Is Low Income Housing Gone For Good?

My is answer is yes.

Low income housing is taking a hit on the Coast……many of the units that were destroyed by Katrina are being rebuilt and will be more like Section 8 that the traditional low income housing.

I would expect the housing to change….why?…the state ignores the low income person.  To them they are a group that has no champion…therefore it is about profit not people.

I watched a local housing authority go from an organization of 15 maintenance people to about 5 on the Coast.  That number sadly hinders the quality of the work and repairs.

The people suffer, but it is NOT a maintenance man’s fault they can only do what management allows them to do.  I mean I am talking about a management team that did not want homes to have flowers growing.  The only thing that stopped the plant massacre was the intervention of one Trent Lott.

The housing authority went about planting many, many trees some of which were dead and the contractor was not forced to replace the dead ones.  Just a minor waste of money, but you can see where I am going with this.

To save money, the authority uses contractors instead of in-house people…..but I ask if it really saves money?  At one point the authority had very capable electricians, plumbers, carpenters and such.  And as normal for Mississippi they were paid a lot less than the going job market…..but yet these people have since gone and replaced with low bidder contractors, that have to make return visit after return visit to make good their screw ups.  Does that save money?

Still looks like the residents are not that important, saving money and giving management their raises are.

Sou. MS Is Growing

That is the head line in the South Mississippi Sun-Herald.  According to the report:

Mississippi registered only slight gains in the latest population estimates being released today by federal officials, but the six Coast counties all showed positive growth, with Stone County leading the way.

Numbers from the population division of the U.S. Census Bureau, comparing population from July 2007 to July 2008, show that Stone County grew by 3.1 percent, to a population of 16,025. George County gained 2.1 percent more residents in the same period, for a total population of 22,406.

If someone wants to build a house, the land value tax is very high near the developed urban areas while very low in the rural areas.  It’s less expensive to develop in the undeveloped areas so people will natural spread out.  Now that can explain the raise in the other county’s without putting everyone to sleep with economic theories.

Yes Stone County is growing….but it is not so much that the ads are helping people relocate, but rather those people are trying to avoid urban sprawl occuring on the Coast.  It is more that cost of living is less.  Cheaper rent and land are a prime motivation for the move.  It is just a development known as “leap frog development”.

It is simply economics that is driving the move….in the economic climate that the country is going through would explain it more than some think tank trying to take credit for the county’s growth.

Barbour Under Fire

Mississippi organizations are suing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for allowing Gov. Haley Barbour to divert nearly $600 million in federal funding away from affordable housing recovery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and into a pet port project that Congress had refused earlier to fund with controversial earmarked money. The Mississippi Conference of the NAACP and the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center are taking HUD to task for allowing Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to divert almost $600 million in money slated for the construction of moderately priced housing and rental units for a commercial port expansion project. Plaintiffs seek a declaration that HUD Secretary Steven C. Preston “was required to review and assess” whether or not the state’s port expansion proposal met FHA guidelines and Community Development Block Grant’s low-to-moderate income benefit requirements. They also seek a declaration that the HUD secretary violated his duties in approving the port plan and an injunction stopping the $570 million heading to the ports.

Congress appropriated $5.481 billion in emergency recovery funds to Mississippi in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The suit claims HUD acknowledged at the time that the primary purpose of the $5 billion was to address critical housing needs, not commercial development.

Fifty percent of the money was slated for 50 low- and moderate-income housing, but the suit claims HUD ultimately approved waivers of the requirement to the point where Barbour and the Mississippi Development Authority was allowed to drop the state’s commitment to lower-income households from 50 percent to 13 percent, despite median households catching the brunt of the storm. Sixty-five percent of decimated properties in the coastal counties of Harrison, Hancock and Jackson that suffered storm-surge damage were medium- to low-income units, and 57 percent of units suffering flood damage in those areas were below the U.S. median household income level.
Congress appropriated the $5 billion in CDBG grant money for Mississippi the year Katrina struck in 2005. In 2006 it gave the state another $400 million. But Barbour and Mississippi Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran were pushing other projects in 2006. Barbour was gunning for big congressional money to expand the port, and worked in tandem with the Republican senators to move the CSX railroad further inland. Estimates put the railroad project at about $750 million, and—in the wake of Republican Alaska Ted Steven’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” battle in the 2006 National Appropriations Bill—Congress began cutting sensational appropriations. Barbour’s railroad and port consequently bit the dust.

In 2007, Barbour conceived the idea of salvaging the port expansion by diverting the $600 million from housing on the Gulf Coast.

Coast Financial Outlook

Sales vs. population

Before Katrina, South Mississippi had built a normal cycle of purchases with a normal population. Although the Coast lost an estimated 40,000 people after Katrina, initially there were at least that many volunteers spending money on the Coast, said McFarland.

Now about 25,000 residents have returned, McFarland said, but “we’ve never had a population loss before, and this time we’ve gone three years with less population.”

Retail sales-tax collections, which spiked after Katrina when people were replacing everything from cars to clothing, have dropped back down, but are still slightly above pre-Katrina levels.

“That being the case, you can argue that our local challenge is less about the national economy than it is resulting from a population that is down about 7 percent,” he said.

New and used vehicle sales

The lower population should also show up in sales of new and used cars and trucks, but McFarland said registrations are the same as 2003 and doing better than the first half of 2004.

“Cars are the biggest single purchase people make other than their homes,” and he is optimistic car sales will begin an upswing.

This is the third year since Katrina, when many people had to buy cars to replace those destroyed during the storm. Most people who buy new cars trade them in between the third and sixth years.

Housing

The upswing in post-Katrina home sales leveled off and now has dropped on the Coast.

The lower asking prices and bigger inventory of homes for sale has brought more “lookers” to the local market, but “housing sales are down” for the year, he said. “Through October 2007, 3,373 homes were sold at an average price of $167,695. Through October this year, only 2,448 homes were sold at an average price of $151,955.”

Employment

Unemployment rates in Mississippi fell in October from 7.5 to 6.9 percent; the rates locally were 5.6 percent in Harrison County, 5.9 in Hancock County and 6.1 in Jackson County.

Even with the lower population on the Coast in 2008, “the work force in Harrison and Hancock counties is almost identical to 2004,” McFarland said. With the demand for workers in 2006 and 2007, “a lot of people who hadn’t worked in a long time entered the work force and the labor force swelled. Others took a second job. But now there are fewer jobs available, causing a lot of those recent workers to begin to move out of the work force.”

They make all sound so good and level that it is just amazing……further analysis will be done….

Housing Center Shifts Focus

The Hancock Housing Resource Center is shifting from disaster-recovery mode into a permanent nonprofit agency to help with housing needs.

Interim Director Rhonda Rhodes had been appointed as the center’s new director. The former grants and development manager for the Hancock County Chamber of Commerce, Rhodes will head a permanent staff of four, including two housing counselors.

The center is gaining its independence as funding arrives for several programs to help residents with housing.

Rhodes said the center will receive a portion of $15 million in federal grant money to be disbursed based on need to Coast housing-resource agencies established in each county after Katrina. The center is guaranteed enough of the funding to rehabilitate or rebuild at least 35 homes.

A second program, REACH, matches down-payment money from employers to help workers become homeowners. The center will provide mandatory home-ownership counseling for REACH participants.

The center also is the lead Hancock County agency for the Mississippi cottage program that provides cottages to families who lost their homes in the storm

LA: Recovery Housing Still Lacking

Public officials say they have made progress on an alternative housing program in the seven months since Gov. Bobby Jindal stripped the project from the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency and gave it to the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

But through two governors, two contracts with the same builder and a change in the state agency responsible for oversight, none of the projected 500 or so Louisiana Cottages have been built; and there are no groundbreakings scheduled for Louisiana’s $75 million share of the $400 million pilot program that Congress authorized in 2006.

In Mississippi, despite negative attention last week for a few hundred of their alternative trailers being condemned for Hurricane Gustav damage, the state Emergency Management Agency has placed 2,800 Mississippi Cottage units; 300 more await delivery to nonprofit agencies that will provide them to disadvantaged Mississippians.

AL: Going Green

Lulu’s at Homeport Marina hoisted a 12-foot windmill fixed atop a 45-foot pole Tuesday. The turbine swiveled, found the easterly breeze, and its trio of blades, shaped a bit like flooring knives, began to spin in a 13-mph wind.

That the windmill, wired to a nearby tiki bar, was generating electricity was a given. What’s unknown is if it will lower the restaurant’s monthly power bill, or if, due to special charges for part-time users of the local power grid, Lulu’s actually will see a net increase in its costs.

As more businesses seek to “go green” both for public relations and cost savings, the project serves as a test case to see if wind power will fly in south Baldwin County.

All the homes built in the town of SaltAire on Alabama 193 on the western shore of Mobile Bay will be designed to reduce water and energy use by at least 20 percent.

The developers and builders are participating in General Electric’s Ecoimagination program and will be one of 11 communities in the country to build under the GE guidelines, according to Nick Noel, a spokesman for GE who is based in St. Louis, Mo.

“We wanted to be on the leading edge,” said George Jones, president of SaltAire Development Group. “We went after something that was quantifiable and achievable.”

Ecoimagination homes feature a dashboard installed on the wall that allows homeowners to monitor their energy and indoor water use on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The cost of installing the dashboard and the wiring averages about $1,700, according to Jim Wilkie, general manager of SaltAire.

Other features in the SaltAire houses will include GE Energy Star appliance and an indoor and outdoor lighting package that uses up to 75 percent less electricity.

Masco Contractor Services has partnered with GE to review the home plans and incorporate its Environments for Living certified green standards in each house. The standards dictate tight construction, fresh-air ventilation, improved insulation and efficient heating and cooling equipment.

LA: New Housing Strategy

Fearing that federal recovery dollars for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike won’t fully cover residents’ crucial home repair needs, Louisiana officials are devising a new state strategy for housing relief.

Their fundamental concern: making sure that billions of dollars already spent on homes damaged by Katrina and Rita in 2005 won’t go to waste.

Nothing akin to the state’s massive Road Home recovery program for Katrina and Rita exists for Gustav and Ike. Victims of this month’s storms have their private insurance, but named storm deductibles of 2 percent to 5 percent are sure to leave gaps for those facing major repairs

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has stepped forward with more extensive home repair aid than it offered after Katrina and Rita, but it’s capped at $28,800 for each household and is designed only to make houses or apartments livable again. The FEMA process will, however, assist property owners in applying for low-interest Small Business Administration loans, which are designed to restore homes to pre-storm conditions.

That program, funded by about $10 billion channeled through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was supposed to combine with private insurance settlements to recover the value of owner-occupied homes destroyed or badly damaged in the 2005 storms. It has paid more than 117,000 homeowners, but the unprecedented effort took more than two years to pay the bulk of the applicants and three years on, tens of thousands are still waiting for payment, in many cases having appealed an earlier decision.

FL: McCain Is Your Pal

Hurricanes aren’t the only force to slam Florida in the recent past. Grinding economic recession has taken its own toll over the past two years.

One in seven Florida homeowners face losing their home or are behind on their mortgage payments, a new study from the Mortgage Bankers Association reported last week. This figure is well above the already staggeringly high national average of of 9.2 percent of Americans in a similar position.

John McCain helped block efforts in Congress to allow Floridians facing foreclosure to keep their homes, preferring to lecture them, along with Americans in general, to get a second job and stop making bad choices. McCain, who owns seven homes reportedly worth an average of $2 million each, has also refused to address economic problems head on, saying repeatedly the economy is “fundamentally sound.”

Overall, the economic crisis has dramatically impacted Floridians, especially since George W. Bush took office. According to Census Bureau data, poverty in Florida is up 17 percent since 2000, swelling to over 2.1 million Floridians. The price of a gallon of milk went up by 27 percent in the past year, while eggs have shot up 38 percent. Food prices are higher across the board in the state.
On the question of creating a national catastrophic insurance program to help Floridians (and millions of other Americans across the country) recover from hurricanes and other natural disasters, McCain first supported the idea and then backtracked, noting that he “campaigned against national catastrophic insurance” and claiming that FEMA is enough.

John McCain has refused to put forward serious new policies to tackle these issues, because he believes that economic problems are mainly “psychological,” as he told FOX News last April. What he has offered instead are proposals that are remarkably similar to George W. Bush, prompting one newspaper to editorialize, “McCain doesn’t like to hear it, but his economic plans really are an extension of Bush administration policies.”

McCain’s avoidance of economic issues, his re-hash of Republican Party stances and his pledge to continue the Bush administration agenda during his speech to his party’s convention elicited a sharp response from the St. Petersburg Times, which criticized the Arizona Republican for failing “to deliver on change.”
The Times editorial also questioned McCain’s judgment based on his choice of Palin as running mate. “But the real issue is not Palin; it is McCain’s judgment. The candidate who would be the oldest first-term president chose a running mate he barely knows who is not prepared to be president. There were far more qualified men and women available. This appears to be a last-minute political calculation based more on gut instinct than thoughtful deliberation.”

Floridians are increasingly aware they can’t afford to vote for the same politicians from the same party with the same policies as George W. Bush.

MS: Housing Woes

In the three years since Katrina clobbered the Coast, nothing has been done to fix the problems inside Bullard’s public housing unit, for which she pays nearly $400 a month. In fact, none of the 75 barracks-style units at Woodland Park on Railroad Street have been touched.

Brown water stains darken her ceiling. A small white stove in the kitchen is rusty after three years under a leak. She uses old newspapers to sop up rainwater in the bedroom and moves plants and pots around to collect dripping water in the living room.

On Thursday, Bullard stood on her front lawn and told her story to Gov. Haley Barbour and HUD Secretary Steve Preston.

The government sent $105 million after Katrina to rehabilitate public housing on the Coast, and $2.9 million of that was for the Long Beach Housing Authority’s 75 units.

But in three years all that’s been done is some roof patching and other exterior touch-ups, and that work was largely funded by insurance money.

LBHA Executive Director LeNelle Davis said one of the biggest hurdles was a federal restriction on building public housing too close to railroad tracks. Davis said the LBHA wrestled with the government for more than a year and finally won approval to renovate the units, which have been there since 1969.

“All the units are going to be completely renovated,” she said.

The LBHA will solicit proposals from contractors in October and hopes to have all the units rehabilitated by 2010.