Category: Housing
-
Spend Less, Invest More, Improve Credit Scores
The editorial board of the Virginian-Pilot finds it a matter for “concern” that African-Americans are denied mortgage loan applications in the Hampton Roads region at a higher rate than whites. “In Hampton Roads,” writes the Pilot, black applicants during the study’s period — 2015 and 2016 — were 2.4 times more likely to be denied…
-
Racism, Racism Everywhere You Look
The Center for Investigative Reporting has published an in-depth analysis of lending data showing that African-Americans have been denied home loans at a significantly higher rate than whites in 48 out of the 61 metropolitan areas examined. The Virginian-Pilot picked up that research and published an article yesterday stating that African-American homebuyers in Hampton Roads were…
-
The Airbnb Dilemma: Regulate or Not?
Airbnb, the website that allows homeowners to rent rooms and houses for short periods, no longer occupies an obscure niche in the Virginia lodging marketplace. The company is capturing a disproportionate share of growth in lodging industry rooms and revenues, and it depresses the ability of hotels to raise rates during periods of peak demand,…
-
Poverty, Government, and the Bourgeois Virtues
Unwinding historical injustices that trap African-Americans in inter-generational poverty is “the moral challenge of our time,” Mayor Levar Stoney told attendees of at an anti-poverty conclave at Virginia Union University Tuesday. Policy decisions that hurt the poor “have done more to hold the flesh and blood of our city back … than any bronze and…
-
Motels as Housing of Last Resort
Two Sundays ago the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a disturbing special report on poverty and housing insecurity along the Jefferson Davis Highway in Chesterfield County. Hundreds of people live in shabby motels, paying $200 or more per week to live in conditions almost as deplorable as Richmond’s public housing projects. These hotels, the housing equivalent of…
-
Public Housing Vs. Private Housing, Round Two
A couple of weeks ago, I published a post, “Your Taxpayer Dollars at Work: Stuffing Poor People into Hideous Housing,” trying to put the $150 million maintenance backlog at the Richmond Redevelopment Housing Authority into context. I noted that the RRHA’s $65 million budget, spread over 4,000 public housing units, amounts to $16,250 per unit…
-
Your Taxpayer Dollars at Work: Stuffing Poor People into Hideous Housing
The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which provides public housing to about 10,000 Richmond residents, faces a $150 million backlog in repairs for its 4,000 housing units, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “At some point you’re going to have very serious health and safety problems,” agency CEO T.K. Somanath told the authority’s board last week. The authority…
-
Sustaining the Biggest Public Nuisance in Richmond
Republished from Cranky’s Blog. Not satisfied at maintaining the largest public nuisance in Richmond – the one that just led to the shooting death of a State Policeman – the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RHHA) now proposes to do nothing realistic about it: Fencing and gates. RRHA says this remedy is “largely . . .…
-
The Scourge of Rootless, Predatory Males
Last week 27-year-old Travis A. Ball allegedly shot and killed Virginia State Police Special Agent Michael T. Walter in an apparently unprovoked attack in the Mosby Court public housing project. The murder was the seventh homicide and one of about 20 shootings to take place in the troubled housing project so far this year. The…
-
Bristol Home Builder Proposes Solar Subdivision
Developer Aaron Lilly is seeking Bristol planning commission approval to construct 30 upscale townhouses using solar power to offset electric bills. He envisions the project as the first solar-powered subdivision east of the Mississippi, reports the Bristol Herald-Courier. The project would be built on 12.5 hillside acres near an Interstate 81 exit. The townhomes would…
-
Slum Maintenance at Essex Village
Who needs tenement slums when we’ve got public housing projects? The supposed “market failure” of the private sector to provide the poor and working class with decent shelter provided the justification for the federal government to get into housing business in the 1930s. We all know the result. Uncle Sam turned out to be the…
-
Twilight of an Era in Alexandria
Eric Terran, a 39-year-old architect, is doing something that almost no one in the City of Alexandria is doing anymore: building a detached, single-family residence. Last year he purchased a lot zoned for single-family residential for $230,000, and now he’s erecting a 3,300-square-foot house on it, reports Michael Neibauer with the Washington Business Journal. Construction…
-
Reinventing another Failed Public Housing Project
Kippax Place, a seven-story building in downtown Hopewell, is a product of 1970s-era public policy housing. Like so many public housing projects, it became almost unlivable. In an effort to restore the facility to habitable standards, the Hopewell Redevelopment and Housing Authority has contracted with the Community Housing Corporation to give the home for more than…
-
Suburbs Not So Simple
A difficulty in analyzing the economic dynamics of the “suburbs” is that land use and development is far from uniform. Recognizing that the term encompasses a wide range of human settlement patterns, the authors of “Housing in the Evolving American Suburb” broke down suburbs into five major types. Established high-end. These have high home values…
-
What Home Buyers Are Looking For
For all the talk of urban renaissance in cities across Virginia and the United States, first-time home buyers find that new or existing suburban homes offer the best match for their preferences and budget, reports the Urban Land Institute (ULI) in a new study, “Housing in the Evolving American Suburb.” While American’s urban cores are experiencing…