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Home prices are surging in South Florida — and there’s no end in sight

February 25, 2021 by Housing Leadership Council Leave a Comment

By David Lyons | South Florida Sun Sentinel |Feb 23, 2021

Homebuyers saw home prices exceeding 10% or more across South Florida during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, as interest rates hit new lows and the numbers of houses for sale sharply dropped off.

The monthslong, rock-bottom interest rates coupled with the heavy demand for homes all fueled the push, experts say. And there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight, even though South Florida home prices are well above their historical highs.

“You see this every time you have a dramatic drop in [interest] rates,” said Ken Johnson, a real estate economist at Florida Atlantic University. “You see a quick run-up in price. It’s like a sugar high. It’s like an injection to stimulate the marketplace where you have this really low interest rate. ‘I’d better buy now because I’ll never see these low rates again.’”

In a survey released Tuesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency ranked the metro area of West Palm Beach, Boca Raton and Boynton Beach No. 36 out of 100 U.S. markets. The area saw prices rise 12.1% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The metro area covering Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach and Sunrise came in at No. 44 with an increase of 11.7% during last year’s final quarter, while the area covering Miami,…

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Filed Under: News, Unaffordable

If ‘Housing Is a Right,’ How Do We Make It Happen?

February 19, 2021 by Housing Leadership Council Leave a Comment

By Eva Rosen | The New York Times | Feb. 17, 2021

Dr. Rosen has been conducting in-person research on the housing market in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore for more than 10 years. Her book, “The Voucher Promise: ‘Section 8’ and the Fate of an American Neighborhood,” tells that story.

“Housing is a right in America,” President Biden said last month as he signed an executive order promising to address racial discrimination and inequality in housing. On Tuesday, the administration announced an extension of the federal foreclosure moratorium through the end of June.

While this temporary measure is a necessary Band-Aid on a gaping economic wound, housing is not yet a right in this country — far from it. Mr. Biden’s emphasis on redressing racial inequity in housing provides a welcome contrast, though, to the long history of the federal government’s housing policies, which created barriers to safe, affordable housing in all 50 states, especially for communities of color.

Of course, the American housing crisis long predated the pandemic, and the United States has never made the provision of housing a national priority. The crisis has only been compounded during the last year: Somewhere between 10 and 40 million people may be at risk of eviction in the coming months, in a time of deep racial inequity, volatile personal incomes, a surge in small business failures and diminished public access to many government benefits.

Mr. Biden’s speech points to a pathway out. In a moment of economic upheaval and fragility, there is an existing program that can help. Housing vouchers offer the potential for a solution to the residential instability and deep inequity in our country. Housing assistance can help stabilize communities that have been hard hit by generations of racially predatory practices like redlining and disinvestment. Expanding housing vouchers to everyone who needs them would be a key step toward recognizing the role that stable housing plays in life outcomes from health to employment and education.

Currently, the Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as “Section 8,” helps more than 2 million households keep a roof over their head. Funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, vouchers offer a ticket to safe, affordable housing, reducing homelessness and alleviating overcrowding. Yet they aren’t used as much as they could be: Only one-quarter of those who qualify for housing help get it. Marcia Fudge, the new secretary of HUD, knows that the logic is clear for scaling up vouchers with the goal of improving affordability.

Economists like Raj Chetty hold a secondary hope for the program: social mobility. Vouchers can offer the chance to move to new places — out of the disadvantaged neighborhoods to which subsidized renters have long been tethered. In theory, the private market can offer recipients homes in safer neighborhoods, with better schools and jobs, paving a pathway out of poverty. In this way, policymakers hope vouchers might even be able to remedy the concentrated poverty and segregation that previous policies helped create.

But like school vouchers — which conservatives have long championed as a preferred policy to promote choice and better educational outcomes, despite data that suggests otherwise — housing vouchers, as they currently operate, are based on a flawed premise: that given the option, people can and will make the “right” choice. The truth is that “right” choices are often unavailable.

Take Edie, whom I met during my fieldwork in Baltimore. For Edie (this is not her actual name; the terms of my research protocol prevent me from using even an initial to describe her), getting a housing voucher after years on the waiting list was like winning the lottery. Edie works as a shampooer at a hair salon in her neighborhood. Instead of handing over most of her meager paycheck to her landlord each month, she would now only…

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Filed Under: Affordable Housing, Evictions, Homeless, Low-Income, News, Unaffordable

Freddie Mac Investigates the Homeownership Gap

February 12, 2021 by Housing Leadership Council

Freddie Mac’s Equality in Housing mission is to expand homeownership opportunities and to access affordable housing for underrepresented borrowers, especially communities of color.

During the Great Recession and the subprime lending crisis, Black and Hispanic homeowners were disproportionately affected by foreclosures and the tighter lending standards. New HMDA-reported mortgage originations to Black and Hispanic borrowers declined from 25% of originations in 2006 to just 12% by 2009. As of 2018, the White–Black and White–Hispanic mortgage ownership gaps stood at roughly 17 and 16 percentage points, respectively. At the same time, the White–Hispanic and White–Black homeownership rate gaps persisted. This study uses uniquely constructed credit bureau data to answer two questions: How do consumers’ credit profiles determine their decision to enter mortgage ownership? What explains the racial/ethnic gap in rates of transition to obtaining new mortgages?

Our research reveals several interesting findings. First, using a logistic regression model, we find that some of the important determinants of the decision to enter mortgage ownership are age, income growth, marital status, getting a FICO score, the individual’s demand for a mortgage, and local unemployment rates. Consumers with limited credit histories are less likely to transition to acquiring new mortgages. Other factors, such as student loan debt, auto debt, gender, number of children, and educational attainment, play less important roles.

Second, we find that…Read this article The Role of Credit Attributes in Explaining the Homeownership Gap Between Whites and Minorities Since the Financial Crisis, as Freddie Mac investigates significant barriers to minority mortgage ownership and explains the unequal housing recovery across minority groups.

Filed Under: Affordable Housing, Low-Income, News

Florida study: $5 billion return on $423 million affordable housing investment

February 8, 2021 by Housing Leadership Council

By John Haughey | The Center Square Feb 2, 2021

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed $96.6 billion Fiscal Year 2022 (FY22) budget recommendation fully funds affordable housing programs at $423.3 million, which a study released Tuesday maintains will generate $5 billion in economic benefits statewide. “An Economic Analysis of the Florida Housing Programs,” produced by the Regional Economic Consulting (REC) Group for the Sadowski Coalition, analyzed the economic impact of using affordable housing trust funds solely for affordable housing — a rarity in Florida until this year — and determined every $1 in housing trust funds spent on housing returns $1.40 in revenues for state and local government coffers. Read More.

Filed Under: News

When $25B won’t make a dent…

December 23, 2020 by Housing Leadership Council

U.S. Renters Could Owe $70 Billion

By January, when the federal eviction moratorium expires, 11.4 million households in the U.S. might be more than three months behind in their rent, or $6,000 each.
By: Kriston Capps
December 10, 2020, 11:36 AM

Between past due rent, late fees and unpaid utility bills, Americans may collectively owe $70 billion by January, when the current federal eviction moratorium is set to expire.

Estimates for the nation’s total rent shortfall on Jan. 1 range in the tens of billions of dollars, potentially exceeding the amount of emergency rental assistance that Congress may or may not deliver over the next few weeks. If lawmakers fail to act, the New Year could trigger a long-feared disaster — an avalanche of evictions during… Read More

 

Filed Under: COVID-19, Evictions, Homeless, News, Rental Assistance

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