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
