RE: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
One note: Bill Cullen writes: 1) Jim Graham is right. Help low income families purchase houses. Their investment will help them escape poverty and give them emotional investment in the neighborhood. It will cost less than $158,828. Unfortunately (for me professionally), Bill is referencing an erroneous figure calculated by my paper, the Southwest Journal. The figure was meant to reference the city's per-unit affordable-housing subsidy ... unfortunately, we included private (nonsubsidy) money in our math, which was wrong. We printed a prominent correction/explanation in the next issue. The corrected figure is $41,473 per unit. Whether that is too much is, of course, up to you, but please use the correct figure in debate. As we said in print, sorry for leading everyone astray. David Brauer Editor, Southwest Journal King Field TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
RE: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
Mark is very correct in his assertions. When I lived in Waite Park (NE) there was a city owned rental home next to mine. Both tenants were good families, one foreign, one a single mom. It never bothered me to live next to it except between tenants, mostly not knowing what would move in next. It also bothered me then because it took the city three months to get the place ready for the next tenant (it had not been destroyed by previous tenant, I peeked). The present tenant is the single mom, and I think her and her children are better off being in a house in a nice area rather than an apartment or a bad neighborhood. They have stability and the bad element to destroy her children is not as prevalent. I congratulated her several times for the good job she is doing on her children because I am the product of a divorce, and know how hard it can be on her. There was at least one other city rental house nearby and I never heard it to be a problem, and the tenant took care of the yard quite well. Ron Leurquin Nokomis East -Original Message- From: Mark Snyder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 8:43 PM To: Minneapolis Issues Forum Subject: Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue? Dave Stack is correct that I was thinking primarily of adults with my comments. Children are a different situation and deserve additional attention, especially because they have essentially no control over the environment they live in. From what I've seen, the biggest obstacle facing children in poor families in Minneapolis are unstable living situations that cause them to move frequently and also change schools frequently, often leading to their falling behind. If direct housing assistance to families, either as Jim Graham has suggested by subsidizing home ownership or as Dennis Plante has suggested by deconcentrating poverty, helps solve the problem of school-aged children moving around too much, that might be worth the cost to taxpayers right there. However, I don't know that neighborhood surroundings matter as much as stability of the individual child's home. Who is the bigger influence in a child's life - their parents or their parents' neighbors? With the exception of extreme poverty where meals are missed and such, are kids really that aware that they're poor? I grew up in a single-parent and poor family, but I have to say that I didn't really notice much difference between me and the other kids until maybe around junior high school when we actually started to pay attention to things like clothes and what brands kids wore. Or maybe it was just me. Does anyone know whether kids in poor neighborhoods who do live in relatively stable situations where they're not moving constantly and have responsible parents do better at avoiding things like drugs, gangs or other criminal activity? I would guess that they do. Again, that's why I say that focusing on just one aspect of the lives of struggling families, in this case, where they live, will not lead towards a real solution for the poverty and other ills that plague our most impacted neighborhoods. We need to address all of the obstacles in a coordinated fashion. Where there's substandard housing and concentrated poverty, there are also going to be the health issues, the educational issues, the job skill issues, etc. Addressing each of those issues in a vacuum is what we've been doing pretty much forever and it should be fairly obvious by now that it doesn't work very well. The other problem I have is that whether you go with the Graham idea or the Plante idea, both are awfully tough sells from a political standpoint. As distasteful as it is, we do have to maintain some awareness of how policy in Minneapolis is viewed by the folks at the Capitol. I'm willing to bet that they'd look at something like the Graham proposal and say Gee, Minneapolis has enough revenue to be giving away houses to the poor. They can stand to have their LGA slashed some more. Even though this wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of the situation, when has that ever stopped the folks on the Hill from sticking it to us? As for the Plante idea, while I certainly understand the reasoning behind deconcentrating poverty, I'm still willing to bet that folks in those more well-off neighborhoods are going to see it simply as being told to take on poor families and associated problems they'll bring with them from Jordan or Hawthorne or wherever. And they'll balk, just like they do when the issue is ever brought up of locating supportive housing outside the huge cluster in Whittier. There are areas in NE where just saying affordable housing or increasing housing density will get you a dirty look from some folks. Start talking about something like Plante suggests and you'd probably hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way to Duluth. I'm not proud to have some of these folks for neighbors and I'm glad to say it's not as bad as it used to be when I was growing up, but I'm also
Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue? No, Poverty Is!
David was more correct than he thinks. He now has the MCDA subsidy at $41,473. But his original figure was much more correct for the total subsidy per unit. What David forgot was to check the total subsidy of taxpayer dollars. Lets see now, we also have Empowerment Zone money, Hennepin County money, MHFA money, low income tax-credits, HUD money with several different programs (that little Bank in Iowa is one of them that disperses such money). I think it was estimated that the Village assembled almost fifty sources of funding to be completely financed. Of course most of the sources ultimately got back to the taxpayer. So David do not be modest, your first estimate was far closer than you seem to think. But for the sake of argument lets look at only the $41,473. A $140,000 house gets a mortgage WITH a guaranteed first 30%. Cost to the City - nothing but a 5% or 10% escrow, which the City gets back. Lets say you escrow a whopping 15% (just to be safe) and set aside $5000 from that 41,473. This of course will give you a loan at about .5 to .75% less than Market on a thirty-year mortgage. Now lets pay down that loan to $110,000 for affordable homeownership. On today's Market the monthly Mortgage payment for the family would be $590.50. That figure might change this morning at say 11:00 AM. It might go up or down by as much as $5.00 or $10.00. So for the sake of argument lets just call it $600.00 per month. In this situation a family now owns a house for less than the guidelines for the rent on a two-bedroom apartment under required low income housing guidelines. AND the City has saved $6,473 in taxpayer dollars. Now of course if you go after all those other pools of money you would have an even lower amount, but lets just leave it there for comparison. Now lets look at the tax creating benefit of that single-family house compared to an affordable rental unit. Just guess which one pays more per unit for property taxes. Folks, this is not idle speculation. The rates I quoted are in a number of Internet sites for anyone to find. The real magic is in how the politicians keep it hidden. For those who think such a program should not be set up for poor people, let's start looking at the real cost of keeping someone in poverty. Don't even consider the human suffering and decreased happiness and well being of the family. Let's just look at real dollars. How much does it cost for twenty years of subsidized rent? How much does it cost for increased medical costs? How much does it cost for other social services? How much does it cost per person to the criminal justice system for the average poverty stricken child who enters a life of crime? In these hard financial times, with budget cuts, We just cannot afford the luxury of keeping people in poverty. We need to help people out of it, and the best vehicle is affordable homeownership. The next thing is concentration of poverty. There will always be a group of people who wish to, or need to, rent. Bill Cullen's suggestion of rent vouchers makes sense for that reason. It allows people the freedom to choose where they live and is far cheaper for taxpayers. More importantly it de-concentrates poverty and gives new opportunities for people. But lets go one step further shall we? How about returning to a system where individual small landlords are given a tax advantage if their property is not in an impacted neighborhood and they rent to a low-income person. We give such tax advantages and financing advantages to Large Land Lords. Most such advantages for Large Land Lords are designed to exclude small landlords. I wonder why? Could it be that Large Land Lords had a little more money and a lot more influence on the creation of those programs? Remember the largest industry in Minneapolis as well as most large cities is poverty, and business is good. All the above looks at only Costs. It does not factor in the increased productivity of a child that is the product of a stabilized family. Keeping to the dollar and cents thyme only, how many more taxes will that child pay into the system over their lifetime? From a purely selfish stance, we just cannot afford the luxury of keeping people in poverty to benefit the Poverty Industry any longer. As a society we could not afford the social and moral cost before, but now as taxpayers we can no longer support the Poverty Industry. We need to start some good old fiscal conservative revolution in this country. We Democrats have antecedents such as Thomas Jefferson; we need to get back to Jefferson's revolutionary philosophy. All men are created equal! They are endowed by their maker with certain inalienable rights! Among which is the pursuit of happiness! My question is this: How in hell are you going to be happy in poverty, when concentrated with other impoverished people and with no opportunity to get out? Homeownership is not the only solution, but it is the best one I know. It is one that has
RE: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
While I would agree that the most important influence for a child growing up is that of a stable, nurturing family, I think it's also important to realize that one of the larger issues facing impoverished families is the constant struggle to just survive, whether they're receiving government assistance of not. I do not propose a rental property cap by neighborhood to remove people (from my neighborhood) that I no longer wish to live next to. If it were that simple, my wife and I would sell and move elsewhere. I do so because on a daily basis I have the opportunity to wathc the interaction of my neighbors. My oberservations are as follows: When a child in my neighborhood finially gets it and realizes that they, through hard work, have a right to live a life other than what they see, they become outcasts. Not through the petty bullying that most of us remember growing-up, but through much more dangerous and malicious methods. In my neighborhood, if a young male attempts to make a different life for himself he will be continually threatened and eventually beat-up. His self-esteem will be eroded through constant derogatory remarks regarding his ethnic background (especially by those of his own race). Most end-up failing in their dreams because they're not strong enough to take it. Those that eventually succeed do so because their parents care enough to either move, or ship them off to lives with friends/relatives in a nicer neighborhood. Anyone that doubts these dynamics exist on a regular basis only need to come spend some time in the 'hood. Many more of the kids would escape poverty (and break the cycle) on their own, if the neighborhoods they lived in were better influences on them. Making housing affordable (whether it's rented or owned) won't change these dynamics. Only deconcentrating the number of rental properties by neighborhood will. It's been my experience that good neighborhoods only exist when the majority of its residents are unwilling to accept behaviour that is counter-productive to having a safe, healthy neighborhood. Currently, neighborhoods such as Jordan don't fit that criteria. If something is stolen in my neighborhood, the cops aren't called, as many of the residents in my neighborhood see the cops as more of a problem than they do the person that stole from them. Homeowners and renters alike, for the most part, turn a blind-eye to activities such as drug dealing and gambling. The reasons typically center around the fear of reprisal or the desire to fit-in. I find a certain irony in the fact that many of the dealers I call-on now recognize me and my vehicle and I consistently hear them telling me that I need to get the F out of the hood. The irony? Many of them live in the northern suburbs, or South Minneapolis and only come to my neighborhood because their crimes are more readily accepted by the residents here. It's easier for them to do business. _ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
RE: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
I attended high school in North Minneapolis and have experienced what you speak of. Some have the attitude that if you work hard to better yourself you are somehow 'acting white,' a phrase I often heard spoken about people moving out to better neighborhoods. Some people also think that to leave 'the hood' you give up your roots and your respect. Perhaps it is this mentality that is plaguing some of the neighborhoods such as Jordan, to stay there is hell but to leave it's a sin. Sean Ryan Audubon (Also, being a white male from Northeast people often assumed I was rich based simply on those facts when in reality I was not.) From: Dennis Plante [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue? Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:04:04 -0500 While I would agree that the most important influence for a child growing up is that of a stable, nurturing family, I think it's also important to realize that one of the larger issues facing impoverished families is the constant struggle to just survive, whether they're receiving government assistance of not. I do not propose a rental property cap by neighborhood to remove people (from my neighborhood) that I no longer wish to live next to. If it were that simple, my wife and I would sell and move elsewhere. I do so because on a daily basis I have the opportunity to wathc the interaction of my neighbors. My oberservations are as follows: When a child in my neighborhood finially gets it and realizes that they, through hard work, have a right to live a life other than what they see, they become outcasts. Not through the petty bullying that most of us remember growing-up, but through much more dangerous and malicious methods. In my neighborhood, if a young male attempts to make a different life for himself he will be continually threatened and eventually beat-up. His self-esteem will be eroded through constant derogatory remarks regarding his ethnic background (especially by those of his own race). Most end-up failing in their dreams because they're not strong enough to take it. Those that eventually succeed do so because their parents care enough to either move, or ship them off to lives with friends/relatives in a nicer neighborhood. Anyone that doubts these dynamics exist on a regular basis only need to come spend some time in the 'hood. Many more of the kids would escape poverty (and break the cycle) on their own, if the neighborhoods they lived in were better influences on them. Making housing affordable (whether it's rented or owned) won't change these dynamics. Only deconcentrating the number of rental properties by neighborhood will. It's been my experience that good neighborhoods only exist when the majority of its residents are unwilling to accept behaviour that is counter-productive to having a safe, healthy neighborhood. Currently, neighborhoods such as Jordan don't fit that criteria. If something is stolen in my neighborhood, the cops aren't called, as many of the residents in my neighborhood see the cops as more of a problem than they do the person that stole from them. Homeowners and renters alike, for the most part, turn a blind-eye to activities such as drug dealing and gambling. The reasons typically center around the fear of reprisal or the desire to fit-in. I find a certain irony in the fact that many of the dealers I call-on now recognize me and my vehicle and I consistently hear them telling me that I need to get the F out of the hood. The irony? Many of them live in the northern suburbs, or South Minneapolis and only come to my neighborhood because their crimes are more readily accepted by the residents here. It's easier for them to do business. _ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
After reading the post that suggests tax dollars go to subsidizing renters in more affluent neighborhoods, I'm not sure how this alone solves anything? As far as I can see, the problems in Jordan or Hawthorne have little to do with the percentage of properties that are rental vs. homeowner alone. While concentrated poverty is a problem, I think the concerns in those neighborhoods have more to do with the fact that there's just a lot of damn poor people who have little opportunity to break out of that situation than it does that they live in rental property. As pointed out, there are plenty of areas in Minneapolis that have high percentages of rental property without the problems of Hawthorne or Jordan. How does taking a poor family and moving them to Kenwood or Loring Park help them? They're still poor. Even with subsidized housing, they're still unable to afford many of life's necessities. Are they supposed to suddenly develop job skills because they're no longer surrounded by drug dealers and trash on the streets? If they're minorities, are they suddenly no longer at risk of racial profiling? If they're disabled, will they suddenly become abled? If they don't participate in their communities because they're working two or three jobs to get by, how does moving the a more expensive area of the city help with that? We can't just look at one aspect of an unfortunate person's or family's life and say that's the thing that needs to be fixed for them to get back on track. We need to coordinate efforts instead of continuing the fractured approach that we have now with the state doing some things, the county doing others, the city doing still others and nonprofits doing yet more things, with little communication or coordination taking place. That's one thing I hope to see improved through the African American Men Project. The folks working on that have figured out that there's no one single issue or problem that is the cause of the kinds of problems we see in Jordan or Hawthorne. We need a multi-pronged strategy that focuses not just on housing or jobs, but also education, family structure, health, community involvement and criminal justice. All in one shared effort, not the disparate programs that focus on single issues like we have now. I imagine this will be something of an uphill battle, seeking strategic change in entrenched programs that have already taken or are at risk of huge budget cuts. But I hope people can open their eyes to the larger picture instead of continuing to focus on just one or two trees amid the forest of problems that plague some of our neighborhoods. Mark Snyder Windom Park TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
Dave Stack is correct that I was thinking primarily of adults with my comments. Children are a different situation and deserve additional attention, especially because they have essentially no control over the environment they live in. From what I've seen, the biggest obstacle facing children in poor families in Minneapolis are unstable living situations that cause them to move frequently and also change schools frequently, often leading to their falling behind. If direct housing assistance to families, either as Jim Graham has suggested by subsidizing home ownership or as Dennis Plante has suggested by deconcentrating poverty, helps solve the problem of school-aged children moving around too much, that might be worth the cost to taxpayers right there. However, I don't know that neighborhood surroundings matter as much as stability of the individual child's home. Who is the bigger influence in a child's life - their parents or their parents' neighbors? With the exception of extreme poverty where meals are missed and such, are kids really that aware that they're poor? I grew up in a single-parent and poor family, but I have to say that I didn't really notice much difference between me and the other kids until maybe around junior high school when we actually started to pay attention to things like clothes and what brands kids wore. Or maybe it was just me. Does anyone know whether kids in poor neighborhoods who do live in relatively stable situations where they're not moving constantly and have responsible parents do better at avoiding things like drugs, gangs or other criminal activity? I would guess that they do. Again, that's why I say that focusing on just one aspect of the lives of struggling families, in this case, where they live, will not lead towards a real solution for the poverty and other ills that plague our most impacted neighborhoods. We need to address all of the obstacles in a coordinated fashion. Where there's substandard housing and concentrated poverty, there are also going to be the health issues, the educational issues, the job skill issues, etc. Addressing each of those issues in a vacuum is what we've been doing pretty much forever and it should be fairly obvious by now that it doesn't work very well. The other problem I have is that whether you go with the Graham idea or the Plante idea, both are awfully tough sells from a political standpoint. As distasteful as it is, we do have to maintain some awareness of how policy in Minneapolis is viewed by the folks at the Capitol. I'm willing to bet that they'd look at something like the Graham proposal and say Gee, Minneapolis has enough revenue to be giving away houses to the poor. They can stand to have their LGA slashed some more. Even though this wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of the situation, when has that ever stopped the folks on the Hill from sticking it to us? As for the Plante idea, while I certainly understand the reasoning behind deconcentrating poverty, I'm still willing to bet that folks in those more well-off neighborhoods are going to see it simply as being told to take on poor families and associated problems they'll bring with them from Jordan or Hawthorne or wherever. And they'll balk, just like they do when the issue is ever brought up of locating supportive housing outside the huge cluster in Whittier. There are areas in NE where just saying affordable housing or increasing housing density will get you a dirty look from some folks. Start talking about something like Plante suggests and you'd probably hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way to Duluth. I'm not proud to have some of these folks for neighbors and I'm glad to say it's not as bad as it used to be when I was growing up, but I'm also too realistic to pretend they still don't exist. So how do you sell folks on these ideas? The numbers alone won't do it. You'll need to come up with an argument that is good enough to overcome the cynical reactions, the emotional responses and the NIMBY syndrome. Mark Snyder Windom Park TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
Mark Snyder wrote: From what I've seen, the biggest obstacle facing children in poor families in Minneapolis are unstable living situations that cause them to move frequently and also change schools frequently, often leading to their falling behind. WM: Both deconcentration and homeownership could help. What the landscape looks like in project housing is that no one who is succeeding lives there. Why? Because when one's parents begin to succeed, they automatically have to move out because they no longer meet income guidelines. So, no one with role model potential stays. Being kids, you don't know why these families leave, you just know they leave. Kids also tend to know more families like their own and fewer who are somehow different. However, I doubt that housing stability is achievable for some folks, even if it is underwritten. In some families, times get tough, they quit paying the rent (or mortgage). It's very difficult, when families and clans have high drug and alcohol usage. That becomes what kids know, and for them those behaviors constitute normalcy. (The first time you step over a 10-yr old junkie to get into a building, something goes out of you as though it's leaking copiously from your very pores.) If what you have is normal and TV is just fantasy, then where do you look for something different and possibly achievable. However, I don't know that neighborhood surroundings matter as much as stability of the individual child's home. Who is the bigger influence in a child's life - their parents or their parents' neighbors? WM: Kids don't know they're poor if everyone around them has the same situation, more or less. Further, there are differences if they are the children of any family which views its situation as temporary. It's when they can look at grandparents and great grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins and see that this has gone on for a very long time that they lose hope. What puts the kids in the way of guns and drugs is that sense of hopelessness. My parents had squat, they were not well educated--high school only and, of course, dad was not a big believer in legitimate work. But I'm sure that they were saying to us that we would go to college one day while we were still in our cribs, they were certainly saying it loud and clear by the time I could understand it. Their friends reflected that too. They had friends at the U of Cincinnati who came over to visit. The Ps were also sticklers for school and learning and devised games to further that notion in us. I don't see the parents of kids who are the worst off providing anything like a compare and contrast situation. The other problem I have is that whether you go with the Graham idea or the Plante idea, both are awfully tough sells from a political standpoint. WM: Some folks, exemplefied by the current governor, appear to take the attitude that all their privilege is not privilege, but the fruits of their own hard work. Rural folks appear to know something different. People work hard at farming, for example, and they're still poor. Even though poverty can be blamed on the weather and, say, hog futures, it's still the fact of life so many deal with. In small communities it's harder to separate oneself out by income, since the whole town may be only ten by ten blocks or smaller. Everybody knows some family that's still hunting, fishing, and trapping to bring in enough revenue and food, though they may own the house they live in. The farmers all seem to have a winter job, farm wives are trying to bring in a little extra with a part time job in town. (I always think it's important to read Dickens about this point. He can describe urban poverty better than anyone else.) Even though their representatives may deny it, rural and small town folks know that poverty is not about laziness or some other contrary trait in most cases. As for the Plante idea, while I certainly understand the reasoning behind deconcentrating poverty, I'm still willing to bet that folks in those more well-off neighborhoods are going to see it simply as being told to take on poor families and associated problems they'll bring with them from Jordan or Hawthorne or wherever. And they'll balk, just like they do when the issue is ever brought up of locating supportive housing outside the huge cluster in Whittier. WM: The same way the better off balk at everything that is perceived to be a threat to their comfort level. Perhaps the only way deconcentration would work is to buy down mortgages for folks. It surely would work better than subsidized apartment complexes in better off neighborhoods, which practically scream poverty. There are areas in NE where just saying affordable housing or increasing housing density will get you a dirty look from some folks. WM: You don't have to go to NE for that. I don't want a much higher density where I am. At this point it would require taking houses down to accomodate
Re: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
Mark Snyder writes: From what I've seen, the biggest obstacle facing children in poor families in Minneapolis are unstable living situations that cause them to move frequently and also change schools frequently, often leading to their falling behind. If direct housing assistance to families, either as Jim Graham has suggested by subsidizing home ownership or as Dennis Plante has suggested by de-concentrating poverty, helps solve the problem of school-aged children moving around too much, that might be worth the cost to taxpayers right there. However, I don't know that neighborhood surroundings matter as much as stability of the individual child's home. Who is the bigger influence in a child's life - their parents or their parents' neighbors? With the exception of extreme poverty where meals are missed and such, are kids really that aware that they're poor? I grew up in a single-parent and poor family, but I have to say that I didn't really notice much difference between me and the other kids until maybe around junior high school when we actually started to pay attention to things like clothes and what brands kids wore. Or maybe it was just me. Does anyone know whether kids in poor neighborhoods who do live in relatively stable situations where they're not moving constantly and have responsible parents do better at avoiding things like drugs, gangs or other criminal activity? I would guess that they do. The other problem I have is that whether you go with the Graham idea or the Plante idea, both are awfully tough sells from a political standpoint. Jim Graham did not suggest, giving people houses. What I suggested is that it is ridiculous to subsidize cheap apartments for MORE than it would cost to give them a good house. My suggestion is to create a guaranteed loan program (whose actual costs are almost nothing) to make mortgages more affordable and to create a down payment assistance program coupled with supportive homeownership assistance. This creates homeownership units at a small percentage of the amount of subsidy to keep them in poverty apartments. It is an INVESTMENT because the new homeowner pays it back in the form of his or her taxes. Mark is correct; the most important thing in a child's life is a stable home environment. The best means to creating that stability is homeownership! There is more to that stability than just living in one place. Families with homes also have more stable home lives as a rule, with stability for the adult parents also. This of course impacts the security for the children and a belief in the future. That hopefulness creates reasons to go to school and have dreams of better things in the future. Being around positive role models and associating with friends that offer opportunities also contributes to a child's future and even more hopefulness. Being surrounded by a community where all children are expected to succeed also helps a child's success. Much of the damage that poverty inflicts on children is a hopelessness that creates both powerlessness and social isolation. Poverty (aided by some good liberal folks) teaches children that because of that poverty they will have no chance for a future. When the child has learned this well enough they don't bother to even try. This creates more than just economic poverty; it creates a poverty of the soul. Children from impoverished families and neighborhoods are expected to fail. Should we be surprised when after learning this at school they then follow this blueprint for failure? We must re-establish the hope that was once the American dream for all of our children. We must start expecting ALL our children to succeed! Mark speaks of how this affordable homeownership would NOT be acceptable to Republicans. I am not sure he is correct. Isn't it the Republican mantra that people should not be given things but given opportunities? Don't Republicans often refer to the America of their parents who came home from the WWII and bought a house with the GI Bill? A guaranteed loan program or small State investment in subsidizing homeownership down payments does exactly that. It removes families from social service costs to the taxpayer, and makes them taxpayers themselves. Taxpayers who return that small investment with interest. Sounds like fiscal conservativeness to me. It is even the program that is currently being pushed by the Secretary Martinez directed HUD. Even the Republicans realize that a small investment in affordable homeownership is the answer to bringing poor families out of poverty. I am sometimes ashamed that my fellow Democrats have not been caring enough to realize this. Sure the Republicans might not be totally serious, but at least they are talking about it. The party that is supposed to care for people needs to start acting like it. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey was about giving people opportunities to get OUT of poverty, NOT about how to better exist in it.
RE: [Mpls] Is Rental Property the Issue?
Mark Snyder said: So how do you sell folks on these ideas? The numbers alone won't do it. You'll need to come up with an argument that is good enough to overcome the cynical reactions, the emotional responses and the NIMBY syndrome. Bill Cullen Responds: The answer is two fold: 1) Jim Graham is right. Help low income families purchase houses. Their investment will help them escape poverty and give them emotional investment in the neighborhood. It will cost less than $158,828. 2) For the low income families that do not want to (or can't) purchase a home, help them pay for rent in the form of rent stamps. In that case, there is no NIMBY because there is no government identified locations. The contract is between the landlord and the tenant (with partial payments from the city). The waiting list for a section 8 voucher is so long that they no longer even put names on the list. But instead of increasing funding to a program like section 8 (or rent stamps), we fund poverty pimps to build affordable housing that concentrate poverty and require on-going subsidies. Remember this: If we subsidize the rent for a low income family, then ALL RENTAL HOUSING IS AFFORDABLE. It opens up EVERY neighborhood. Bill Cullen Hopkins Uptown. P.S. Thanks to Jim Graham for the Poverty Pimps name. I like it. :) TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
