Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Housing Crisis Hits Poor Renters Hard

February 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Affordable and Available Units per 100 ELI Renter Households

Since the American housing crisis began five years ago, policymakers have devoted the bulk of their attention to the bubble’s most visible victims, homeowners who’ve lost their houses to foreclosure, or who look like they may any day now. This group has been the subject of congressional inquiries and legal settlements and numerous election-year speeches. Just this week, California’s attorney general has been pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to forgive some of the debt owed by underwater homeowners. Considerably less attention has gone to a population deeply impacted by the housing ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , ,

How Foreclosures Feasted on Some Cities, Not Others

January 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Here’s a tale of two cities in Southern California, one that survived the worst of the foreclosure crisis with a few scratches, and one that was badly beaten up. In 2000, Santa Paula, a historic oil town bounded by vast greenbelts of orange, lemon, and avocado groves, had a population of 29,000 and a median household income of $42,000. When the subprime mortgage industry collapsed eight years later, 16 of every 1,000 homes in the “Citrus Capital of the World” went into foreclosure, well below the national average of 22 for every 1,000 homes. Another old town, Lake Elsinore, closely ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, January-February 2012
Tags: , , ,

Leaky Homes Show Green Intentions Gone Wrong

December 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Twenty years ago, changes to New Zealand’s construction and building inspection codes, the introduction of new materials, a shift in the style and design of homes, and, ironically, pressure from environmentalists, all combined to sow the seeds of a massive “leaky homes” problem. Two decades after that perfect storm, the debris is now washing up on the shores of a recession-hit housing market, leaving thousands of people trapped in homes that are rotting around them, but which they cannot afford to repair and have no hope of selling. Russell Cooney, past president of the New Zealand ... Read More

More like this: Environment
Tags: , , , ,

The Man Who Saw the Mortgage Crisis Coming

November 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Jim Rokakis stands in front of a house scheduled to be demolished later in the day. We are the Cleveland suburb of Cleveland Heights. Rokakis, the Cuyahoga County treasurer from 1997 through 2011, is being interviewed by a reporter from Canada’s CBC. “So, you are the guy who saw all this coming?” the reporter asks. He shrugs. Rokakis has been a main actor in the sub-prime mortgage story since 2000, when he went to the Federal Reserve with his concern about securitized loans. In March 2001, he sponsored a conference on predatory lending in Ohio. No one paid him any mind. “The ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: ,

#OWS: Have We Entered the Age of Protest?

October 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The Occupy Wall Street movement is in many ways a sign of the moment. The unemployment rate has been hanging out around 9 percent for more than two years. Income inequality is rising. Washington's political system has devolved into dysfunction. There is, in other words, plenty to protest. But there's another way to think about what's going on in Zuccotti Park (and its far-flung spinoffs): People have many legitimate grievances these days, but they're also more prone to protest than in the past. Occupy Wall Street, in this sense, represents a particular moment in time when people are really ... Read More

More like this: Culture, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , , ,

Learning to Play the HARP

October 21, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

It was a tense time during the Persian Gulf War. I was a "pool" reporter covering U.S. troops in northern Saudi Arabia. No one knew when the order to invade Iraq and Kuwait would come, but D-day was said to be "very soon." The unit I was attached to sat in what seemed a very exposed camp in the middle of desert nowhere, just a few miles from the Iraqi border. At sunset, tiny, reflective F-15s streaked overhead in formation; a while later, the low mountains at the horizon were outlined in flickering orange light for 10 minutes or so, as if fireworks were being set off behind them. Then the ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Not the Editor's Letter, November-December 2009
Tags: ,

Squat to Own

October 5, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade — and hope that life hands you some sugar, too. When life hands you foreclosed houses, make them homes. That was the point of Pam Kelley's recent Miller-McCune.com article on Habitat for Humanity buying some fixer-uppers on the ultra-cheap and turning them into affordable housing for low-income working people. In Miami, notes Miller-McCune.com contributor Kirk Nielsen, they're cutting out the middleman and allowing homeless people just to squat in foreclosed homes vacated by their erstwhile buyers but not yet spiffed and resold by their genuine ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Culture, Culture & Society, Findings
Tags: ,

The New College Try

October 21, 2008 • By • 1 Comment

Coming in from Chicago, it’s not a pretty ride to Thomas M. McDermott Jr.’s office. A mile to the north, you roll down from an unlovely concrete overpass that spans a trio of railroad tracks, greeted by a blighted strip of U.S. 41 that leads past the formerly marvelous structure that used to house the State Bank of Hammond. A wooden eagle, painted feathers slowly flaking off, is perched on the neoclassic building between tree-sized columns and golden gryphons on the edge of decay. The remainder of the road to McDermott is littered with similarly disused buildings, many plastered with ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Education, Magazine Feature Story, November-December 2008
Tags: , , , , , , ,