Allow me to weave a couple of loosely related pieces that I found on the internet today. Ok, one of them is something I actually placed on the internet but you get the picture.
This morning, WHYY's Bill Hangley did a quick piece about the implications of the latest federal housing bill for the city of Philadelphia. While housing and anti-poverty advocates are hailing the bill for for the funding that it sends along to endangered homeowners, others are a little wary of what it could mean if the city uses funding to buy up foreclosed properties:
...block grant dollars will help Philadelphia replace some of the property tax revenue lost on foreclosed homes. The same funding could allow the city to buy up foreclosed properties.
Ira Goldstein is with a nonprofit developer called The Reinvestment Fund. He likes the bill for the most part, but he worries that the city isn't ready to be the landlord of last resort.
"My concern is that cities aren't the best property management organizations," said Goldstein. "Some cities have tried to do this with various degrees of success and failure. The last thing I want to see is the City of Philadelphia becomes landlord to thousands of abandoned properties. We need a really good plan in place."
It's a point well made and it's a point that Matthew Yglesias made on his blog when he wrote about "the limits of local action."
He writes:
Since urban areas tend to contain both pockets of poor people and pockets of liberals, it's to some extent inevitable that city governments will wind up taking the lead on poverty issues. But for the sake of poor people, we shouldn't be content to leave it that way. On the local level, after all, the easiest and most effective way to eliminate poverty is just to make it too expensive for poor people to live there. Your typical low-poverty suburb hasn't discovered some miracle formula that turns all its citizens non-poor. Instead, land in the suburb is relatively expensive and its enacted regulations that prevent you from building small houses, from building dense apartment buildings, from crowding a lot of people into a single family home, etc. Basically, if you make it illegal to do anything that would make it possible for a poor person to rent a home in your town, you can ensure yourself a low poverty rate.
Essentially, Philadelphia's poverty rate is so high relative to other cities, boroughs and townships in the region because it's possible for low-income families to live here. We have an extensive mass transit system, high density in the housing stock, access to public health services, etc. Cities are, by necessity, the places where lower income people can actually live. Yglesias goes on to make the point that even if a city, and let us use Philadelphia as an example, were able to consistently help lower income people move up the income ladder, whether individually or across generations, other lower income families will move in to take advantage of the services.
This is ok and probably the only feasible solution but it requires the federal government to realize this role for cities and fund it appropriately rather than leave local governments on their own. Otherwise, cities will be forced to devote more of their own tax revenue to this role, leaving other basic services - public safety, streets, parks, libraries, and so on - underfunded. The other solution is for the federal government to really shake things up and encourage suburban areas to create the kind of support structures and land use policies that would allow for people with lower incomes to live there.
Which do you think is more likely?