NC Lending Laws lend Model to a Nation in Crisis

Well we don’t see this too often, so when it’s written we should celebrate it:

"North Carolina’s progressive laws may become
a nation-wide model".

Think you misread that? Think again. That’s a quote from an article in the latest edition of BusinessWeek, regarding the need for stiffer predatory lending penalties to combat the current home foreclosure epidemic sweeping the country.

Predatory lending laws in NC have been strengthened with regularity since 1999, when groundbreaking and comprehensive predatory lending regulations for home loans were passed. In August, Governor Easley signed the North Carolina Home Loan Protection Act into law. The law bans penalties for borrowers who pay off their mortgages early and mandates lenders to verify income, and is also expected to limit the fees brokers collect for arranging certain high-rate mortgages. This most recent victory for North Carolina homeowners, and previous legislation that paved the way, are now the talk of national politicians eager to help the folks back home, more and more of whom are starting to experience a mortgage interest rate and fee explosion.

While the picture in North Carolina is less than rosy—foreclosure filings have jumped 39% in the past six months —it seems that thanks to a strong legislative stand we’re faring far better than the national average of 56%.

Predatory lending in the subprime mortgage market has resulted or will ultimately result in over 2.2 million foreclosures for American families in the coming years, costing homeowners as much as $164 billion, primarily in lost equity. The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) reports that 1 out of every 5 subprime loans issued in 2005-06 will end in foreclosure. Foreclosures will inordinately affect low-income communities and communities of color (currently African Americans are three times more likely to receive a subprime loan than whites), putting homeownership and the ability to build equity out of reach for yet another generation. Those who stand to benefit most from ownership are those who will be hit hardest.

Legislation recently introduced in Congress by NC Reps. Miller and Watt, among others, (H.R. 3915, called the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2007) would mirror current North Carolina law in its protection of future mortgage consumers and its confrontation of the predatory lending status quo. To support the current national movement (it’s facing opposition from groups like the Mortgage Banker's Association and could use your active support) or to read more about it, check out information on CRL’s website.

Housing Update 09.05.07

Last week, two important announcements were made about our nation’s economic progress and the mortgage lending / foreclosure crisis.

In the first, the American Community Survey (from the US Census Bureau) showed a couple of statistics that seemed to indicate that things are improving in that both the number of people working and median household income had risen. However, further analysis showed that what is actually happening is that more people are working per household, but they are on average earning less than last year (this grows even more when adjusted for inflation). Another disappointing stat showed that despite this increase in the labor force, the number of people without health insurance had risen. The grim reality, the economic “recovery” that started in 2001, has not produced gains for low and moderate income families. For more about this analysis, read the press release by the NC Justice Center in this Update.

In the second announcement, President Bush announced his response to the nation’s foreclosure crisis. You can read more about the analysis of his proposals, along with additional insight by Martin Eakes of the Center for Responsible Lending in today’s Update. There are several additional thoughts I hope to make in an Op-Ed this week as well.

One thing I hope to bring forward is that the state has a program that is well-positioned to respond NC’s foreclosure problem: the Home Protection Pilot Program. It offers mortgage assistance and housing counseling to homeowners who have lost their jobs, and has saved several hundred homes since its inception in 2004. The program could have been expanded to serve more counties, handle more issues than just job loss, and provide more housing counseling, but we could not get the NC General Assembly to even consider such an action. Instead, we had to work hard with several of our legislative allies, like Sen. Dorsett and Rep. Goforth, to keep the program from being cut. Hopefully, it will not take a dramatic worsening of this crisis to generate the kind of response from state legislators that is needed on this issue.


NC Housing News

Monthly Fair Housing Training Series
NC Housing Coalition invites you to attend a Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Property Managers Training. This training will focus on the rights and responsibilities of landlords and property managers under Fair Housing laws, including Reasonable Accommodations, and NC Landlord-Tenant Law.

Registration costs are $20 for NC Housing Coalition members and $30 for non-members. Registration is required, and closes a week before each event. For more information and to register, please click here.

Fair Housing for Affordable Housing DevelopersWe are pleased to announce the publication of Overcoming Municipal Barriers: a Guidebook for Affordable Housing Developers by Amy Curry and the Duke Law Community Enterprise Clinic.

We hope this guidebook helps builders and nonprofit organizations better understand their rights under fair housing law. We also hope that it leads to more successful challenges to communities that are discriminating against affordable housing by denying or delaying their approval. This month we will be printing 200 of these guidebooks for distribution; in the meantime, you can download a free copy in .PDF format by clicking here.

NC Housing Preservation Project
The goals of this project are twofold: to compile a complete list of all the subsidized rental units (including vouchers and PHA units) in the state, and to establish a “monitoring” network that will ensure that any units threatened with conversion or demolition can be preserved as affordable units. For more information on this project, visit the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s project website at www.preservationcatalog.org or please contact us at the NC Housing Coalition by emailing jniff@nchousing.org if you are interested in participating.


National Housing News
Click here for the latest in national housing news, courtesy of NLIHC and HAC.

To read the full Housing Update, click here. This will open an Adobe PDF document on our website.

Thanks for being a member of the NC Housing Coalition,


Chris Estes
Executive Director

Save the Date!

On October 12th, the NC Housing Coalition is co-sponsoring a conference with the UNC-CH Law School entitled "One People, One Nation? Housing and Social Justice: The Intersection of Race, Place, and Opportunity." This conference aims to invigorate a new dialogue among advocates, explore new approaches to housing solutions, identify structural dynamics that keep people spatially isolated by economics and race, increase public awareness of how housing problems impede numerous social justice goals, and discover avenues for actors, advocates, and academics to work together to advance the promises of "one people, one nation."


The conference will be held Friday, October 12, 2007, from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center at UNC-CH.

Click here for the Conference Brochure and here for the Registration Form.

Thank you for your support of the NC Housing Coalition and the many North Carolinians who need quality affordable housing in our state.

New Tools for Fair Housing

North Carolina Housing Coalition is pleased to announce two Fair Housing related news items:

We will be hosting Fair Housing and Reasonable Accommodations Trainings in September, October and November.

Overcoming Municipal Barriers: A Fair Housing Guide for NC's Affordable Housing Developers is now available.


Fair Housing Trainings
NC Housing Coalition invites you to attend a Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Property Managers Training.

This training will focus on the rights and responsibilities of landlords and property managers under Fair Housing laws, including Reasonable Accommodations, and NC Landlord-Tenant Law. This training is designed for landlords and property managers of developments that serve low- to moderate-income residents. Certificates of attendance are available.

Raleigh: September 14, 2007, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm in the Meeting Room at the RDU Airport Authority Building; 1000 Trade Drive, RDU Airport, NC 27623.

Asheville: October 26, 2007 , 9:00 am – 12:30 pm in the small conference room (209) at the Haynes Center at ABTCC Enka Campus; 1459 Sand Hill Rd., Candler, NC 28715.

Winterville: November 2, 2007 , 9:00 am – 12:30 pm in the Leslie Building Auditorium (Room 143) at Pitt Community College; 1986 Pitt Tech Rd., Winterville, NC 28590.
Registration costs are $20 for NC Housing Coalition members and $30 for non-members. Registration is required, and closes a week before each event.

For more information and to register, please contact jniff@nchousing.org.


Overcoming Municipal Barriers: A Fair Housing Guide for NC's Affordable Housing Developers
Despite producing some of the best examples of affordable housing in the country, those who build affordable housing, both for-profit and non-profit, still face considerable opposition from local governments across our state.

We believe that this opposition is based in misguided perceptions of what is being proposed and often driven by discriminatory stereotypes about race and class. It can also take the form of outdated stereotypes about design and economic impact based on the failed large-scale urban renewal developments of fifty or more years ago.

The Housing Coalition is committed to changing the perception of the public and local governments about what affordable housing looks like and what its impact in their community will be both by conducting a public information campaign and by challenging discriminatory development decisions in the courts.

We are pleased to present this guidebook by Amy Curry and the Duke Law School Community Enterprise Clinic and hope it helps builders and nonprofit organizations better understand their rights under fair housing law as developers of affordable homes. We also hope that it leads to more successful challenges to communities that are discriminating against affordable housing by denying or delaying their approval.

This guide is available for download from our website and will soon be available in hard copy. To download a .PDF copy, please visit our website: www.nchousing.org.

Housing Update 8-22-07

While the NC Legislature has gone home, there is still a great deal to do as we shift gears to speaking opportunities and ways to get involved in the many discussions happening around our state that are connected to housing issues.

Last week, I enjoyed the opportunity to spend part of day with Ryan Miller from Sen. Dole’s staff in Washington. Ryan was in NC on a week long tour of housing developments across the state on an itinerary arranged by Denise Neunaber of the NC Coalition to End Homelessness.

We spent the morning showing off housing built by CASA in Raleigh as models for housing for persons with disabilities. Thanks to Debra King and her staff from CASA, who did a great job talking about how the various sources of funding are needed to produce these quality independent living opportunities. We hope to bring Sen Dole on as a co-sponsor of the National Housing Trust Fund bill when it is introduced in the Senate in the coming weeks. Thanks to Denise for all of her work arranging Ryan's visits and to Ryan for taking time to come see all the great examples of affordable housing in our state.

Later that day, I headed down to Fayetteville to speak to the NC Association of County Commissioners on affordable housing issues. This was an opportunity to talk about the impact the lack of affordable housing has on both their spending in human services (because of the increased costs serving persons with disabilities in particular) and their difficulty in hiring needed public employees in high land costs areas. It was also great to be speaking alongside Sue Perry-Cole from the CDC Association who talked about their report looking at workforce housing issues in Brunswick County. Thanks to Anthony Allen from the Commissioners Association for inviting me to speak.

NC Housing News

Monthly Fair Housing Training Series to begin in September

NC Housing Coalition invites you to attend a Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Property Managers Training. This training will focus on the rights and responsibilities of landlords and property managers under Fair Housing laws, including Reasonable Accommodations, and NC Landlord-Tenant Law.

This training is designed for landlords and property managers of developments that serve low to moderate income residents. Certificates of attendance are available.

Raleigh: September 14, 2007, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm in the Meeting Room at the RDU Airport Authority Building; 1000 Trade Drive, RDU Airport, NC 27623.

Registration costs are $20 for NC Housing Coalition members and $30 for non-members. Registration is required, and closes a week before each event. For more information and to register, please click here. Trainings are scheduled for Asheville in October and Winterville in November with more to come in other parts of the state in 2008.

NC Housing Preservation Project

We spend a lot of time here focused on increasing resources for the increased production of new quality affordable housing in our state. Another very important issue is the preservation of the affordable housing stock already in place.

Two weeks ago we held the first meeting of interested parties in the NC Housing Preservation Project at the NC Housing Finance Agency. The goals of the project are twofold: to compile a complete list of all the subsidized rental units (including vouchers and PHA units) in the state, and to establish a “monitoring” network that will ensure that any units threatened with conversion or demolition can be preserved as affordable units.

If you are interested in being a part of such a preservation effort, please contact us at the NC Housing Coalition by emailing jniff@nchousing.org.

National Housing News

Click here for the latest in national housing news, courtesy of NLIHC and HAC.

2007 NC Legislative Recap

It was a difficult and sometimes tumultuous legislative session with the conviction and sentencing of the Speaker of the House, the resignation of another legislator under allegations of improper conduct, and a significant battle over how to pay for Medicaid relief for counties and the challenges of a fast growing state.

There was a significant coalition formed around addressing the state’s infrastructure needs, and we chose to join the Campaign for Housing Carolina to that effort. While not ultimately successful in generating all of the funding requested for the different issues (including housing), the Partnership for NC’s Future did elevate affordable housing as an important infrastructure issue to the public and the General Assembly.

As noted in last week’s Housing Update, the final budget agreement demonstrates that the leadership of the House and Senate do not yet see housing issues as important as other growth/infrastructure issues. However, we had significant support among House and Senate members for increasing the Housing Trust Fund during the Committee process, and have a good base of legislative champions to build upon in the next session.

While the Housing Trust Fund ultimately received less funding than the year previously for the first time in three years, it did receive an increase in its recurring appropriation for the first time since securing the initial $3 million many years ago. We were disappointed to see a cut in the Housing 400 program, but are hopeful with two years of demonstrated impact we increase funding next year. We advocated hard for an expansion in the Home Protection Pilot program and for its funding to shift to recurring but were unable to do so because of requested cuts to Committee budgets.

A quick recap of the funding results the NC Housing Coalition worked on:
Recurring (R) funding means it will be present in the next budget going forward. Non-recurring (NR) means the funding is one-time only for this particular budget.

--Operating Subsidy for Housing 400 Initiative (affordable accessible rental units targeted to persons with disabilities) - $3.5M (Recurring) –’07 & $4.5M (R) –‘08

--NC Housing Trust Fund - $5M (R) increase for total of $8M (R) & $7.5M (Non-Recurring) for Housing 400 Initiative - TOTAL - $15.5M

--Home Protection Pilot Program - $1.5M (NR)


NCHC also worked to support funding for the items below as part of its legislative advocacy:
3 positions with HHS to staff Housing & Homelessness work - $248,341 (R)
2 Migrant Housing Inspectors added - $124,000 (R)
HOME Match reduced by $142,528
Landloss Prevention Project - $350,000 (R)
NC Community Development Initiative - $3M (R)
NC Association of CDCs - $750,000 (R)
NC Institute of Minority Economic Development - $1.5M (R)
NC Minority Support Center - $3M (R)

Important Housing Bills that Passed:
These bills were all supported by the NC Housing Coalition. We have highlighted the organizations who led the advocacy efforts and are most responsible for their passage. Click on the link to view each bill.

SB 1466 “Migrant Housing Health/Safety”

Presented to the Governor 7/24/07

This bill was the result of several years work by the Farmworker Advocacy Network and brings important improvements to farmworker housing standards as the NCDOL’s inspection and enforcement processes. Congratulations to FAN and the NC Justice Center for all of their work on getting this bill through!



HB 313 “Identify Loan Originator”
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2007&BillID=H313

Signed by the Governor 7/5/07

Requires the name of the loan originator, if any, to appear on the deed of trust. The rational behind the legislation was that it should make it easier to discover bad actors in the market if the originators name is on the deed of trust. While not led by consumer advocates, this bill was supported by the advocacy community and is seen as a positive step in consumer protection.


HB 817 “Residential Mortgage Fraud Act”

Signed by the Governor 7/4/07

Creates a new definition of Residential Mortgage Fraud intended to make it easier to bring cases for fraud related to home mortgages. While not led by advocates this bill was supported by the advocacy community and is seen as a positive step in reducing fraud and foreclosures.


HB 947 “NC Foreclosure / Landlord Tenant Laws”

Presented to the Governor 8/1/07

This legislation protects tenants who live in a property going through foreclosure. Currently, there is no requirement that tenants be informed that a foreclosure is pending. HB 947 requires that the tenant receive the notice of a foreclosure sale, which will describe the “order for possession” process and inform the tenant that she may terminate her rental agreement. This bill also allows the tenant to terminate their lease by giving proper written notice to the landlord. Congratulations to Bill Rowe from the NC Justice Center for his success on this bill.


HB 1374 “Protect Homeowners” / Reduce Foreclosure”

Presented to the Governor 8/1/07

This legislation is designed to help North Carolina Home Owners avoid foreclosure by making the foreclosure process fairer and by helping protect homeowners from abusive mortgage loan servicing companies that misapply mortgage payments, charge illegal fees, and mishandle escrow accounts on home loans. The legislation requires loan servicers to notify homeowners of any fees charged on the loan and provide a full accounting of how payments are handled and fees accessed. HB 1374 also makes the foreclosure process fairer by requiring servicers to give a detailed accounting of the sums claimed to be owed at foreclosure and by giving homeowners better information about their rights in the foreclosure process. Finally, the legislation reverses two recent NC Supreme Court decisions that make it harder for borrowers to sue for illegal lending practices. Congratulations to Al Ripley from the NC Justice Center for his success on this bill.


HB 1817 “Protect Consumers / Covered Loans”

Presented to the Governor 8/2/07

This legislation is designed to protect North Carolinians from predatory mortgage lending practices that increase foreclosure. The legislation improves existing NC predatory lending laws by limiting broker fees that encourage brokers to “steer” borrowers into more expensive, higher rate, home loans, and, improves the duties mortgage brokers owe their clients. The legislation creates new borrower protections intended to protect borrowers from abusive adjustable rate mortgage loans and other lending practices that have contributed to the number of loans being foreclosed on today. These additional protections include a prohibition on prepayment penalties and a requirement that lenders determine that the borrower has the ability to repay the loan. Finally, the legislation strengthens the powers of the Commissioner of Banks. Congratulations to the Center for Responsible Lending for their success on this important bill.


HB 1499 “Increase Homestead Income Limit to 25K”

Presented to Governor 8/2/07

Increases eligibility for NC’s property tax homestead exclusion from $18,000 to $25,000 annual income and creates a “circuit breaker” for eligible tax payers where they can defer taxes greater than 4% of their income or 5% of their income if they have incomes between $25,000 and $37,500. This is an important bill to protect low and fixed income property owners in areas with rising property tax rates. Congratulations to AARP and the NC Justice Center for their success on this bill.



Bills that did not Pass but are Eligible next Session in 2008:

The NC Housing Coalition worked hard on all of these bills with Bill Rowe from the NC Justice Center and other allies where noted. While we were not successful in getting them through the General Assembly, all are eligible for the short session next spring. Click on the link to view each bill.

S 1507 “Housing Conditions/Inspections”

Status: Passed Senate and pending in House, eligible for the short session in 2008.

Establishes statewide standards for rental housing and targeted procedures for housing inspections by local governments. We worked very hard on this bill with the NC Justice Center, NC Association of Realtors, and NC Apartment Association. The bill was amended to ensure it would not interfere with important programs like the City of Greensboro’s but was blocked in the end by the NC League of Municipalities. We expect to bring this back again in the short session.




H 1700 “Prevent Displacement of Manufactured Homes”

Status: Pending in House, eligible for the short session in 2008.

Requires that residents of manufactured home parks be given a “right of first refusal” to make an offer to buy a park that is about to be sold. Also provides a tax credit to an owner who sells a manufactured home park to the residents. This is a very important bill to assist with our housing preservation strategy of converting manufactured home communities to tenant-owned or nonprofit owned communities. We are very hopeful for success in 2008 and look forward to working with Adam Rust and Peter Skillern from CRA-NC and other allies on this bill.



S 334 Fair Housing Act Amendment

Status: Pending in Senate, eligible for the short session in 2008.

Amends NC’s Fair Housing Statute to prohibit discrimination against households with members who are disabled or over age 62 solely because they receive housing assistance. We got through one committee in the Senate but were bogged down in the Senate Appropriations Committee with strong opposition at the end from the NC Apartment Association. We expect to again partner with a strong array of allies and fight for this bill again next session. Thanks especially to the Julia Leggett from the Alliance of Disability Advocates and Mary Bethel from AARP for their work with us on this bill.


H 1134 "Cleanup of Abandoned Manufactured Homes"

Status: Pending in the House, eligible for short session in 2008.

This bill will create a fund to clean up abandoned manufactured homes which are a significant cost to community redevelopment or manufactured park preservation efforts. The advocacy effort for this bill has been led by Peter Skillern of CRA-NC and has strong support. The manufactured housing industry has opposed the fee that would be added to generate the clean up fund which has kept the bill from moving forward. However at the end of the session S 1492 passed which adds funds to the NC Solid Waste Management Trustfund that can be used for clean up of abandoned manufactured homes. This appears to clear the funding barrier and we expect this bill to move successfully next session. Thanks to Peter Skillern and CRA-NC for all of there work on this bill.



S 1309 “Fairness in Property Tax Values/Lien on Manufactured Housing”

Status: Passed Senate and pending in House, eligible for the short session in 2008.

This is especially important to affordable rental properties developed with Federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits. This would change the local property tax valuation from market rate to account for the rent restrictions in these developments. This bill (1) requires that rent and income restrictions on real property must be taken into account in determining the valuation of the property for tax purposes and (2) requires that a lien on manufactured housing listed as personal property shall attach to the manufactured home and to all real property of the tax payer. We are very hopeful that this bill will be successful in the next session with positive preliminary talks with the NC Association of County Commissioners and strong interest of advocacy from LIHTC developers.



Conclusion
Thank you for all of your efforts in working with us on these issues. As a Coalition we are only as strong as our membership and our ability to generate contacts to legislators in support of important housing issues. When you take the time to contact your legislator you make a real difference in elevating issues of affordable housing and increase our opportunities for success in policy-making.

A special thank you to Bill Rowe from the NC Justice Center who worked tirelessly on the multiple issues noted above. Bill is a tremendous resource for affordable housing and social justice issues in general. We are grateful to have him working with us and acknowledge how central he is to our state legislative efforts.

Now that the state legislative session has ended, we will shift to monthly Legislative Updates on Federal issues.

Housing Update 8-07-07

The NC General Assembly has gone home after passing a budget for the next two years and a number of important bills. However, for the first time in several years, very little happened that was beneficial for affordable housing. For the first time in three years, the Housing Trust Fund received less than it had in the previous year. This was especially painful given that $100 million was appropriated to the NC Rural Center for water/sewer and the NC Clean Water Management Trust Fund for open space preservation. It is clearer than ever that we have much more work to do across the whole spectrum of affordable housing advocates, developers, lenders, managers, and residents to convince the leadership in the House and Senate to invest more funds in affordable housing production through the Housing Trust Fund.

The good news is that all of the bills we worked on will be back next year in the short session along with our effort to get the NC Housing Trust Fund (NC’s largest state appropriated source for affordable housing production) to $50 million a year.

Next week we will provide a full synopsis of the legislative session in our final Legislative Update.

NC Housing News - NC Housing Preservation Project
We spend a lot of time here focused on increasing resources for the increased production of new quality affordable housing in our state. Another very important issue is the preservation of the affordable housing stock already in place.

Two week’s ago we held the first meeting of interested parties in the NC Housing Preservation Project at the NC Housing Finance Agency. The goals of the project are twofold: to compile a complete list of all the subsidized rental units (including vouchers and PHA units) in the state, and to establish a “monitoring” network that will ensure that any units threatened with conversion or demolition can be preserved as affordable units.

If you are interested in being a part of such a preservation effort, please contact us at the NC Housing Coalition.

National Housing News - Housing Trust Fund Bill moves to House Floor!
For the first time since the campaign began in 2001, legislation to establish a National Housing Trust Fund moved out of committee. H.R. 2895 directs funds from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration into a National Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Thus, as with the best of state and local housing trust funds, the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund does not depend on annual appropriations. The combined amount estimated to be in the Fund for the first year is $800 million to $1 billion.

As has been the primary goal of the National Housing Trust Fund Campaign since its onset, the bill focuses on the production and preservation of rental housing that is affordable for extremely low income (ELI or 30% AMI or less) families. Three-quarters (75%) of the Fund must be used for ELI families, with 30% of the total going to even poorer families, those whose income is no more that the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit level. The remaining 25% of the Fund can go to households with incomes up to 60% AMI, until the Fund reaches $2 billion a year. After that threshold is passed, 25% of the Fund can be used for households with incomes up to 80% AMI. For complete details on the bill's provisions, go to www.nhtf.org.

House Passes Small PHA Bill
On July 30, the House of Representatives passed legislation to exempt certain small public housing agencies (PHAs) from some of the requirements of the annual PHA plan. The bill, H.R. 3067, applies to housing agencies that administer less than a combined total of 250 public housing and voucher units. In addition, the PHAs cannot be designated as troubled under the public housing or voucher assessment scorings. The bill would apply to about 58% of all PHAs, which administer about 6% of all public housing and voucher units.

The small PHAs covered by the bill would have to submit an annual civil rights certification to HUD, establish resident advisory boards (RABs), consult with the RABs, consider the RABs’ recommendations, and hold public hearings regarding the annual hearing to discuss the goals, objectives and policies of the PHA and any changes to them, and invite public comment.

National Housing News

Striking Racial Disparities in High-Cost Lending

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) released a report this month examining racial disparities in high-cost lending and found that the differences in the number of high-cost loans received by minorities and whites are substantial and persist across all income levels. The authors note that being middle income does not inoculate minority borrowers from receiving high-cost loans; to the contrary, differences widen as income levels increase.

The NCRC finds that in 2005, low-income African Americans were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost loans as whites in 70 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs).

To address these disparities, the report suggests strengthening the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to encourage more prime and market-rate lending to minorities, and increasing federal and state enforcement of anti-predatory and fair lending regulations. The full report can be found here.

Housing Update--Take Action!

While there are still a number of bills we are working on in hopes of passage before the legislature leaves town, the most critical issue we need your support on is increasing the appropriation to the NC Housing Trust Fund.

Right now the Trust Fund stands to get less than last year’s appropriation mainly due to a cut in the support for the Housing 400 Initiative. We know there is a significant amount of discretionary spending that happens outside of the Committee structure, especially in the final days of the budget negotiations.

Lawmakers in the leadership of both the House and Senate can press their priorities and easily secure more funding for budget items. We believe that an additional $10 million is possible for the Trust Fund if you can help us generate enough pressure on those negotiating the budget.

Campaign for Housing Carolina
Click on the Alerts below to send an email message to the leadership of the House and Senate, asking them to find more money for the Housing Trust Fund as they finalize the state budget.

Alert: Tell the House Leadership to Support the NC Housing Trust Fund.
Take Action.

Alert: Tell the Senate Leadership to Support the NC Housing Trust Fund.
Take Action.

Now is the time to call or email the General Assembly in support of affordable housing!

NC Housing Preservation Project – Friday, July 27th at 1:00
We spend a lot of time here focused on increasing resources for the increased production of new quality affordable housing in our state. Another very important issue is the preservation of the affordable housing stock already in place.

If you are interested in this issue, I invite you to join in a conversation with us on this Friday, July 27th from 1:00-3:00 at the NC Housing Finance Agency. The NC Housing Preservation Project is a collaborative effort of the NC Housing Coalition, the NC Housing Finance Agency, Socialserve.com, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The goal of this effort is to create a catalog of the existing affordable housing stock in NC and to create a “monitoring” network that will keep us informed when stock is vulnerable for loss or conversion (with the hoped for goal of convening partners to preserve its long-term affordability). For those of you who cannot make it to Raleigh, there is a call-in number. Dial-in Number (866) 878-4191. Conference Code 2289317.

Thanks for being a member of the NC Housing Coalition,

Chris Estes
Executive Director

Senate says Yes to Improved Migrant Housing

By a vote of 48-0, the Migrant Housing Health/Safety Bill (S1466) met with resounding approval on the Senate floor. The Bill now moves to Governor Easley's desk for approval and a signature!

Migrant Housing Bill Migrates Toward Passage

"North Carolina has the fifth largest migrant farmworker population in the country. Many workers live in housing that’s owned by the farmers they work for, and it’s not unusual for that housing to be shoddy. In the worst cases, migrants don’t have flush toilets and are without kitchens. But a bill making its way through the legislature seeks to improve those conditions."--Jessica Jones, WUNC.

Senate Bill 1466- Migrant Housing/Health/Safety passed the House! It now moves to the Senate TODAY for concurrence, and if successful, to the Governor’s desk to be signed into law. This legislation will improve Department of Labor inspection and enforcement for farmworker housing, bringing much needed improvements to the standard of living of migrant workers in NC.

To hear the WUNC broadcast on migrant housing legislation, aired earlier today, click here.

Congratulations to the Farmworker Advocacy Network and the NC Justice Center who worked for over two years for its passage!