Housing Starts: Hope in West Baltimore | Invisible Homeless Children | New Bronx Housing

(credit: The New York Times).

1. North Avenue Gateway apartments build hope in West Baltimore. About 60 percent of Baltimore renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing and 37 percent spend more than half, according to a September working paper by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and the John Hopkins University’s Institute for Policy Studies. [The Baltimore Sun – 12/02/13]
2. Invisible child: Dasani’s homeless life. Long before Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rose to power by denouncing the city’s inequality, children like Dasani were being pushed further into the margins, and not just in New York. Cities across the nation have become flash points of polarization, as one population has bounced back from the recession while another continues to struggle. One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania. [The New York Times – 12/09/13]
3. A derelict former Bronx brownfield will be reborn as affordable senior citizen housing. A new development meant for low-income pensioners has broken ground in Morris Heights, promising to turn a derelict patch of overgrown grass into a badly needed asset. The West Tremont Senior Residences will provide affordable housing for seniors on the remediated site of a former brownfield. [New York Daily News – 12/08/13]
4. NYC’s business incentives face skepticism from de Blasio: taxes.  In the twilight of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure, a New York agency will vote next week to give developers $120 million in tax breaks for two of his signature projects: a new district of offices, apartments and shops on the far west side of Manhattan, and a hotel and mall in a Queens neighborhood filled with auto shops and junkyards. [Bloomberg News – 12/06/13]
5. Why it’s harder to move up in America’s segregated cities. Economic mobility - the ability to work hard and get ahead - has long been the cornerstone of the American Dream. But it’s becoming harder and harder for Americans to pull themselves up the economic ladder. An influential report this past summer from Harvard and Berkeley economists at The Equality of Opportunity Project found economic mobility varied widely across the country. Summarizing the key results of the study, the New York Times headline neatly explained: ‘In climbing income ladder, location matters.’ Children from post-industrial metros like San Jose, Seattle, or Boston were twice as likely jump from the bottom income quintile to the top as kids growing up in Sunbelt or Midwestern manufacturing cities. [The Atlantic Cities – 12/04/13]
6. How 60 years of progressive organizing history is shaping the short-term rental market.  Curbed Los Angeles reports that the Venice Neighborhood Council has voted down a resolution that would have asked the area’s city councilmember to dig into the legal particulars around short-term housing rentals. That’s music to the ears of Airbnb, the online rental platform whose thousand-plus active rentals in Venice are what brought the beach community’s attention to the fact that city rules around vacation rentals are messy and confusing. [Next City – 12/02/13]
7. TF Cornerstone to build 1,200 Hunter’s Point apartments. New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas announced that TF Cornerstone would work with the non-profit for seniors, Selfhelp, to build two high-rises with 1,193 new apartments. Some 796 apartments will be affordable, with 100 of those will be reserved for low-income senior citizens. The remainder will be market-rate. [Real Estate Weekly – 12/05/13]
8. NYCHA hedges bet on finishing apartment fixes by 2014. The city Housing Authority Thursday backed away from its promise to eliminate its huge backlog of apartment repairs by year’s end. Last January, Mayor Bloomberg stood at a public housing development in Harlem and vowed to erase NYCHA’s outrageous inventory of 420,000 repair requests by Dec. 31. [New York Daily News – 12/06/13]
9. Soaring rents are putting many families in peril. Rapidly rising rents in Massachusetts and across the country are making housing unaffordable for a significant share of families and pushing many into homelessness, according to a study released Monday by Harvard University.  Massachusetts has the sixth-highest median rent in the nation as the supply of rental housing has failed to keep up with the surge in renters following the recent housing collapse and foreclosure crisis, according to the study from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. More than one in four renters here and nationally must spend more than half their income on their housing, a level the report described as unimaginable just a decade ago. [The Boston Globe – 12/09/13]
10. With new formula, an official helped unmask the face of poverty in New York. Over and over again, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has hammered it home: Forty-six percent of New Yorkers are poor or nearly poor. It is his mantra, the figure he holds up as proof that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has failed nearly half of his citizens. Yet the man who came up with that statistic is no Democratic operative. He is a wry, bespectacled Bloomberg administration official who is far more familiar with complex statistical methodologies than with rough-and-tumble political brawling. His name is Mark K. Levitan, and he is Mr. Bloomberg’s director of poverty research. Over the past five years, he has completely transformed how New York City measures poverty. [The New York Times – 12/08/13]