Download City Hall Steps In Written by Rick Jacobus and Michael Brown. Published By Shelterforce.
This article from Shelterforce Magazine outlines the growing trend of municipal sponsorship of Community Land Trusts including profiles of new CLTs in Irvine, CA and Chicago.
Download Preservation of Affordable Homeownership: A Continuum of Strategies Written by Rick Jacobus and Jeff Lubel.
Published by the Center for Housing Policy of the National Housing Conference.
In recognition of the significant benefits of homeownership for families and the communities in which they live, many cities, counties and states have adopted policies that seek to increase residents’ access to affordable homeownership opportunities. This paper examines the range of different policy options that communities have adopted to reduce the cost of homeownership, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of each option in preserving affordable homeownership opportunities over time.
The focus of this review on the preservation of affordable homeownership grows out of the collective experience of numerous communities around the country with sharply rising home prices over the past five to ten years. As many communities have learned the hard way, homes that they helped make affordable through an initial downpayment grant or other assistance often have become unaffordable when sold to the next family. With the amount of subsidy needed to bring homeownership within reach of working families growing exponentially, communities have struggled with the question of how to ensure that the public’s investments in homeownership keep pace with the market. This review provides an overview of the range of mechanisms that local governments use to ensure that housing funds invested in affordable homeownership today are able to serve additional families into the future. In general, this is accomplished either through resale restrictions that preserve the affordability of specific assisted units or through deferred loans that allow the locality to capture a portion of home price appreciation at the time that assisted units are sold that can then be used to help subsequent buyers purchase homes of their choice.
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By Rick Jacobus and Amy Cohen
in California Affordable Housing Deskbook, Solano Press.
Written for local elected officials and housing program administrators, this chapter explains how Community Land Trusts operate and places them within a continuum of other policy alternatives.
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There is no doubt that information technology has brought about huge changes in world financial markets. Markets which used to be largely isolated are now inextricably interconnected by a real time network of transactions in which, generally, capital flows instantly to the highest bidder regardless of the location of that bidder on the globe. We might expect this trend, which Richard O’Brian calls this “the end of geography,” to be good news for low-income communities. One could conclude that the development of an integrated and standardized financial network, by reducing the role of potentially biased individual lenders, could reduce racial and income discrimination and move the economy toward a situation where capital is allocated based entirely on the real value which various sectors contribute. And yet low-income urban communities in America and elsewhere appear to be experiencing increasing capital shortages.
This paper identifies an emerging structural logic of the financial system under which investment decisions are made by a network that relies on previous transactions as the main source for information about credit quality. The home mortgage market in the United States is examined as a specific case of this more general global financial market transformation. Data relating to the secondary market for single family home mortgages in the Oakland, CA metropolitan area is employed to provide empirical support for the argument that the emerging financial network itself has distinct geographic preferences which place low-income and minority neighborhoods at a systematic disadvantage in the competition for capital.
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