Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

How the Trailer Park Could Save Us All

April 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
trailer-park-end-of-world-lead

Residents call life at Pismo Dunes Senior Park "Pismodise." Park manager Louise Payne calls it "a holding tank for the great beyond." Louise has short hair and blunt bleached bangs that give her the air of a preteen skateboarder, but at 72 she's often found rolling by the park's 333 trailers in her electric golf cart, alternating between her roles as mother hen and whip-cracker. California is a notoriously youthful culture, but eventually the perpetually young get very old. If they're lucky enough to live in Pismodise, which is on the Central Coast, they can exit its palm-lined entrance, cross ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Health, May-June 2013
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Real Utility: Accounting for Energy Costs Makes Mortgage Sense

October 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Mortgage underwriters generally weigh several numbers when deciding whether a family can afford a new home. They look at income, of course, and tally up expenses in the form of a home’s property taxes, insurance premiums and monthly payments. There is one number they ignore: how much a household spends on its utilities, a figure that averages more than $2,000 a year in the U.S. In fact, most U.S. families spend more powering, heating, and cooling their homes than they pay in real estate taxes and insurance. At the margins, that number can spell the difference between a home a family can ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
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Mortgage Loan Documents Getting an Overhaul

June 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

If you've ever shopped for a home mortgage, you probably recognize — perhaps with a knot of fear in your gut — these two federally mandated pieces of paperwork: the two-page Truth in Lending disclosure, and the three-page Good Faith Estimate form. They are, despite their sweet-sounding names, daunting loan documents for consumers about to make the largest financial commitment of their lives. The government has long required banks to present these papers to potential home buyers to help them grasp the full consequences of loans and all the sneaky fees that go with them. Over the years, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
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Turning Failed Commercial Properties Into Parks

December 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Miami-Dade Neighborhood Conversion

In the language of urbanism, "greenfields" usually means rural land at the metropolitan edge, where suburbia metastasizes. "Brownfields" are former industrial sites that could be redeveloped once they are cleaned of pollution. "Greyfields" — picture vast empty parking lots — refer to moribund shopping centers. Recently another such locution was coined: "redfields," as in red ink, for underperforming, underwater and foreclosed commercial real estate. Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Environment, January-February 2011, News and Options
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Immigrant Flow Shifts to Smaller Cities

December 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The Pew Hispanic Center has predicted that the U.S. population will grow by more than 100 million over the next 40 years solely as a result of immigration — legal and illegal — and the children born to immigrants already here. Those numbers are in line with several other forecasts based on Census Bureau data, and certainly sound right to associate professor Gary Painter, director of research at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate. Where will all those people live? Painter, a specialist in urban economics, homeownership and housing markets, has a pretty ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Culture
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Facing Foreclosure? Get Counseling

February 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Want to save $454 a month or more than $5,000 a year on your mortgage payment and escape foreclosure? As a new study conducted by the Urban Institute for NeighborWorks America suggests, that’s the happy result for more than half of the clients of the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling program. The legally mandated report, which studied the program’s first full year, 2008, found that homeowners who take advantage of the free counseling — it’s government-funded — are 62.5 percent more likely not to lose their homes to foreclosure than those who sail that legally fraught ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, CAROUSEL
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Shadow Market Delays Recovery, Helps Defiant Homeowners

October 21, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

It's been almost a year since Horatio Bernard effectively lost his Baltimore row house to foreclosure and roughly 15 months since he last made a payment on his primary mortgage. And yet to his amazement and those following his story, Bernard continues living in the home with his ailing mother without any sign of an eviction notice or word from his lender, in this case JP Morgan Chase and then US Bank. "I haven't paid a dime," Bernard told me, sounding gleeful over the phone. Earlier this year, Bernard was defiant on staying in his home even though the bank had already tried selling it ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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The Bonfire of the Housing Vanity

March 11, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

On Dec. 21, 2008, The New York Times seemed to solve America's confusion over the ongoing global financial crisis with an explanation both simple and familiar: Like so much else, our economic meltdown could be blamed on the blinkered right-wing zealotry of President George W. Bush. Under the heading "The Reckoning," a 5,000-word front-page story titled "Ownership Society: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire," by a team of four Times reporters, examined how Bush entered office "vowing to spread the dream of homeownership" and then "pushed hard" to expand it. The results, the story ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, March-April 2009, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Tapping Academe to Avoid the Next Flailout

October 3, 2008 • By • 1 Comment

Two respected Washington, D.C. lawyers — tax expert, finance watchdog, media adviser and occasional Miller-McCune contributor Marty Lobel and Joseph Goldstein of the Mayer Brown law firm — are offering an intriguing way to prevent future financial meltdowns of the subprime sort: A team of academic experts would survey the financial field and warn government of impending problems before they happen. Here's the nut of the Lobel-Goldstein argument, presented on the Nieman Watchdog/Nieman Reports site: While everyone is uncertain about what is coming next, we ought to think about what we ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings
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