School of Architecture and Planning

Final feedback etc.

folks --

we've emailed out our feedback on your team presentations (to team points of contact, for forwarding) and posted feedback on your final memos in Stellar/Homework.

thx again for a great semester -- and also for your helpfully specific feedback, including pointers and other suggestions, in the evaluations. we're on it -- always looking to make this a better course.

keep pushing the boundaries, have a great new year -- xav and phil

Announced on 03 January 2013  5:41  p.m. by Xavier de Souza Briggs

Moving the jobless to the jobs -- crucial for economic growth

Bloomberg Businessweek

Moving the Jobless to the Jobs—Crucial for Economic Growth

Posted by: Charles Kenny on December 16, 2012

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-16/moving-the-jobless-to-the-jobs-crucial-for-economic-growth

Immigration is suddenly a hot topic in Washington. From an issue with about as much traction as an ice cube on a skating rink, the election (and Republican’s drubbing at the hands of Latinos) has created a consensus around the need for reform. That’s great. There are very few things Washington could do to help the U.S. economic recovery and long-term growth than welcoming more entrepreneurs, creators, and workers from overseas. But while the movement of people to America is on the agenda in D.C., politicians might want to think about the benefits of people moving inside America, too.

Around the world, movement from poor rural areas to rich cities within countries has been a vital part of wealth creation. China alone has 140 million internal migrants, for example—most moved from the middle of the country to more prosperous coastal areas such as Shanghai, where they can earn more while their children can get a better education and quality health care. Just as international migrants send back $406 billion to their home countries each year, internal migrants support the families and communities they leave behind. And the wealth they create alongside the taxes they pay allow central governments to provide services and support to lagging regions.

Internal migration has been a powerful force for improving quality of life in the U.S., as well. People moving to Texas and California are going where the jobs are. And when poor people in the U.S. move to rich areas, that’s also a force for more equal national growth. Alongside the movement of goods and finance, the opportunities presented by movements of people are why poorer areas of the U.S. have traditionally grown faster than richer ones. Harvard economist Robert Barro and Columbia’s Xavier Sala-i-Martin estimated the rate of “income convergence” between states—how fast the gap is shrinking between poor and rich states—was about 2 percent per year between 1880 and 1998.

But more recent analysis by Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag of Harvard finds that the rate of convergence across U.S. states has slowed dramatically over the past 30 years—poor states are growing faster than rich states, still, but the relative pace is much closer than it used to be. From 1940 to 1980, the gap between incomes in poor and rich states narrowed by 2.1 percent a year. But after 1980, the rate of narrowing slipped to less than 1 percent.

One big reason for this, they suggest, is a similar slowing of migration from poor to rich states. Before 1980, each doubling of income across states was associated with a population growth rate of 1.46 percent higher. Poor people from relatively poor states moved to the richer states in search of a better life—so rich states saw rapidly rising populations. But in recent years, the relationship essentially disappeared. Poor states and rich states are seeing the same rate of population growth. The decline in migration can account for all the slowdown in income convergence over the past few decades, they conclude.

Ganong and Shoag note that the slowdown in migration has been particularly severe for low-income workers. They suggest that rapidly rising house prices in wealthy areas help account for that. As house prices rise, the benefits of living in productive areas erodes for low-skilled households. And the researchers note that the impact of housing regulation measured through land-use court cases is a big factor behind rising house prices. More regulation leads to higher house prices at a given income level—pricing poor people out of the housing market. Rich areas haven’t needed a passport system to keep poor people out of their communities; they’ve just regulated land use so much that there’s no cheap housing available.

Of course, that’s not necessarily easy for Washington to fix. Most of the regulations involved are made at the state and local level. But one thing Congress could do to help reduce the cost of housing and help deal with the fiscal cliff: Dump the home mortgage interest tax deduction.

The $100 billion the U.S. government provides each year in home mortgage interest tax relief makes housing more expensive. Three-quarters of the tax relief on home mortgage interest goes to the top 20 percent of earners, according to the Tax Policy Center—and hardly any people at the other end of the income distribution benefit from the credit. The credit encourages richer Americans to borrow more, bid up prices, and buy bigger houses on bigger plots. All that squeezes out the affordable rental housing that poor migrants need if they are going to get to where the jobs are.

Republican and Democrats agree that we should focus on equality of opportunity. But one of the best opportunities we can give people is to move from areas of little economic potential to areas with jobs and quality education. Getting rid of the home mortgage interest tax deduction is one way both to raise revenue and to help poor people help themselves. Of course, it’s also an idea with no political traction at the moment—but we’ve seen such things change before.

©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MADE IN NYC Ad Choices

Announced on 17 December 2012  5:32  p.m. by Xavier de Souza Briggs

(NYT) Soaring rents drive a boom in apartments

The New York Times

December 6, 2012

Soaring Rents Drive a Boom in Apartments

By SHAILA DEWAN and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Houston is better known for urban sprawl than dense apartment living. But as part of a national rush to capitalize on rising rents, developers there are building thousands of apartments like those south of downtown at Camden City Centre, where 268 units will open early next year in a complex that also has two swimming pools, billiards tables, a coffee bar and a fitness center.

As residential building recovers from a near standstill after the housing crisis, much of the momentum is coming not from subdivisions with green lawns and two-car garages but from rental apartments. Multifamily construction nationwide is two-thirds of the way back to its prerecession peak, while single-family home construction is still only about a third of the way back to its peak, said David Crowe, the chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders.

The multifamily construction recovery, fueled by young people who are striking out on their own, is strongest in the South and West, particularly in markets where job growth is picking up. Last month, the Commerce Department released data on new construction that showed new apartment complexes were going up at the fastest rate since July 2008.

That has led to a fear of overbuilding. While rents are still rising, analysts say the steep increases between 2011 and 2012 are unlikely to be repeated as a surge of units are completed in the latter part of this year and will continue to come on the market early next year. Nationally, residential rents rose 4.2 percent in 2011, but only 3.6 percent so far this year, according to Axiometrics, a Dallas-based apartment market research firm.

Much depends on the fortunes of the job market, which industry analysts said would determine whether higher rents were sustainable.

“The real test is going to be what happens between now and April or May as we see all these new units introduced to the market,” said Jay Denton, the vice president for research at Axiometrics.

Still, vacancies remain extremely low and the pace of building in recent years has not been quick enough to replace obsolete, decrepit or demolished units, said Mr. Crowe of the homebuilders group. He projected that it would be several years before supply was back to normal.

In Houston, from January to September, construction permits for multifamily housing increased by more than 70 percent over the same period a year earlier, according to data compiled by the homebuilders group. Permits for single-family homes, by contrast, increased by 25 percent. Shares of Camden Property, the real estate investment trust that is building Camden City Centre, were up about 20 percent over a year ago.

“The demand for building is all over the country, really,” said Ric Campo, Camden’s chairman and chief executive. “We’re seeing higher rents, faster lease-ups, lower construction costs — everything you want to see. Part of it is there’s just a pent-up demand for new product because we didn’t build anything during the downturn.”

In Houston, where low housing prices have traditionally kept the cost of living down, Camden can rent a one-bedroom apartment for $1,450.

Houston is far from the only market where demand for rentals is at a fever pitch. Denver, Oakland, Seattle, Miami and Charlotte, N.C., where many of the condo projects that went bust have been converted to rentals, also appear at the top of lists by data collectors like Trulia, Zillow and Axiometrics.

The bulk of the apartments are not going to families who lost their homes to foreclosure, many of whom are renting single-family houses. Instead, the apartments are being rented by young people who had moved in with their parents during the recession, or simply had not yet moved out.

People in their early 30s, the age when many might look to buy a first home, are renting for longer periods of time, partly because mortgages are difficult to come by and partly because they have been unnerved by the turmoil in the housing market.

“That portion of the population is starting to grow again, but I think a lot of them, seeing what has happened, are not particularly enthralled with the idea of going out and buying a house,” said Steve Blitz, the chief economist at ITG Investment Research.

Michael Hoffman, a 26-year-old electrical engineer, said he moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Camden City Centre a few months ago after living with his parents to save money.

“It was easier,” he said of the rent-free arrangement with his parents. “But I felt like I was missing out on my 20s.”

New household creation, for example when people move out on their own, slowed to a virtual halt during the recession, but it has begun to grow once more. Even so, there are still roughly the same number of homeowners as there were in 2004, Mr. Crowe said.

“All of the net addition to households since 2004 has been in rentals,” he said.

There are still some two million doubled-up households waiting for the opportunity to split into two.

To cater to those younger customers, Camden and other apartment builders are developing smaller apartments in buildings with more lavish social spaces, Mr. Campo said.

Where once 60 percent of the units in a given complex had two bedrooms, now 80 percent have one bedroom, and some units are as small as 500 square feet, he said. Cities like New York and San Francisco are going even smaller, experimenting with microapartments between 200 and 300 square feet in an attempt to meet demand and curb rents.

Singles represent a large slice of new demand, said Doug Bibby, president of the National Multi Housing Council, which represents owners and developers. “They don’t want a single-family home with a picket fence in the suburbs,” he said.

In fact, Mr. Bibby said, married couples with children make up under one in four households today, and will be under one in five households by 2020. Experts estimate that rental growth will continue to drive construction for at least a couple of years, though those increases will be tamed a bit as more supply becomes available.

Andy McCulloch, the head of residential research at Green Street Advisors, a real estate analysis firm, said it was a misconception that growing momentum in the single-family housing market would hurt the rental market.

“If the single-family market gets better it could help jobs, it could help incomes and you could see rent continue to rise,” he said. Constraints on lending, Mr. McCulloch said, will also keep a lid on the number of new homeowners.

“If I was an apartment landlord, the only thing that would really freak me out from the buying side is the return of easy credit,” he said. “But that doesn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon.”

Daniel Cadis contributed reporting from Houston.

Announced on 07 December 2012  6:14  p.m. by Xavier de Souza Briggs

Tipping the scales in housing court (NYT Op-Ed)

New York Times -- OP-ED
November 29, 2012

Tipping the Scales in Housing Court

By MATTHEW DESMOND

Cambridge, Mass.

IT’S easy to tell who’s going to win in eviction court. On one side of the room sit the tenants: men in work uniforms, mothers with children in secondhand coats, confused and crowded together on hard benches. On the other side, often in a set-aside space, are not the landlords but their lawyers: dark suits doing crossword puzzles and joking with the bailiff as they casually wait for their cases to be called.

Millions of Americans face eviction every year. But legal aid to the poor, steadily starved since the Reagan years, has been decimated during the recession. The result? In many housing courts around the country, 90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys and 90 percent of tenants are not. This imbalance of power is as unfair as the solution is clear.

When tenants have lawyers, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically. Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court is a cost-effective social policy that would prevent homelessness and uphold our ideals of fundamental fairness.

Poor people cannot afford lawyers, and in nearly all civil cases they don’t have a right to one. In the 1963 landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court unanimously established the right to counsel for indigent defendants in criminal cases on the grounds that a fair trial was virtually impossible without a lawyer. Eighteen years later, the court heard the case of Abby Gail Lassiter, a poor black woman from North Carolina who appeared without counsel at a civil trial that resulted in her parental rights being erased. This time, a divided Supreme Court ruled that the right to appointed counsel was reserved for indigent litigants only when the loss of physical liberty was at stake.

Incarceration is a misery, but the outcomes of civil cases, as Ms. Lassiter learned, can be devastating, with stubbornly resilient consequences. Consider eviction’s fallout. Families forced from their homes often lose their possessions, too: furniture and clothes piled on the sidewalk or auctioned off by moving companies. Evicted families experience long stretches of homelessness, with kids bouncing between shelters or abandoned houses.

Sociological research affirms what anyone who teaches poor children knows: that residential instability is the enemy of school success. Evicted families end up in bad housing in bad neighborhoods because most landlords turn them away. Months and even years after being evicted, people experience more material hardship and higher levels of depression than peers who avoided eviction. Psychologists have identified eviction as a risk factor for suicide.

Our legal system extends the right to a state-appointed attorney to someone facing months or years of prison but not to someone facing months or years of homelessness. In recent years, the poor have watched their incomes flat-line or drop, while housing costs have soared and federal spending on low-income housing assistance has plummeted. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only one in four families who qualify for housing assistance get it. The rest devote huge chunks of their income — sometimes 80 or 90 percent — to rent. For these families, missing a rent payment is less the result of irresponsibility than of inevitability.

I’ve spent the last several years studying eviction. I lived for more than a year in some of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, shadowing evicted families and their landlords. Along the way, I saw hardworking landlords let some tenants slide when they missed payments or reluctantly evict families who had fallen behind. But I also saw landlords carry out retaliatory evictions against tenants who had reported housing problems, and watched some lie in court about what tenants had paid them. I met one landlord who hired heavies from outside the neighborhood to evict families and another who liked to remove the doors of tenants who hadn’t paid up.

Providing lawyers to tenants facing eviction would help curb these abuses and prevent families from being wrongly evicted. And it works. A recent randomized experiment in Quincy, Mass., involving 129 participants showed that two-thirds of tenants offered full representation avoided eviction, compared with one-third who were offered limited assistance like instructional clinics.

Yes, some victories came from raising technical objections, but many others came in cases that were not open and shut but would have been treated that way had tenants been forced to represent themselves.

Are some tenants freeloaders? Sure. But what about when a tenant withholds rent because the toilet hasn’t worked in three weeks? Or when a landlord serves you after noticing that you’re pregnant? The determining factor in many eviction proceedings — including those involving people who lose their jobs or fall ill — isn’t the merits of the case but whether tenants have someone on their side who understands the law.

The right to counsel in civil matters has been established around the world — not just in France and Sweden but also in Azerbaijan, India, Zambia and many other countries we like to think of as less progressive than we are.

And the price tag — a bundle, right? Not really. A program that ran from 2005 to 2008 in the South Bronx provided more than 1,300 families legal assistance and prevented eviction in 86 percent of cases. It cost around $450,000, but saved New York City more than $700,000 in estimated shelter costs.

The key point is that when we direct aid upstream in the form of a few hours of legal services we can lower costs downstream. We all pay when the state reacts to the many consequences of eviction by distributing public assistance, subsidizing health care or providing a lawyer to someone who hustled in the drug or sex trade to survive life on the street.

But this policy’s worth should not be determined by the amount of money it saves. There are moral costs we incur as a society when our citizens are denied equal protection under the law and wrongfully thrown from their homes by court order. Countless families are living perilously close to eviction and homelessness. The least we can do is give them a fighting chance to stay put.

Matthew Desmond, an assistant professor of sociology and social studies at Harvard, is writing a book on eviction and urban poverty.

Announced on 30 November 2012  7:24  a.m. by Xavier de Souza Briggs

Schedule for dry run and final team presentations

Dear students --

Here's the schedule below, including room locations. We did our best to accommodate your preferences and in most cases were able to grant your first or second choice of slots.

We'll be serving dinner and refreshments on both final presentation evenings, and we hope that as many of you as possible will attend, regardless of when your team will present. It's a celebratory, "serious fun" atmosphere and chance to learn from -- and ask about -- the wide array of interesting projects your classmates have been tackling.

-- Xav

DRY RUN PRESENTATIONS (Phil will coach)

12/3 (Room 9-450A)

5-5:30PM Katherine Mella and team
5:30-6 Roberto Ponce and team
6:30-7 Alicia Roualt and team

12/5 (Room 9-450B)

5-5:30PM Maggie Tishman and team
5:30-6 Anna Muessig and team
6-6:30 Courtney S. and Nene I.
6:30-7 Ava R. and Ashwin B.

FINAL PRESENTATIONS

(Phil and Xav will assess; dinner and refreshments served)

12/10 (Room 9-450A)

6-6:30 Katherine M. and team
6:30-7 Anna M. and team
7-7:30 Roberto and team

12/12 (Room 9-450A)

6-6:30PM Kari Milchman and team
6:30-7 Anne Marie Gray and team
7-7:20 Teresa C.
7:20-50 Courtney S. and Nene
7:50-8:20 Ava R. and Ashwin B.

Announced on 27 November 2012  4:46  p.m. by Xavier de Souza Briggs