Housing

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on the The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include food assistance, tax issues, the health-wealth connection, alternatives to banking and the prepaid card industry, and the mortgage crisis. 

Way back in 2011, we conducted a survey of readers that told us a number of things: importantly, we learned that many of you look to us for timely news from the asset building field and that a regular round-up of articles would be a welcome addition to our other content. In keeping with the spirit of 2012 and resolutions and all that good stuff, the Asset Building Program is introducing a new weekly blog feature: a Friday news round-up. We hope this will help you (and us, for that matter) keep up with developments in the field, note-worthy news, and learn about partner organizations working around the U.S. on asset building, economic security, anti-poverty policy, and accessible financial services for low- and middle-income Americans. Topics will vary week-to-week (and depending on the news!) but we’ll aim to provide a diverse overview of the things we’re keeping an eye on that we think you’ll find interesting too.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) recently released findings from a study of American physicians about the links between health and unmet social needs. These needs included basic necessities like adequate nutrition, access to public transportation, and safe housing. Physicians overwhelmingly identified unmet needs as fundamentally related to their patients' health conditions, particularly among lower-income patient populations. Unfortunately, four out of five doctors surveyed (a sample of 1000 primary care physicians and pediatricians) said they did not feel confident in their capacity to meet these needs, which limited the effectiveness of the care they provided. Over half of surveyed doctors said their patients did not have access to the resources they needed to stay healthy. As Jane Lowe of RWJF noted in a press release, "America’s physicians understand that our health is largely determined by forces outside of the doctor’s office. Housing, employment, income and education are key factors that shape our health, especially for the most vulnerable among us.”

On November 22^nd, the Asset Building Program hosted a panel of experts to discuss how Americans are faring in the years since the Great Recession according to different measures. (Video from the event is available here.) Speakers from Wider Opportunities for Women, the Half in Ten Campaign, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Pew’s Economic Mobility Project joined moderator, Rachel Black, for a discussion of current data and indicators, who’s falling short according to these measures and by how much, and policy ideas for  making progress.

Over the past few years, Reid Cramer and Jeffrey Lubell, the Executive Director for the Center on Housing Policy, have worked on identifying ways to improve asset building opportunities among people receiving federal housing assistance. Their paper, “Taking Asset Building and Earning Incentives to Scale in HUD-Assisted Rental Housing,” details possible models that could improve the existing housing subsidy program.

Last week, I attended the Federal Reserve Community Affairs Research Conference on “The Changing Landscape of Community Development” where researchers from the Fed and Universities around the country shared their most recent findings on the challenges facing low-income communities and community development policy-makers.  The conference covered a wide range of topics from foreclosures to farmers markets with eight discussion panels and keynote speeches by Columbia University professor and aut

It is erroneous to think that extending jobless benefits will lead to an increase in unemployment. The cause of mass unemployment was a collapse in mass demand, not a growth in mass laziness. In other words, this is a macroeconomic, rather than a moral, problem.

No one wants to be unemployed – in addition to the stress of financial hardships, unemployment kills self-esteem. The U.S. has a strong anti-welfare culture, and in the eyes of friends and loved ones, one is suddenly worth less when not earning money and supporting their family.

New America Foundation President Steve Coll was a guest on NPR’s On the Media two Fridays ago, commenting on his open letter to the FCC in the The Columbia Journalism Review and the accompanying op-ed in The Washington Post. In these publications and on NPR, Coll made the point that it is in the best interest of Americans for commercial media to give up the existing public interest obligations, and instead pay spectrum usage fees that could go towards strengthening the public media to provide the information the commercial media hasn’t been providing.

Through reporting and analysis, Alyssa Katz’s new book tells the tale of how the spread of homeownership ultimately played a role in debilitating the national economy. Her account of the recent housing bubble and its sudden deflation should be required reading for those who want to know what happened and how to avoid it from happening again.

In this paper, we review the literature on homeownership as an asset building strategy for lower income households. We then present a real world case study, examining wealth building and household mobility among buyers of 424 resale-restricted, owner-occupied houses and condominiums developed by the Champlain Housing Trust (CHT) in Burlington, Vermont between 1988 and 2008. We conclude by comparing the asset building potential of shared equity homeownership to the rewards and risks associated with other strategies for helping lower income families to accumulate assets and build wealth.