the quality of education. I'd prefer something like the French national funding system, where all schools get similar funding.
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Thumbs up!!

I like this... This idea means that we are taking people who are not affluent, lack the means to sustain affluence and put them into an affluent environment. A formula for disaster. Put a bunch of low income people into a upper income neighborhood and the upper income people who live will start moving out or at least not moving in. Tell a guy making $300,000 a year that his neighbor is a single mom living in HUD housing who is only there because the gov't because the gov't bought her a house and he's likely to look elsewhere. Now home values in those neighborhoods start dropping, less affluent people start moving in and before you know it, you are no longer living in an affluent neighborhood. It's happened before over and over again and all this will do is cause it to happen again.
 
VanceMack said:
The same goal they achieved when they shut down the projects and dispersed gang members into middle income communities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html
Chicago Street Gangs Increasing Presence in Suburbs | NBC Chicago
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That NYT article was pretty illuminating.

And check-out their representative example:

"Ms. Payne, a 42-year-old African-American mother of five, moved to Antioch in 2006. With the local real estate market slowing and a housing voucher covering two-thirds of the rent, she found she could afford a large, new home, with a pool, for $2,200 a month.

But old problems persisted. When her estranged husband was arrested, the local housing authority tried to cut off her subsidy, citing disturbances at her house. Then the police threatened to prosecute her landlord for any criminal activity or public nuisances caused by the family. The landlord forced the Paynes to leave when their lease was up"

This exact thing happened to a good friend of my uncle's, when he retired from the city. He cleaned-out his savings and his retirement funds to buy a six-flat to support himself during his retirement in an otherwise pretty decent neighborhood. Almost immediately after he bought his building, the building right next to it went Section 8. In my city many buildings are separated by a narrow gangway (in his instance) and sometimes even attached (row houses), so everyone's in extremely close proximity. Consequently several years later he lost his shirt, threw-in the towel, and sold at a deep loss! His vacancy rates and tenant choices became abysmal. He couldn't make his note. His only choice was to go Section 8 with the building or walk away, and he didn't want to deal with Section 8 after what he saw next-door, so he walked away from his investment and his retirement dream.

Like my uncle, this guy was an old school Sicilian - and if there's any two groups in my northern city that don't like each other and don't get along, it's the Blacks & the Italians. And this Section 8 experience really cemented this guy's prejudices! The old guy's gone now, but for awhile there we thought he might go postal! He was seriously that bent.
 
Chomsky said:
I'm not so sure about that I've bolded.

I lived in a neighborhood in the city that hit the skids and became a slum. Panicked by watching three generations of my, my parents', and my grandparents' hard work go down the drain, I subsequently moved my wife and kids to a nice little hamlet in the 'burbs that's doing pretty good. And this place functions unbelievably better! It's not even close! It's safe, clean, quiet, and has excellent schools! IOW, it has all the things my old neighborhood in the city lacked.

So unless you have some sense of "healthy" that differs from mine, I can assure you where I live now is way healthier than where I used to live, in terms of both governance and individual quality of life.

I think the thing to keep in mind is: Local government services depend upon a tax base. If you can't or won't pay those taxes, you're not going to get more than the most basic services. If you want more, you have to pay. And for some of us, we'd rather pay more for what we perceive is a higher quality of life. Not everyone wants to do that.
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Slums lack affluence, ergo they aren't healthy. Part of the failings of city planners in the 60's was this idea that you can put all of the poor people in one place and it will be awesome for everyone. Unfortunately, clustering poor people in one place creates systemic poverty and crime that feeds on itself in a downward spiral.

No one wants to live around poor people. But as long as there are poor people it's the best choice of a number of bad ones. I don't mean live next door, but certainly within the same general area. Think about what you do and who you interact with on a day to day basis. I'm talking servers, janitors, retail workers, hotel staff, convenience store clerks etc.... Now think about what they must make. Does it make any sense to force them to live far away from those jobs? Why would they want to do them? A lot of them are going to be living on the margins, if there isn't affordable housing nearby then they're going to have to sink additional funds into transportation that they don't have. This will either end up being a drag on the community they live in, or it will raise the cost of goods and services in the more well to do areas.

When the population gets very segmented, you'll have regions with huge shortages in unskilled workers and regions with large excesses of unskilled workers without a market. (See silicon valley) It's simply not sustainable.
 
VanceMack said:
The same goal they achieved when they shut down the projects and dispersed gang members into middle income communities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html
Chicago Street Gangs Increasing Presence in Suburbs | NBC Chicago
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I understand, and agree.

But I also must point-out, at least in my city which had high-rise housing projects that many years later were found out-of-regulation for viability by HUD, that those initial high-rise areas largely exasperated the problems.

It was an utterly terrible idea to stuff the poverty stricken in these dense buildings as one huge homogeneous group, considering all the social ills that are prevalent with chronic poverty.

So the initial idea of projects helped accelerate this mess.

Check it out! These were really big areas, literally stretching for miles! All stacked with welfare high-rises!

CHA.jpg
 
Mithros said:
Slums lack affluence, ergo they aren't healthy. Part of the failings of city planners in the 60's was this idea that you can put all of the poor people in one place and it will be awesome for everyone. Unfortunately, clustering poor people in one place creates systemic poverty and crime that feeds on itself in a downward spiral.

No one wants to live around poor people. But as long as there are poor people it's the best choice of a number of bad ones. I don't mean live next door, but certainly within the same general area. Think about what you do and who you interact with on a day to day basis. I'm talking servers, janitors, retail workers, hotel staff, convenience store clerks etc.... Now think about what they must make. Does it make any sense to force them to live far away from those jobs? Why would they want to do them? A lot of them are going to be living on the margins, if there isn't affordable housing nearby then they're going to have to sink additional funds into transportation that they don't have. This will either end up being a drag on the community they live in, or it will raise the cost of goods and services in the more well to do areas.

When the population gets very segmented, you'll have regions with huge shortages in unskilled workers and regions with large excesses of unskilled workers without a market. (See silicon valley) It's simply not sustainable.
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To the bolded:

Agreed! It was a terrible idea. Take a look at my post #35 for my thoughts and a pic on this.

To the rest:

Yeah, we need solutions, but I'd argue the bigger picture yet: We need an economic system where far larger segments of our society have the possibility to share in the economic wealth through active participation (working and business), rather than a subsistence stipend.

The whole '1% v the rest' thing (metaphorically speaking) is exasperating these problems, and I don't see it getting better.

More money by the fruits-of-one's-labor needs to be getting down to the poor and working-poor.
 
Chomsky said:
I understand, and agree.

But I also must point-out, at least in my city which had high-rise housing projects that many years later were found out-of-regulation for viability by HUD, that those initial high-rise areas largely exasperated the problems.

It was an utterly terrible idea to stuff the poverty stricken in these dense buildings as one huge homogeneous group, considering all the social ills that are prevalent with chronic poverty.

So the initial idea of projects helped accelerate this mess.

Check it out! These were really big areas, literally stretching for miles! All stacked with welfare high-rises!

View attachment 67199614
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Totally. Just because the general idea has merit doesn't make the implementation a good thing.

Areas need to support a wide range of economic situations. But all paths to get there are certainly not equal. Just like how having termites in your house is a pretty bad thing, and burning it down will certainly solve the termite situation, but "solving" one problem doesn't make the end situation magically better.
 
Anthony60 said:
HUD mandates ?affordable housing? in affluent suburbs | NewBostonPost

“Every person deserves a fair shot at opportunity, and that starts with a decent, safe, and affordable place to call home,” HUD Secretary Julián Castro said in the March 15 announcement. “This agreement sets Baltimore County on a path to stronger, more inclusive communities where everyone can enjoy equal access to opportunity.”

Who the hell asked the government to engineer who lives where? This is just disgusting.
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Don't they realize that the only acceptable social engineering the govt can do is when they pack all those poor people into ghettos?
After nearly ten years of litigation, Judge Garbis gave public housing residents a precedent-setting civil rights victory in 2005. He ruled that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) violated the Fair Housing Act by unfairly concentrating African-American public housing residents in the most impoverished, segregated areas of Baltimore City. Judge Garbis held that HUD must take a regional approach to promoting fair housing opportunities throughout the Baltimore Region.

After issuing his 2005 liability ruling, Judge Garbis directed further proceedings to determine whether HUD’s conduct also violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws and to decide on an appropriate remedy for the plaintiff class. At a trial in 2006, HUD’s own witnesses confirmed that the Baltimore Region’s public housing is, and always has been, racially segregated. Those witnesses also testified that, far from fulfilling HUD’s constitutional obligations to eliminate the vestiges of intentional discrimination, virtually none of the billions of dollars spent by HUD in the Baltimore Region went to offering Baltimore public housing families any meaningful opportunity to live in integrated communities.
Baltimore Public Housing Families Win Settlement in Fair Housing Lawsuit | NAACP LDF
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Mithros said:
Totally. Just because the general idea has merit doesn't make the implementation a good thing.

Areas need to support a wide range of economic situations. But all paths to get there are certainly not equal. Just like how having termites in your house is a pretty bad thing, and burning it down will certainly solve the termite situation, but "solving" one problem doesn't make the end situation magically better.
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To the bolded:

True words, that can probably knock-down about half of all the arguments ever made for any position on any subject in this forum!

Add: "And don't fault a good general idea because of a poor implementation" - and we can pretty much own this place! :thumbs:
 
Chomsky said:
I understand, and agree.

But I also must point-out, at least in my city which had high-rise housing projects that many years later were found out-of-regulation for viability by HUD, that those initial high-rise areas largely exasperated the problems.

It was an utterly terrible idea to stuff the poverty stricken in these dense buildings as one huge homogeneous group, considering all the social ills that are prevalent with chronic poverty.

So the initial idea of projects helped accelerate this mess.

Check it out! These were really big areas, literally stretching for miles! All stacked with welfare high-rises!

View attachment 67199614
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There are other problems to consider. Sure...they can subsidize the house. What cost does it add to the individuals to commute to work (assuming they have a job)? What social pressures does it put on kids to fit in with neighbors that have means. What is the impact when the kids are wearing old clothes and walking and their peers are in designers and riding in style? How well are they going to fit in and assimilate?
 
VanceMack said:
There are other problems to consider. Sure...they can subsidize the house. What cost does it add to the individuals to commute to work (assuming they have a job)? What social pressures does it put on kids to fit in with neighbors that have means. What is the impact when the kids are wearing old clothes and walking and their peers are in designers and riding in style? How well are they going to fit in and assimilate?
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And here's a really practical consideration: What do you do for a set of wheels?

When I lived in the city, it was common-enough for some of the neighbors to not have a car. Particularly younger singhle women who lived in apartments in the neighborhoods, and hopped-on a bus or the el to work in offices in the Loop. If you're single you can rent a really cheap small apartment in a moderate to marginal neighborhood, and with no auto expenses and eating cheaply and otherwise living frugally, you'd be surprised at how you can get by with very little money even in a relatively expensive city.

But in many burbs, except for the oldest close-in ones, a car becomes a necessity. And it's not like back in the city where you can have a cheap beater with only liability insurance, not even caring if it is undependable because you only need it for special trips and not everyday transportation. In the 'burbs you often need a dependable car to function, and that's an expense not many that qualify for subsidized housing can afford (legally).
 
I do believe that action needs to be taken to improve the availability of affordable housing but this is not it.
 
HUD...bringing slums to a gated community near you!

Apparently crime rates are too low in affluent neighborhoods for Big Fed's liking, so they figure on changing that by forcing Section 8 Housing onto them.
 
Chomsky said:
From the article:

"The goal is to move low- and very-low-income people out of the city and into the suburbs."

Huh?

What-the-hay kind of goal is this??? :doh
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The goal? Destruction of neighborhoods.
 
Chomsky said:
From the article:

"The goal is to move low- and very-low-income people out of the city and into the suburbs."

Huh?

What-the-hay kind of goal is this??? :doh
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Meh, it'll never happen. Maybe they can force rent controlled apartment buildings, but they'll never be able to dictate what people can sell their private homes for.
 
Chomsky said:
From the article:

"The goal is to move low- and very-low-income people out of the city and into the suburbs."

Huh?

What-the-hay kind of goal is this??? :doh
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That sentence comes the original biased source and NOT from HUD.

The HUD statement states they wish to see low-income people moving "to higher opportunity neighborhoods." That does not mean "suburbia" for the very reason you noted in a later post - they would need wheels to get to work.

This is a legal settlement reached by the County of Baltimore after years of deliberate housing discrimination; the county had not developed affordable housing in areas other than those that were concentrated by race and poverty and focused only on providing rental housing for seniors rather than families. The complaint also alleged that adequate numbers of accessible units were unavailable to people with disabilities and that the county’s actions failed to affirmatively further fair housing.

In other words, HUD was supported in the suit by the court and the County acknowledged that they had in the past deliberately "ghettoized" low-income housing

People should always do a bit of investigation before making claims about one's opponents and their supposed actions.
 
Somerville said:
That sentence comes the original biased source and NOT from HUD.

The HUD statement states they wish to see low-income people moving "to higher opportunity neighborhoods." That does not mean "suburbia" for the very reason you noted in a later post - they would need wheels to get to work.

This is a legal settlement reached by the County of Baltimore after years of deliberate housing discrimination; the county had not developed affordable housing in areas other than those that were concentrated by race and poverty and focused only on providing rental housing for seniors rather than families. The complaint also alleged that adequate numbers of accessible units were unavailable to people with disabilities and that the county’s actions failed to affirmatively further fair housing.

In other words, HUD was supported in the suit by the court and the County acknowledged that they had in the past deliberately "ghettoized" low-income housing

People should always do a bit of investigation before making claims about one's opponents and their supposed actions.
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Well, there seems to be a discrepancy between what you're claiming, and what the article states:

The units will be geographically dispersed in “neighborhoods that provide access to opportunity.” The 46-page settlement includes a chart (Exhibit F) listing the 116 relatively affluent census tracts surrounding Baltimore City where most of the 1,000 housing units must be located."

Again, the article title states "suburbs", and now the body section I quoted states the same, while also referring to a chart not included in the article. Pls note the use of the word "surrounding", which I bolded for emphasis.

So is this article fraudulent?
 
Chomsky said:
Well, there seems to be a discrepancy between what you're claiming, and what the article states:

The units will be geographically dispersed in “neighborhoods that provide access to opportunity.” The 46-page settlement includes a chart (Exhibit F) listing the 116 relatively affluent census tracts surrounding Baltimore City where most of the 1,000 housing units must be located."

Again, the article title states "suburbs", and now the body section I quoted states the same, while also referring to a chart not included in the article. Pls note the use of the word "surrounding", which I bolded for emphasis.

So is this article fraudulent?
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I believe it lies in the definition of "suburbs". The communities which surround Baltimore, in other locations could well be seen as urban locales owing to population numbers and job locations. For many, not all, "suburbs" evokes an image of housing developments often including those gated communities noted previously, but with little in the way of job opportunities other than house-keeping and lawn care jobs.
 
Anthony60 said:
HUD mandates ?affordable housing? in affluent suburbs | NewBostonPost

“Every person deserves a fair shot at opportunity, and that starts with a decent, safe, and affordable place to call home,” HUD Secretary Julián Castro said in the March 15 announcement. “This agreement sets Baltimore County on a path to stronger, more inclusive communities where everyone can enjoy equal access to opportunity.”

Who the hell asked the government to engineer who lives where? This is just disgusting.
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So, two things: those who were born and raised in said areas are supposed to do what? Secondly, those who are working for wages that don't support a living in those areas are - supposed to live 60 miles away where living is cheaper and commute? Leaving 30% of their earnings on the road?
 
jet57 said:
So, two things: those who were born and raised in said areas are supposed to do what? Secondly, those who are working for wages that don't support a living in those areas are - supposed to live 60 miles away where living is cheaper and commute? Leaving 30% of their earnings on the road?
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Please read my posts #46 and 48
 
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