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Producing less than 20,000 units on average annually in California, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) cannot meet the outsized demand for subsidized housing alone . This report examines alternatives to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit in the State of California, with particular emphasis on the Los Angeles market. This report analyzes project feasibility in today’s conditions, as well as an analysis of the financial impact that certain international policies could have on affordable housing development at the project level. The analyses aim to illustrate possible project models as additional options beyond LIHTC, and demonstrate the value of including higher income projects within an affordable housing system on being able to leverage more debt, equity and other financial resources and thereby produce more affordable housing at all levels.

Los Angeles County is in an affordable housing crisis. This crisis is particularly pronounced for low-income workers. With the government and private sector unable to solve the crisis on their own, many labor unions are looking for ways to get involved. Our client, UNITE HERE Local 11 (UH11) – a hospitality workers’ union – is looking into creative methods of addressing the housing crisis for its members, other hospitality workers, and the rest of the region’s working class. This report investigates two solutions: converting hotels and motels into housing and establishing housing cooperatives. This research employs a mixed-methods approach consisting of literature reviews, document analysis, quantitative data and spatial analyses, and expert interviews. On the hotel/motel conversion side, our findings suggest that there are opportunities to convert hotels/motels into housing, but further municipal action is needed to implement this model at scale. Our findings on the cooperative side suggest that financial, tax, and legal challenges may stymy the establishment of new cooperatives, but community land trusts present a feasible intermediate model. Our report concludes with several recommendations: regarding conversions, UH11 should pilot conversion projects and advocate for certain state and local reforms to further facilitate conversions; and regarding cooperatives, UH11 should partner with existing community land trusts to develop cooperative housing. With these strategies, UH11 can play a pivotal role in expanding affordable housing options for its members and other low-income workers in Los Angeles County and provide models for union-led initiatives to address housing insecurity in other high-cost metropolitan areas.

Housing affordability and fair housing are critical issues for minority residents in many cities and regions around the world. Yet little is known about the housing experiences of migrant urban residents facing potentially precarious conditions, what adaptation strategies they develop, and what factors affect these strategies, especially during times of economic or other crises. This dissertation focuses on the case of Athens, Greece in the early 2010s, during a period of major socioeconomic crisis for the country and when adaptation strategies might have been most needed, and examines and contrasts the experiences of recent migrants to Athens who had come to the city from non-EU and lower-income origins to those of Greek residents. It employs a mixed-methods approach to 1) inquire about their housing experiences, 2) analyze their adaptation strategies, and 3) compare their experiences to those of Greek participants. It contributes to the literature on housing by offering user-based perspectives on housing affordability during the crisis, rental housing discrimination based on migration status, as well as adaptation strategies of recent migrant urban residents. The findings indicate an increased lack of housing affordability, amounting to an invisible housing crisis in the city particularly affecting low-income and minority renters, the omnipresence of housing discrimination for minority participants, and the development of a wide variety of adaptation strategies from the part of the minority participants despite factors limiting them. These findings suggest that minority groups experiences and adaptation strategies, as well as the multi-dimensional effects of housing affordability and fair housing, merit more attention and that the development of inclusive and fair housing policies is pertinent during crises and beyond them.

Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government adopted programs and policies toward safe and decent housing for all. The initiatives included the creation of the Federal Housing Administration that, among other things, spurred mortgage lending by guaranteeing mortgage loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers. The creation of the secondary mortgage market by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (“GSEs”) helped provide more liquidity for loan originators. However, somewhere along the way, these GSEs lost their way, as they pursued profitability without regard to risk and heedlessly bought mortgages without considering quality. The overabundance of poor quality mortgages led to the housing market crisis in 2008, and the GSEs faced ruin when the millions of mortgagors who took out loans defaulted. When the federal government intervened to rescue the GSEs, a new mission and attitude emerged--not one of furthering housing, but of self-preservation. This new attitude was revealed in heavy-handed policies calculated to recoup losses, but not to keep borrowers in their homes. Legislation enacted in the wake of the crisis invested a federal conservator with draconian powers, seemingly unchecked by state law constraints on lenders' remedies or notions of fairness. The mission became reducing portfolios by auction sales of the properties to investors, while the foreclosed owners had to pay the amounts owed on the mortgages to keep their homes. The impacts of these policies were felt disproportionately by minority borrowers who originally had been offered more onerous mortgage terms on the basis of inflated appraisals. Early attempts by state and local authorities to temper the GSEs' hard march toward solvency were met with successful assertions of federal preemption. This Article explores these rulings and asserts that, rather than base challenges on subordinate state or local laws, a better and more viable course of action is through the assertion of co-equal federal laws.

This dissertation examines how the country’s largest real estate trade group negotiated the mandate for fair housing in the latter half of the twentieth century. I ask, how has the Realtor trade group informed the nation’s fair housing laws and policies since 1961? To answer this question, I chronicle the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ initial opposition to local and federal fair housing laws in the 1960s and then trace how the organization—rebranded as the National Association of REALTORS®—seemingly transformed its position on fair housing in the post-civil rights decades. Inspired by sociological, historical, and urban studies scholarship that has considered real estate boards as powerful social organizations, this dissertation illustrates how Realtors brokered fairness in the post-civil rights housing market. Based upon my archival research on the trade group’s historical records, government documents, and newspaper accounts, I demonstrate how the Realtors steered the size, scope, and efficacy of the nation’s fair housing environment for three decades. This historical case study revises explanations for the weakness of federal fair housing law by emphasizing how Title VIII’s anemia was purposefully maintained by the National Association of REALTORS® and their political lobby. The Realtors, however, did not completely reject fair housing. I show that while the trade group exhibited a sustained ideological discord with government regulation and oversight of discrimination in the private residential housing market, its contemporary iteration nonetheless popularized the social directive for fair housing in order to rebrand itself as a fair and equitable housing servicer.

This dissertation examines how the country’s largest real estate trade group negotiated the mandate for fair housing in the latter half of the twentieth century. I ask, how has the Realtor trade group informed the nation’s fair housing laws and policies since 1961? To answer this question, I chronicle the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ initial opposition to local and federal fair housing laws in the 1960s and then trace how the organization—rebranded as the National Association of REALTORS®—seemingly transformed its position on fair housing in the post-civil rights decades. Inspired by sociological, historical, and urban studies scholarship that has considered real estate boards as powerful social organizations, this dissertation illustrates how Realtors brokered fairness in the post-civil rights housing market. Based upon my archival research on the trade group’s historical records, government documents, and newspaper accounts, I demonstrate how the Realtors steered the size, scope, and efficacy of the nation’s fair housing environment for three decades. This historical case study revises explanations for the weakness of federal fair housing law by emphasizing how Title VIII’s anemia was purposefully maintained by the National Association of REALTORS® and their political lobby. The Realtors, however, did not completely reject fair housing. I show that while the trade group exhibited a sustained ideological discord with government regulation and oversight of discrimination in the private residential housing market, its contemporary iteration nonetheless popularized the social directive for fair housing in order to rebrand itself as a fair and equitable housing servicer.

This Article will explore the twin interests of responding to climate change and preserving accessible and affordable housing. Part II will give a broad overview of the scientists' climate change predictions. Part III will discuss what these predictions portend for populations, housing, and communities. Part IV will describe the broad responses that the federal, state, and local governments are making to climate change to create communities that are thriving and resilient. Part V discusses the efficacy of these responses and their potential impact on the poor, housing, and communities. Part VI looks for parallels between the resilient cities movement and the urban revitalization programs of the past to see if there are lessons that should be heeded and discusses ways to mediate the intersection of what should be parallel interests-- resiliency and community. In Part VII, I suggest that climate change will force new conceptions of what it means to own property and what it means to govern democratically. In conclusion, this Article offers some prescriptions for going forward.

Beginning in the late 1970s, policymakers enacted a series of legislative and regulatory changes that, by 1985, combined to dismantle the New Deal-era system of housing finance. These policy changes fundamentally restructured the way that Americans accessed credit for homeownership from primarily borrowing via long-term, fixed-rate mortgages from local, federally insured S&Ls that collected deposits at a regulated cost, to increasingly borrowing through adjustable-rate mortgages issued by unregulated brokers who then sold those mortgages to investors in a secondary market, typically through an intermediary such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. "Dream Deregulated" argues that this transformation of housing finance undermined the progressive intent of the open housing and community reinvestment initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s by making housing credit less stable for all borrowers, relative to the New Deal system, and by largely disconnecting housing finance from the institutional structure that the civil rights initiatives were designed to regulate. It further argues that policymakers pursued broad deregulation of housing finance only after their pursuit of a narrower agenda of deregulation, that of deposit interest rate ceilings, opened the door to a series of arguments for further deregulation, particularly of S&L assets, including authorization of adjustable rate mortgages. The populist politics of the deregulation of deposit rate ceilings, taken up by and on behalf of "small savers," provided a discursive wedge for advocates of broader deregulation, taken up by and on behalf of the interests of the largest financial institutions and a neoliberal political agenda. "Dream Deregulated" investigates the policymaking process as a case study in what Paul Pierson calls "politics in time." This study bridges scholarship on fair housing and community reinvestment with that on the deregulation of housing finance, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the politics of

Reviewing John M. Goerling, ed., Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Handout - Rescuers from Poverty, https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/craftvictories/1024/thumbnail.jpg

Handout - Rescuers from Poverty., https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/craftvictories/1025/thumbnail.jpg

Handout - Rescuers from Poverty, https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/craftvictories/1024/thumbnail.jpg

Handout - Rescuers from Poverty., https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/craftvictories/1025/thumbnail.jpg

22 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. 895 (2006).

21 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 1 (2003).