Kathe Newman

The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City

Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-makers. Qualitative analysis based on interviews with community organisers and residents documents the continued political salience of displacement and reveals an increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist displacement in a policy climate emphasising selective deregulation and market-oriented social policy.

Cities Destroyed (Again) For Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis

In 2008, there will be at least 2.5 million new foreclosures in the United States. Record levels of mortgage delinquency, default, and foreclosure are causing widespread hardship in cities and suburbs across America, and causing repeated destabilization of global credit and investment markets. In this Forum, six housing specialists unravel the complex connections between urban geography, subprime lending, and foreclosure. Although a wide variety of view-points are represented, three common threads are evident. First, foreclosures are tightly linked to the lax underwriting standards and aggressive business practices of the subprime mortgage market. Second, the subprime-foreclosure linkage is a reflection of the steady deregulation of U.S. financial markets and the promotion of homeownership as the cornerstone of national housing policy. Third, deregulated mortgage market segmentation has created uneven new geographies of debt, risk, and default—superimposed atop existing landscapes of old-fashioned exclusionary discrimination. Low-income and racially marginalized neighborhoods, once redlined and excluded from mainstream credit markets, were at the center of the profitable wave of subprime abuse and equity extraction during the long housing boom, and are now at the center of the long, slowly unfolding catastrophe of the U.S. foreclosure crisis.

Neoliberal urban policy and new paths of neighborhood change in the American inner city

In this paper, we examine a new form of neighborhood change that appeared towards the end of the 1990s and early 2000s and explore its causes, processes, and effects. We suggest that a neoliberal policy regime focused on revitalizing cities through deconcentrating poverty and increasing low-income and moderate-income home-ownership has created a new funding and decision environment for the redevelopment of select inner-urban neighborhoods. The results have been an emerging process of neighborhood reinvestment marked by land-use and social transformations driven not by rent-seeking private developers but primarily by local political actors and community development organizations struggling in resource-poor environments. This neighborhood change process promotes benefits for those with a vested interest in neighborhood and urban revitalization and for a small group of moderate-income, minority homebuyers. The effect of these revitalization efforts on very-low-income residents who have lived in these neighborhoods through a period of severe disinvestment is uncertain. Despite the rhetoric of neighborhood revitalization, the reality of this reinvestment looks more like a new process of gentrification than a process of community-controlled redevelopment.

Geographies of mortgage market segmentation: the case of essex county, new jersey

Since the late 1980s, mutually reinforcing trends in economic growth, public policy, and community activism have fostered a wave of residential mortgage lending to ‘underserved markets’ in US cities. Yet many of the changes in housing finance that supported sustainable home ownership also lured a new generation of subprime and predatory credit institutions specialising in high-cost, high-risk lending. For many urban and minority neighbourhoods, the old problems of exclusionary redlining are now accompanied by new dilemmas of exploitive greenlining. This paper analyses the market penetration of subprime lending institutions and the subsequent concentration of mortgage ‘pre-foreclosures’ in low- and moderate-income, African American neighbourhoods. Focusing on Newark, NJ, and its surrounding suburbs, Gary Kings ecological inference technique and a series of logistic regression models are used to assess the role of borrower characteristics, institutional divisions, and neighbourhood context in the process of mortgage market segmentation. The evidence corroborates theories emphasising the dynamics of capital investment, financial services restructuring, and the economic incentives for racial-geographic targeting, and not the presumed credit deficiencies of urban and minority home owners. Unfortunately, the tidy empirical analysis offered here is overshadowed by the enormous societal experiment now underway across the US, as a wave of delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures undermines the belated minority home ownership gains achieved during the unprecedented boom of the 1990s.

Displacing New York

The capitalization of urban property markets intensifies the contradictions between housing as use-value affordability versus exchange-value asset accumulation, and exacerbates displacement pressures. Policies designed to deal with these contradictions—public housing and rent regulations—allow some low-income renters to resist displacement, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the resulting empirical configuration has been interpreted in ways that cast doubt on the extent of displacement, its causal links to gentrification, and the necessity of protective policies. In this paper we present an alternative interpretation, using New York City as a case study to analyze the spatial evolution of displacement pressures amidst the restructuring of an embattled yet vital municipal welfare state.

Expanding Civic Opportunity Urban Empowerment Zones

The authors report on the first year of the 1993 federal Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Communities Program (EZ) and its ability to expand community capacity in the six urban EZ areas. They hypothesize that expanded community capacity depends on the strength of participation and the development of networks. They find variation in capacity levels among sites and limited expansion of community capacity because mayors control the process, community organization roles are limited, and existing networks are reused. They conclude, however, that it is too early to assess the full EZ impact.

Go Public!: Using Publicly Available Data to Understand the Foreclosure Crisis

Problem: While mortgage foreclosures are devastating communities across the United States, few planners know how to access the data necessary to document the number of foreclosures, where they are located, how the problem has changed over time, or how many households are affected, in order to assess how foreclosures affect borrowers, renters, and communities. There is no national dataset with foreclosure information, and in many communities, this information is buried in county property records, state legal files, and property auction lists. Purpose: This article explains foreclosure as a process and describes how to use publicly available data to study foreclosure and inform outreach efforts. It shows how a collaborative effort among researchers and practitioners can produce useful data and analysis to reduce incidences of foreclosure. It concludes with suggestions for improving data access and quality. Methods: The main foreclosure data used in the illustrative examples in this article were gathered from foreclosure court records and enhanced with data from property sales and tax records, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, and foreclosure sale records. Results and conclusions: Although records on property foreclosures, real estate owned properties, and loan servicers are publicly available, accessing them, combining information from different records, and correcting mistakes to make them useful for analysis is time consuming and costly. Teams of researchers, public officials, and non-profits in a number of places, including one involving the author, have collaborated to build local foreclosure datasets using public data, producing accurate, property-level data that planners can use to guide policy, target direct outreach to at-risk borrowers and renters, and purchase distressed properties. Takeaway for practice: Public entities hold some of the best data available on the foreclosure crisis but, in most places, accessing it involves considerable time, effort, and money. When researchers and practitioners work collaboratively to access and analyze these data their joint efforts can transform data-sharing practices and institutions, facilitating wider access and use in the future. Research support: This research was supported by the Fund for New Jersey, NeighborWorks America, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the Michael J. and Susan Angelides Public Policy Research Fund, the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, Essex County, Hudson County/Jersey City, and Union County.

Reclaiming neighborhood from the inside out: Regionalism, globalization, and critical community development

ABSTRACT In this article, we argue the need for a critical turn in community development practice and research in the face of two scalar tensions in the existing academic literature and US community development policy. The first tension is the perceived ineffectiveness of neighborhood-based community development in the context of globalization despite the increasing interrelatedness of neighborhoods and globalization. The second tension emerges in a growing body of academic literature and policy action that privileges the region as the place from which to understand urban decline and to address issues that have historically been the concern of community development. These two tensions dominate community development discussions and often undermine community development politics and policy by contesting its relevance for multiscalar processes. Instead, we argue that neighborhoods are more important than ever because it is from the place of the neighborhood that it becomes possible to understand the multiscalar (global and local) processes that shape it.

Context and Risk: What You Find Depends on What and How You Ask

Libman, Fields and Saegert explore the relationship between health and foreclosure and offer a few important contributions. First, they consider a complex nuanced relationship where poor health and/or healthcare costs may contribute to foreclosure and the process of foreclosure may contribute to poor health. Like researchers at the Urban Institute (Manjarrez, Popkin & Guernsey 2007), who weren’t looking for a major storyline about health and housing, Libman, Fields and Saegert found one. It is not surprising, by any stretch of the imagination, that there is a relationship between housing and health. We might anticipate that poor health contributes to foreclosure and foreclosure contributes to poor health but there is little qualitative research that explores borrower experiences during the foreclosure crisis that might illuminate how this works. The authors’ observations contribute to a better understanding of the reality experienced in these communities of a multi-directional relationship rather than a uni-causal one. This article presents a more complex picture of real life experiences, of fear and dread and of energy spent trying to avoid foreclosure. It extends the experience to others in the home and into other spheres such as education. While some argue that homeowners in foreclosure benefit by staying in homes rentand care-free, this article suggests that many people are deeply connected to their homes and are not so free to walk away. The authors’ findings, and the foreclosure crisis that continues to unfold across the country, suggest the importance of expanding this research to explore the intersection of foreclosure and health for renters and borrowers (not only homeowners), their children and other family members, and communities and staff of the organizations that seek to help them. Experiences working with communities in New Jersey suggest many as yet unexplored questions and Libman, Fields and Saegert point us to them. Second, they consider complex processes that produced problems on both fronts – health and foreclosure. They avoid a tendency to attribute poor health and foreclosure to poor individual decision making and instead consider the systematic

Globalization of Finance and the Future of Home Mortgage Finance

The future of housing research should focus on how to better understand the current banking and finance system and how it relates to housing finance. Since the middle of the last century, the housing finance industry has changed as the financial system evolved from a traditional banking system, in which depository financial institutions intermediated credit between depositors and borrowers, into a modern banking system that intermediated local borrowers and global capital markets. In retrospect, the outlines of these changes are becoming increasing clear. The modern banking system has become increasingly privatized, it is woven into global capital markets, and financial institutions provide specialized banking and finance functions. This system has resolved the traditional banking system’s problem related to credit rationing but it has introduced new problems related to the oversupply of credit, the complexity and opacity of private market intermediation, and challenges for national regulators in a global financial world. The 1990s solidified regulatory, technological, and institutional changes into a modern banking system that connected borrowers with global credit markets and increased the volume of investment dollars for home mortgage lending. A set of changes made highvolume low-cost home loan origination possible and transformed housing finance from a system that rationed credit to one with plentiful credit. Automated underwriting and credit scoring and previous regulatory changes made risk-based pricing a reality. Technological innovations such as the Internet and increased computing capacity along with securitization made it possible to sell a variety of loan products through secondary markets. This modern banking system is more privatized, specialized, and differentially regulated than the traditional banking system, and it greatly expanded access to finance for many borrowers who lacked it in the past. All of this has had significant implications for housing, communities, and people in ways that we have not sufficiently understood. Unfortunately, it also culminated in foreclosure and subsequent financial crisis and increased property prices, which for some was a boon but for others has been far more challenging. Initial reports as the foreclosure calamity unfolded put the blame for the crisis on overeager borrowers and loan originators, but more recent research suggests that the problems were due to a systemic oversupply of loans required by the new financial processes. While once communities struggled to access capital, which produced the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), two pieces of federal legislation designed to increase access to