Homelessness Law Blog

It’s disturbing that millions of people have lost their homes to foreclosure, but at least you’d think that foreclosures would mean more available, affordable homes for low-income renters on the verge of homelessness.  Sadly, you’d be wrong.  Renters lose in the foreclosure crisis too.

One article from Minnesota takes a hard look at the common misperception that foreclosures make renting more affordable.  The reality is that rental costs are increasing, even though the cost of buying a home is falling and banks are holding countless unoccupied and non-revenue producing homes that are costly to maintain.

In Minnesota, for example, statewide rents increased an inflation-adjusted 7 percent from 2000 to 2009 while the income of renters fell 21 percent.  That’s a one-fifth decrease in income.  What would you have to cut out of your budget to live on one-fifth less?  For Edward G. Robinson, the answer is food.  After rent and utilities, Robinson lives on $20 per month.  To get by, he eats at a Dorothy Day drop-in center. (more…)

This week the New York Times caught on to a trend that’s sweeping the nation: as J.R. Fleming, co-founder of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign who spoke earlier this month at our National Forum on the Human Right to Housing put it, “we…put homeless people into people-less housing.”

The article starts off with the scene of the Biggs family moving into their home, as supporters surround them and chant “fight, fight, fight, ‘cause housing is a human right.” While most families move on their own, or with the help of a few friends, the Biggs need the support of a group, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, because their move is not a traditional one – they don’t have a legal right to move in.

This forceful re-examination of the laws by which certain people are left out on the street even when there are countless empty homes in their communities is central to the notion of housing as a human right. During the civil rights struggle, people confronted the long-accepted laws of segregation and discrimination by challenging them in direct actions like sit-ins at lunch counters, as well as working through the courts and the legislatures. We are now engaged in the continuation of that struggle, as the Biggs and the Anti-Eviction Campaign take the first steps to say just because it’s the law, doesn’t mean the law is just.

The idea of housing as a human right doesn’t necessarily mean that every homeless family should be allowed to move into a vacant house and take that property away from its legal owner. But it does challenge us to look at the injustice of homelessness, and the laws that perpetuate it, in a new way. And there may be new models of community homeownership and renting that can co-exist with our present private ownership model that will provide the bridge to a more just future.

The Times article concludes with Ms. Biggs “showing off the freshly painted rooms and the used dining room set given to her by a neighbor,” and tonight, the Biggs will be enjoying dinner around their dining room table. I hope we will soon look back on this struggle to ensure that every family can share a dinner table in their own home the way we look back on the civil rights struggle to share lunch counters: a lesson for the history books, but no longer appropriate in an America that recognizes all its residents’ basic human rights.

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

Photo credit: Khell Center, Cornell University

In a recent series of cover stories, the Washington Post reported that over $400 million in federal HUD HOME funds meant to help local communities build affordable housing for low-income people has gone missing.  This is a terrible thing.  It’s reprehensible that sketchy developers, property flippers, and other unsavory people are siphoning off money meant for poor people, just to line their own pockets.

And given that there is already far too little funding available to build new housing, we can’t afford to waste even a dollar of what we do receive.  Especially because stories like this only serve as fodder for politicians and other interest groups who argue that building affordable housing is an inefficient or ineffective use of tax dollars.  How do we ask Congress to give us more money for programs we know generally work well, when the front page of the Post shows them working poorly?

As advocates for affordable housing, and indeed taxpayers ourselves, we should be outraged by this story.  At the same time, we must undertake a sober evaluation of the facts.  The questionable expenditures occurred over a period of five years, and accounted for less than .2 percent of HUD’s budget each year.  HUD can and should exercise better control over the use of its funds, but make no mistake – this is no indictment of HUD as an agency or of the principle that all people have a human right to safe, decent, affordable housing.  That’s a principle no amount of money can impugn.

- Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director

I grew up in Wichita, KS. The heartland. The land of Oz – or, if the local visitor’s bureau is to be believed, the land of Ahs.

Homelessness wasn’t something we talked about much. There was a small park downtown where we’d see someone sleeping on a bench, or carrying around lots of extra bags, but this was a rare sight. At least, it seemed like that.

Living in Washington, D.C. now, I see poverty all around me. In the man asking for change on the corner. In the women sleeping on the floor at the Metro station because they have nowhere else to go. In the family that’s wearing the same clothes they wore yesterday because they haven’t yet found a place to lay their heads.

Surely, homelessness is a big city problem, right?

Last week, my father sent me an article reporting that homelessness in Wichita had increased 65 percent since the recession began. Sixty. Five. Percent.

That means, on any given night, there are something like 600 people without homes in this small city in the heartland of America. A dozen of them died on the streets last year.

I wept, seeing these numbers, because Wichita is “home” for me. Behind each of these numbers is a man, woman, or child who lives there, but has no home.

What’s more, I know these numbers are part of a horrifying national trend. There are so many more homeless people in Wichita because there are so many more people experiencing homelessness everywhere. Homelessness is not just a big city issue. It’s not just an issue on the coasts. It is everywhere.

And this is unacceptable, given that we know how to both prevent and end it. We lack not the solutions, but the political will to make sure all people are housed in these United States.

Join us.  Give. Learn. Share. Together, and only together, can we change laws, change lives, and end homelessness – in Wichita, in Washington, and everywhere in between.

-Whitney Gent, Development & Communications Director

Photo credit: Travel Aficionado

February is Black History Month, and though the Law Center is mindful of how race intersects our work all year ‘round, I’d like to take the opportunity afforded by the holiday to blog about one particular aspect of race and housing law.

The foreclosure crisis has claimed nearly five million homes in the last four years, and almost no community has escaped unscathed.  From inner city Detroit to rural Idaho, homeowners to apartment-dwellers, foreclosures have affected Americans from every walk of life.  But there can be no denying that the crisis has had a disproportionately negative effect on communities of color.   According to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), about 8% of all African Americans and Latino homeowners lost their homes due to foreclosure compared to only 4.5% of whites, even though white homeowners account for 2/3 of the market.  These homeowners not only lost the place they lived, they most likely lost their greatest asset and sustained serious damage to their credit and financial stability, costs that only add to the wealth gap between the races.

The well-documented “spillover” effects of foreclosure—including vacancy and blight, plummeting real estate values for families able to remain in their homes, and increased crime rates—will continue to be felt more widely in African American and Latino neighborhoods, which CRL estimates will lose close to $200 billion in property values by 2012.  And 40% of Americans at risk of losing their homes due to foreclosure are renters, a group where low-income people of color have always been overrepresented. (more…)

It will be a bitter-sweet Valentine’s Day for many across the country who have already lost their homes due to the foreclosure and economic crises, but should the budget proposals put forth by the House come to pass, things will get even worse.

Even as the need for assistance continues to increase with the ongoing economic crisis, as many as 750,000 Section 8 tenants could be cut off from federal assistance as early as this spring, if the proposed $101 billion cut is applied across the board to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  At the same time, the Obama Administration will release its request for FY 2012 today.  The Administration is weighing a cut of $1 billion from the $4 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds local housing programs, and a 5% cut to HUD overall.  The President has proposed a five year “freeze” on all domestic programs. But reducing or eliminating the Mortgage Interest Deduction, as recommended by Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission, would save $104 billion – enough to create a homeowner tax credit for most homes, build new housing, expand vouchers and even reduce the deficit!

Congress seems determined to pass cuts to spending regardless of the consequences to people living in their towns. But imagine 750,000 parents having to explain to their children that they are losing their home. Imagine millions of hearts breaking. That’s why on Valentine’s Day, low-income tenants from over 15 cities coast-to-coast are holding coordinated actions calling on Congress to “Have a Heart, Save Our Homes” from the proposed cuts to the housing budget.

Join with these tenants by calling your Representatives and Senators to help them realize the human consequences of this arbitrary budget slashing, and ask them to “Have a Heart, Save Our Homes!”  See our allies at the National Alliance of HUD Tenants for talking points and more information.

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

In a previous legal internship at Neighborhood Legal Services Association in Pittsburgh, PA, I specialized in representing low-income tenants in housing cases. From the beginning, I was eager to take on landlords, who I saw as the evil oppressors of low-income people in our society. As college students, my roommates and I had our share of injustices as renters, and I was convinced that landlords played a huge role in the current hardships facing poor Americans. I marched into courtrooms, guns blazing, only to be hit with the reality that most judges had no qualms about evicting people. No matter how sympathetic my client’s story or how egregious a landlord’s behavior, the law was usually not in the tenant’s favor.

I quickly learned that there are two sides to every story, and that some landlords were hit just as hard by the current economic crisis as their tenants. Now, I am seeing further evidence of this through my work at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. When contacting local housing advocates to identify violations they see occurring under the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, I am continually hearing about the high number of tenants being unlawfully evicted and forced into homelessness because of the numerous rental properties undergoing foreclosure.  Due to their landlords not being able to pay the mortgage, these tenants are feeling the trickledown effect of the foreclosure crisis despite never owning a home. In trying to reach the most beneficial outcome for my client, I realized that compassion for the landlord’s situation, along with a firm declaration of my client’s rights as tenants, often went a long way. (more…)

I recently had the privilege of taking what might be the longest domestic trip ever undertaken by a Law Center staff member – a pilgrimage to Anchorage, Alaska to participate in the annual conference of the Alaska Coalition on Housing & Homelessness.  I was warmly welcomed by the dynamic and hard-working conference organizers, Kris Duncan with the State of Alaska and Suzi Pearson who runs a nonprofit focusing on domestic violence, and by their colleagues – really in all ways, except by the zero degree temperatures.

Why did I accept the invitation?   I wanted to find out what homelessness was like in Alaska.  Would it be different than down here in the “lower 48?”  What were the challenges of addressing homelessness in a state where weather conditions can be brutal all year round?  I learned the answers to these questions and others.

In some ways, Alaska has it tough.  Many people have a frontier mentality – a belief that everyone should get by on their own.  This causes some people in need to not seek assistance, and it results in many citizens not being supportive of government investment to help end homelessness.  And as a state with many low population cities, Alaska sometimes struggles to provide even temporary shelter to homeless people. Due to lack of volunteer staff resources, the cold weather shelter in Nome only opens when the temperature dips lower than ten below zero – in a community where anyone sleeping outside in the winter risks death.  Plus there are transportation concerns – one Alaska school district transports homeless children four hours a day.  That’s a lot of time for anyone to spend on a bus, and it’s logistically challenging for the school district.

But Alaska’s also got a lot of advantages – it’s got wonderful and caring people who work on this issue, like Kris and Suzi, and like Dave Mayo-Kiely and Barb Dexter in the Anchorage public schools.  And as a low population state, where “everyone knows everyone,” collaboration can be easier.  Plus, thanks to high oil prices and a good amount of federal government largesse (Alaska gets back nearly two dollars for every tax dollar it sends to Washington), Alaska is one of the few states that currently has a budget surplus.  Unfortunately, so far the state hasn’t expressed interest in devoting significant new resources to this issue – but with hard work from the Coalition, maybe that will change.

I did go to visit one Alaskan with a big huge house, and a great deal of money – former governor Sarah Palin.  I even took a picture (above)!  It was cloudy when I drove to Wasilla, so I couldn’t see Russia.  And I didn’t see the former governor either.  But if I had I would have challenged her – Alaska’s got a lot of money and a lot of land – couldn’t she help put those things together and make sure that all Alaskans have a safe place to live?  My answer?  You betcha!

-Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director

No, mortgage companies aren’t embracing futuristic robot technology.  Instead, the public is just beginning to learn about a time-honored industry practice that just might invalidate tens of thousands of foreclosures around the country.

Last Wednesday, a company called Ally Financial quietly ordered its agents in 23 states to halt any sales, evictions, cash-for-keys deals, and other foreclosure transactions.  According to a two-page memo obtained by Bloomberg News, the company was considering “corrective action in connection with some foreclosures” in the affected states, which include foreclosure hotspots like Florida and Ohio.

Beneath Ally’s smooth technical language lies a troubling revelation with potentially disastrous implications for the massive industry that has grown up around the foreclosure crisis.  According to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and others, Ally used to be GMAC Mortgage, an entity that received three federal bailouts totaling more than $17 billion since 2008.  After rebranding as Ally, Inc., the company began servicing mortgages for some of the nation’s largest lenders.  In the wake of the housing crash, a great deal of Ally’s business involves executing foreclosures—in other words, verifying and signing the affidavits that judges rely on to determine whether a lender can seize a home.  And as the market continues to spiral out of control, homeowners’ losses are Ally’s gain: the more foreclosures out there to process, the more fees it and other companies can rack up.  And now it looks like good old-fashioned greed may call tens of thousands of foreclosures into question. (more…)

Yesterday, the Senate passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, sweeping legislation that covers a broad range of financial and housing policy issues. The House had already passed the same bill on June 29. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation into law during the week of July 19. The Act contains several key provisions of importance to homeless and low income Americans.

Of particular note is an extension and clarification of the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act (PTFA), which ensures that renters whose properties go into foreclosure – through no fault of their own – receive adequate notice so they can find new homes. The Law Center helped spur the passage of PTFA last year and has since been advocating for its extension past the original sunset date of 2012. Dodd-Frank extends it to 2014.

To read more about PTFA, see our commentary in the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity.

The bill also provides new funding for foreclosure prevention measures and efforts to help rebuild housing in blighted communities. Read more about these provisions here.

Today we celebrate these significant victories for housing advocates and the American people!

Photo credit: carlossg