vacant house

Last week, a $62M settlement was reached for roughly 1,400 Louisiana homeowners still not back in their homes due to insufficient recovery resources. The settlement was the result of a suit brought by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Alliance, the NAACP LDF, and the National Fair Housing Alliance, filed in 2008. The case was informed by the PolicyLink 2008 analysis conducted on all applicants to the Road Home program that found formulas that dictated the lesser of pre-storm value or damage estimates had a disproportionate impact on African American homeowners’ ability to recover. The analysis found that African American homeowners faced an average of approximately $70,000 gaps because their homes’ pre-storm values were far lower than the replacement costs of their homes.

This settlement marks the second readjustment of the formula for homeowners triggered by the suit and informed by the PolicyLink findings. The first was a rule change early in the Obama Administration by HUD that raised the eligible amount for ‘additional compensation grants’ for low- and moderate-income homeowners, resulting in more than $470 million to lower income families, the majority of whom were people of color in Orleans Parish. Together, these two measures will provide more than a half billion dollars in rebuilding assistance to struggling storm damaged homeowners.

The New York Times called for stronger oversight to make sure low-income and minority residents don’t have to wait so long for help. Follow the history of the case at the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and learn about their other crucial work to defend fair housing outcomes for residents of Louisiana post-Katrina.

The PolicyLink Summit is back! Please join us – and thousands of your fellow advocates, activists, policymakers, foundation officials, and other equity leaders – in Detroit this November for Equity Summit 2011:

Equity Summit 2011:

Healthy Communities, Strong Regions, A Prosperous America

November 8 to 11, 2011
Detroit Marriott at the
Renaissance Center

More than 2,000 equity leaders attended our Regional Equity ‘08 Summit in New Orleans three years ago. In the time since, the national equity movement has grown even stronger.
At Equity Summit 2011, together we will discuss and develop the agenda for sustainable and equitable development with access to jobs, transportation, education, health, and housing.

On to Detroit,
Angela Glover Blackwell
Founder and CEO, PolicyLink

For up-to-the-minute updates on Equity Summit 2011, please follow our new Twitter feed at @EquitySummit

Photo used under Creative Commons license via Flickr user Andorpro

When I touched down in New Orleans in the early weeks after the levees failed, devastation and loss hung thick in the air. As PolicyLink has worked with our community partners over the past five years trying to forge an equitable recovery, we can still feel that sting against our faces many days.

Today, much still remains to be done. But the residents (new and old) of this most distinctive city are charting their own path – bold, resilient, and distinctly New Orleans.

Dozens of new and historic organizations, networks, and coalitions have grown – from neighborhood associations to multi-issue advocacy teams. Innovations have blossomed — driven by the urgency and depth of need here.

These organizations have grown from a strong soil of love – for their city, their neighbors – and their still-present need to reweave the social fabric decimated by the scattering of their families and neighbors.

The population of New Orleans fell from 455,188 before Katrina (July 2005) to 208,548 a year later — a loss of over half of the city’s population. Slowly, though, people have rebuilt and returned. Now, nearly 80 percent of the city’s population has come back.

READ OUR NEW STUDY, “Community Action: Bringing People Home to Stronger Neighborhoods”

You will hear many hopeful, uplifting stories this weekend of this city rising from floods. These gains are wonderful and hard-fought – but only part of the story. The recovery has been uneven, with more than 88,000 African American residents unreturned to the city, and the BP oil spill marring progress.

And while this city and her people are resilient, we must do more to address the legacy of race, poverty, and structural exclusion from opportunity that still hampers both New Orleans – and America.

Want to help? Join with us and our allies to support the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, which would bring jobs and infrastructure to a region that needs both.

Five years later, the recovery continues. We must continue to invest in the Gulf’s people and make their recovery whole.

Today, HUD and DOT broke the mold.

These two agencies made available $75 million to support communities across the U.S. in planning more sustainable, livable places.  Never before has the federal government had one grant program to  expand housing choices and public transit, biking and walking options. And never before has there been a one-stop-shop for communities to access federal resources  to help them to coordinate their future plans for housing and transportation.

You can read the full press release here and the excerpt below:

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan today announced a groundbreaking collaborative effort designed to help foster planning for more livable, sustainable communities – places where transportation, housing and commercial development investments are coordinated to better serve the people living in those communities.

Together, the U.S. Departments of Transportation (DOT) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), for the first time ever, will join forces to award up to $75 million in funding – $35 million in TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) II Planning Grants and $40 million in Sustainable Community Challenge Grants for localized planning activities that ultimately lead to projects that integrate transportation, housing and economic development.

“This joint effort by DOT and HUD is a giant step toward improved coordination at the state, federal and local levels and reinforces the Obama Administration’s commitment to finding better ways to make government work for people,” said Vice President Joe Biden. “Together, their investments will strengthen communities by connecting housing and transportation options, increasing economic opportunities, promoting environmental sustainability and improving their overall quality of life.”

In St. Paul (Minn.) yesterday, we held the first community meeting in the Twin Cities to share our new report about how to deal with investors who are buying up properties in neighborhoods hard-hit by foreclosures.

In the new report (“When Investors Buy Up the Neighborhood: Strategies to Prevent Investor Ownership from Causing Neighborhood Decline”, authored by Kalima Rose and myself), we researched strategies that communities can use to deter unscrupulous slumlords and flippers, incentivize homebuyers and responsible investors, and take community control of foreclosed properties. The report provides a framework for taking action, presenting 36 promising strategies culled from across the country.

This project came to us from The Northwest Area Foundation and the Family Housing Fund, an anti-poverty philanthropy and housing organization, that were concerned about this challenge facing the same low-income communities of color that already bearing the brunt of a financial crisis that originated with irresponsible mortgage lending practices.

Representatives from many St. Paul neighborhoods – Frogtown, Payne-Phalen, East Side—all described different ways this issue was impeding efforts to build healthy, opportunity-rich neighborhoods. The crowd of residents, community organizers, housing organizers, philanthropists, neighborhood groups, and city officials thought that some of the strategies in the report – Atlanta’s program that trains residents to do code inspections, for example – could be useful for them.

And they came up with some additional ideas, like changing state law on how titles are tracked and launching a regional taskforce on regulation and enforcement. Empowering neighborhood residents – the eyes and ears of the community – to track the issue and take action was another key theme, along with empowering the new Twin Cities Community Land Bank.

It was a great start, and I am excited for today’s meeting in Minneapolis.