On the streets we two pass.
I do not know you.
I did not see
if you are -
fat/thin,
dark/fair
young/old.
If we should pass again
within the hour,
I would not know it.
Yet -
I am committed to
love you.
You are part of my city,
my universe, my being.
If you were not here
to pass me by,
a piece would be missing
from my jigsaw-puzzle day.
-Mararet Tsuda
Midwest HFAs Focus on Foreclosures
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • May 2008
...
In March, The Model Group finished construction on Magnolia Heights, an 18-building, 98-unit scattered site redevelopment in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. All units were Sec. 8 properties, and the work was done in conjunction with 42 market-rate condominiums that The Model Group was renovating in the same neighborhood.
“As the neighborhood started to gentrify we saw that the affordable housing stock was at risk,” Smith said. “We were able to use LIHTCs as an economic stimulus tool for the neighborhood and partner with some local community development corporations (3CDC) to do market-rate condos at the same time.”
Magnolia Heights was financed with $10 million in LIHTC equity and $2.3 million in historic tax credits. ...
The Model Group owned all 98 units in Magnolia Heights. But a scattered-site development of foreclosed properties is a more challenging proposition. Developers would need to negotiate with many different lenders to get the units out of foreclosure— basically developing one unit at a time—and some would likely have to be bought outright.
“The best thing would be if the city were to foreclose on those properties and somehow get them back through a landbank process,” said Jack Kukura, OCCH’s chief of acquisitions. Such a land bank, a fund which the city or county could use to buy foreclosed properties, could make it easier for developers to execute a scattered- site redevelopment of abandoned homes.
Cleveland:
Ground zero for Ohio’s foreclosure problems is Cuyahoga County, where county Treasurer Jim Rokakis is working on a different kind of land-bank proposal. Cuyahoga County had about 15,500 foreclosure filings in 2007, up from around 13,500 the year before. The county is on track to see another 15,000-plus foreclosure filings again in 2008. And the foreclosure crisis has spread out to Cleveland suburbs like Euclid and Cleveland Heights, which contain about 1,200 and 900 foreclosed vacant properties, respectively.
Until recently, Ohio was one of only two states ... that had no regulatory oversight of the appraisal industry...
Cuyahoga County is hoping to stop the blight by creating a local land bank that would allow it to purchase vacant properties for demolition. “We’ve got 10,000 properties that need to be demolished,” Rokakis said. “They’ve been gutted, stripped, and vandalized, and we have to get them down.”
The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture...
Why all the worry about what’s cool? ...In many ways it’s a conservative approach to building communities, which probably accounts for its not being in fashion.
....
... “there’s no indication that the system of building in this country is even dented.” In other words, sprawl still reigns, and so do the sundry forms of architectural dysfunction afflicting the nation’s public realm. The New Urbanists have changed the conversation, but they haven’t changed the world. At least, not yet.
.....
Modernist construction... is typically a matter of reduced up-front construction costs and elevated maintenance costs. (It’s pretty much the same story in the subdivisions, where construction of ordinary tract houses and McMansions alike has become increasingly shoddy.) New Urbanists ... are entirely correct to speak of the ... solidly crafted, and enduring classical architecture as “frugal.” Truly frugal and indeed “sustainable” architecture involves making buildings that people will love for many years to come.
If the New Urbanists are to fulfill their movement’s vast potential as a force for cultural renewal, though, they must do a better job of addressing the public.
...(NUrbanists are) indifferent to the ways in which sprawl is deeply rooted in the American experience, especially the postwar experience of fabulous material progress. The supercilious attitude ....toward the American way of life—which sprawl has epitomized for some time, like it or not—is easily taken for upper-middle-class snobbery. This simply reinforces the New Urbanists’ status as a yuppie cult.
....
...New Urbanists need to focus on a vision that supports the resurgence of an architectural culture—which is precisely what we haven’t got now. Sprawl, generally speaking, is a utilitarian phenomenon with minimal artistic value. It does not involve vision. Its practical advantages, as embraced by millions of Americans, are real, but from a design standpoint it represents unculture...
...As for sprawl, you don’t have to be losing sleep over rising sea levels to regard it as a deeply problematic habitat, or even an ecologically wasteful and objectionable one.
.... Our system... takes no account of the developer of vision who looks beyond the investment cycle to build on the best of our civic-art heritage...
...New Urbanism should not operate as a top-down phenomenon, but as a locally oriented movement that builds from the bottom up. Even if it became politically feasible, attempts to mainstream New Urbanism by bureaucratic diktat...would simply turn New Urbanism into mass-market kitsch...
... building a community cannot be a libertarian exercise... you would need a founder—a leader ... Such a leader would have the guts to scorn the bureaucratic minutiae of “process” politics and stake his authority and prestige on a principled judgment: “This is how we should build here.” Grounded in vision and culture, such leadership could build a community for future generations informed by the noble achievements of the past. ...
The New Urbanists... need to... focus on the formidable task of cultivating political leaders across the ideological spectrum who have the gumption to redeem the nation’s urban landscape—one community at a time.
Family Sunday, this Sunday, April 27, 1-4 pm
Sara M. & Patricia A. Vance Education Center: The UnMuseum®
April's Family Sunday celebrates a new UnMuseum® installation: The Colors in My Life / El color en mi vida by Chilean-born artist Trinidad Mac-Auliffe.
Experience an interactive lesson on color theory with Mac-Auliffe and put your knowledge to work.
Younger children will mix their own colors to finger paint.
Older children will design landscapes and portraits in the colors that they see in the world and themselves.
Enjoy refreshments and a colorful cake courtesy of Take the Cake.
Members: Free. Nonmembers: CAC admission. Space is limited.
Please RSVP with Andrea Blake: 513 345 8434 or ablake at cacmail dot org
Family Sunday is where CAC families use current and upcoming exhibitions to inspire learning and creativity through guided artmaking activities. This program is designed for children ages 5-105.
Polgar and her two younger sisters .... were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, who sought to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. The father also taught his three daughters Esperanto.
...At a recent auction of foreclosed homes north of Washington, in the Maryland suburbs, there weren't many takers. All of the addresses are far from downtown, and average commute times are among the highest in the nation.
...Inside the city, median home prices are actually up 3.5 percent from a year ago.
...The longer the commute, the steeper the drop in prices.
....buyers are now asking different questions: "What is the cost of gasoline? What is the cost of my time?"
....making a correlation between housing prices and transit proximity and then leaping to conclusions about gas prices is a bit of a stretch. It’s just too easy, and the most obvious result of a gas price crunch would be a _huge_ increase in the purchase of small cars. Buying a new car is much easier than moving!
Are the areas around transit tend to be more heavily dominated by rental housing? Is the rental market more insulated from foreclosures than owner-occupied market? Are there other links between owner and renter occupied housing that might be playing into this? What about the sort of employment people in urban cores have, compared to suburbanites? Are their key industries doing better or worse? Is transit ridership up or down?
What about cities with nice urban areas and inferior public transit? Are they seeing the same pattern…larger real estate price declines in the suburbs?
My guess is demographics and shifts of perception are _much_ bigger factors than gas prices. People in my parents’ cohort who lived through the ‘67 riots wouldn’t even consider moving into a big city, while none of my peers are particularly keen on moving out to the suburbs.
....folks ... push the ideology of homeownership as an end itself. They insist on lavish government subsidies, even in situations where homeownership is not a good solution for the people affected.
....If a homeowner takes out a 7 percent mortgage ...pays 1 percent of the value in property tax each year, and another 1 percent for insurance and maintenance, then ownership costs are equal to 9 percent of the sale price. If the house sells for 20 times annual rent, then this family is paying 80 percent more in housing costs as homeowners each year than they would pay as renters. If the house was selling for 25 times the annual rent, then the family would be paying 125 percent more as homeowners than they would as renters.
...Incredibly, instead of acknowledging their mistake, the homeownership ideologues want the government to throw even more money at homeownership. (The money is more likely to end up with bankers than homeowners, as I have argued elsewhere.)
The opportunity to see and hear other people in a city ... offer(s) valuable information about the surrounding social environment...
This is especially true in connection with the social development of children, which is largely based on observations of the surrounding social environment, but all of us need to be kept up to date about the surrounding world in order to function in social context.
Through the mass media we are informed about the larger, more sensational world events, but by being with others we learn about the more common but equally important detail. We discover how others work, behave, and dress, and we obtain knowledge about the people we work with, live with, and so forth. By means of all this information, we establish a confidential relationship with the world around us. A person we have often met on the street becomes a person we "know".
In addition to imparting information about the social world outside, the opportunity to see and hear other people can also provide ideas and inspiration for action.
We are inspired by seeing others in action. Children, for example, see other children at play and get the urge to join in, or they get ideas for new games by watching other children or adults.
The trend from living to lifeless cities and residential areas that has accompanied industrialization, segregation of various city functions, and reliance on the automobile also has caused cities to become duller and more monotonous. This points up another important need, namely the need for stimulation:
Experiencing other people represents a particularly colorful and attractive opportunity for stimulation. Compared with experiencing buildings and other inanimate objects, experiencing people, who speak and move about, offers a wealth of sensual variation. No moment is like the previous or the following when people circulate among people. The number of new situations and new stimuli is limitless. Furthermore, it concerns the most important subject in life: people.
Living in cities, therefore, ones in which people can interact with one another, are always stimulating because they are rich in experiences, in contrast to lifeless cities, which can scarcely avoid being poor in experiences and thus dull, no matter how many colors and variations of shape in buildings are introduced.
....
Wherever there are people ... it is generally true that people and human activities attract other people. People are attracted to other people. They gather with and move about with others and seek to place themselves near others. New activities begin in the vicinity of events that are already in progress.
In the home we can see that children prefer to be where there are adults or where there are other children, instead of, for example, where there are only toys. In residential areas and in city spaces, comparable behavior among adults can be observed. If given a choice between walking on a deserted or a lively street, most people will choose the lively street. If the choice is between sitting in a private backyard or in a semiprivate front yard with a view of the street, people will often choose the front of the house where there is more to see.
...
Both in areas with single-family houses and in apartment house surroundings, children tend to play more on the streets, in parking areas, and near the entrances of dwellings than in the play areas designed for that purpose but located in backyards of single family houses or on the sunny side of multi-story buildings where there are neither traffic nor people to look at.
-Life Between Buildings, Jan Gehl 1971
...the federal government usually covers about 80-90 percent of the costs for a new highway project, compared with only 50 percent of the costs for a transit system. Local communities have to pick up most of the rest of the tab for public transportation, with state governments chipping in what's left. Since doing that usually requires raising property taxes, most local governments just prefer to build highways....
...transit projects have to undergo intensive scrutiny: a cost-benefit analysis, a land-use analysis, an environmental-impact analysis, and, usually, a detailed comparison among various alternatives. That all sounds pretty reasonable, except that highway projects don't have to undergo any of this....
Not surprisingly, most communities find it far easier to build new highways than to set up, say, a light-rail system....
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.
“Parents are in the grip of anxiety and when you’re anxious, you’re totally warped,” the author of “A Nation of Wimps,” Hara Estroff Marano, said. We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.
The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Schools and crime send many urban dwellers to the suburbs.
Attempting to reverse that trend, a Republican state legislator from Hilliard is pushing legislation that would give qualifying home buyers in blighted areas of Columbus and seven other Ohio cities vouchers to send their children to private schools and allow the families to hire private security for the neighborhood.
"I have lots of friends who moved to German Village, got married, and the first kid comes along, and boom, they move to the suburbs," said Rep. Larry Wolpert, who has dubbed House Bill 26 the "Urban Homestead Bill."
"It's crime and education. Those are the two reasons they leave."
Some education groups oppose the proposal.
What Wolpert sees as an effort to revitalize Ohio's urban centers, critics complain represents another effort to undermine public schools by using tax dollars to send students to private schools.
"House Bill 26 takes a counterproductive approach to urban revitalization by seeking to help cities at the expense of public schools," said Matthew Dotson of the Ohio Education Association, the state's largest teachers union and a leading opponent of voucher programs.
.....
Wolpert said it's difficult to tackle urban blight and revitalization without addressing schools. "This is not a voucher bill; it's a bill to revitalize our urban core," he said.
...
A revised version of the bill, under review in a House committee, would allow city residents to create an "urban homestead zone" where residents have spent at least $120,000 to buy a house or at least $40,000 to renovate one.
Part of their property taxes would finance the private-school vouchers. Families living in the zone also would have the opportunity to assess themselves for security beyond the local police force.
...
Wolpert said that unlike other efforts to build lofts and other Downtown housing best suited for singles and childless couples, his plan is intended to help families with youngsters...
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