Urban Planning Blog

An excellent interactive map of New York City with income levels for various neighborhoods in reference to affordable housing. Don’t even click on the Upper East Side. [Source: Envisioning Development: What is Affordable Housing?]

The nation’s sprawling suburbs may have been a good place to grow up, but they’re a tough place to grow old. Here’s how towns are beginning to ‘retrofit’ their neighborhoods—and what your community might look like in the future [source].

Interesting on how changing demographics are making retrofitting suburbia almost necessary. However, this could also mean increased focus on developing communities in alternative locations with different characteristics. Housing coming a full circle?

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com is hosting the first ever Reburbia competition: a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs and have just announced the finalists.

Researchers discovered homeowners, on average, outweighed renters by 12 pounds. In addition to excess weight, female homeowners were also carrying around more aggravation, making less time for leisure, and were less likely to spend time with friends.

via
Journal of Urban Economics (under review)
.

“Neighbors can hear the alarm so they call us, but when we get up to the home, it's vacant, locked up and we're unable to access them,”

Such calls are distracting firefighters from other more important calls in inhabited homes and putting a strain on the public emergency system.

via ABC15 News.

If you took out a mortgage in 2007, there's an over 20 percent chance you'll default on it.

via NPR: Your Odds Of Defaulting.

As the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most-populous state, Lucknow has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural areas, swelling the city’s population. Yet the city hasn’t completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don’t have sewage service, leaving much of the waste to flow directly into the main river, the Gomti, which has become a stinking cesspool.

Wall Street Journal has an article on India’s megacities with the tagline that they are choking India. But is that really what is happening in India? There is an inherent understanding that there is a conflicting dichotomy between urban and rural regions. But even if it does exist, quotes in the WSJ article itself contradict its byline:

Shami Shafi, a 35-year-old laborer in Lucknow, has seen his daily income drop by half in recent months to 50 rupees, or about $1, for carrying bags of potatoes and other goods in a local market. But “I’m not going back to my village,” he says. If work gets harder to find, “I’ll just go to another city.”

Atanu Dey, noted economist and widely-respected proponent of urban India points at the real culprits of urban problems.

This first-of-its-kind learning conference will help you identify policies that have been successful in other communities and could work in yours.

National Housing Conference (NHC) and its research affiliate, the Center for Housing Policy is hosting the “Solutions for Working Families” Learning Conference from June 28th to 30th.

In Camden, N.J., perhaps the poorest American city I regularly visit, I photograph what I call paired houses: two dwellings, side by side, one occupied, the other empty. Those living in the occupied home often have their lives made more difficult by what happens on the other side of a shared wall.

The effect of your neighbors homes on your property is a given in real estate. We tend to control what our neighbors do just because what they do affects us as well even though it doesn’t happen on your property. But what can we do when there are no neighbors to speak of (or to)? Camilo Jose Vergara photographs dwellings where one is occupied and other is not. He talks to the owners of the occupied homes about the dangers of vacancy next door.

Can we relate this to the justification of bailing out owners of foreclosed homes because the state of their foreclosed homes affects us all?

Research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that since 1995 federal funding for low-income housing assistance has dropped by over 20 percent, both as a share of GDP and non-military discretionary spending. Meanwhile, the number of low-income renters spending more than half of their income on housing costs has increased by over 33 percent since 2000.

In the current housing crisis, low-income homeowners continue to face the brunt.

“Foreclosure rates aren’t really that high unless you live in Arizona, California, Florida or Nevada” [source]. William Lucy and Jeff Herlitz at the University of Virginia find that nearly 62 percent of the foreclosures in 2008 were in the above mentioned four states.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.One of the best explanations of the current credit crisis. It shows how ordinary homeowners defaulting aren’t solely to blame and the problems are systemic tracing back to the lowering of the Fed rate and repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 that allowed creation of mortgage-backed securities. But I’m no economist and reasons are far more complex that I could even begin to explain here. The sociological impacts on the neighborhoods however are only beginning to show with abandoned homes that are only making the problem worse.

Love dabbling in real estate data? Zillow, the online real estate website is looking for a Data and Analytics Specialist. Although I’m quite well versed in ArcGIS, unfortunately my knowledge of SQL is pretty limited which is one of the important criteria for the position. As Steven Levitt says, if you get the job after reading about it on here, don’t forget to double the value of my home in their database

Downturn in the housing market leads to rise in milk prices? Alex Tabbrok at Marginal Revolutions observed this curious correlation in Vermont. Recycling is at the heart of the relationship; who would have thunk!

The NY Times Rent or Buy Calculator compares the cost of renting versus buying a home. Enter your monthly rent, projected price of buying a house, mortgage rate, and property tax and the calculator will spit out the number of years after which buying is better than renting.

An extremely useful tool especially in today’s sliding housing market where some homeowners are experiencing negative equity. But as with any online tool, don’t replace it with the experience of a human. Trust but verify.