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Housing Authority (housing + authority)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	70%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	20%

Selected Abstracts

Can Public Housing Authorities Attract and Hold Upwardly Mobile Households?: A Report from Cincinnati

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 3-4 2001
David P. Varady
Logistic regression analysis is applied to a pooled, cross sectional data set containing results from approximately 1,300 interviews with Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) residents, carried out between 1995 and 1998 to determine overall levels of residential attachment, and to test whether socially mobile householders had especially weak attachments to their locations. The results highlighted a strong propensity to move among CMHA residents generally. Although most residents stated that they were satisfied with their home, nearly three-fifths said that they expected to move within five years. Multivariate results suggested that socially mobile residents (college educated householders, workers, moderate-income households) were using the CMHA stock as a stepping-stone to better rental housing or homeownership. Public housing officials need to decide whether to make a special effort to hold these upwardly mobile households. A more realistic goal would be to minimize residential turnover caused by environmental problems (e.g., crime), regardless of income level. Policies to achieve this goal are discussed. [source]

LOW-INCOME HOMEOWNERSHIP: DOES IT NECESSARILY MEAN SACRIFICING NEIGHBORHOOD QUALITY TO BUY A HOME?

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2010
ANNA M. SANTIAGO
ABSTRACT:,Questions have been raised about the wisdom of low-income homeownership policies for many reasons. One potential reason to be skeptical: low-income homebuyers perhaps may be constrained to purchase homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is a potential problem because home purchases in such neighborhoods: (1) may limit appreciation; (2) may reduce quality of life for adults; and (3) may militate against reputed advantages of homeownership for children. Our study examines the neighborhood conditions of a group of 126 low-income homebuyers who purchased their first home with assistance from the Home Ownership Program (HOP) operated by the Denver Housing Authority. Our approach is distinguished by its use of a comprehensive set of objective and subjective indicators measuring the neighborhood quality of pre-move and post-move neighborhoods. Do low-income homebuyers sacrifice neighborhood quality to buy their homes? Our results suggest that the answer to this question is more complex than it might at first appear. On the one hand, HOP homebuyers purchased in a wide variety of city and suburban neighborhoods. Nonetheless, a variety of neighborhood quality indicators suggest that these neighborhoods, on average, were indeed inferior to those of Denver homeowners overall and to those in the same ethnic group. However, our analyses also revealed that their post-move neighborhoods were superior to the ones they lived in prior to homeownership. Moreover, very few HOP destination neighborhoods evinced severe physical, environmental, infrastructural, or socioeconomic problems, as measured by a wide variety of objective indicators or by the homebuyers' own perceptions. Indeed, only 10% of HOP homebuyers perceived that their new neighborhoods were worse than their prior ones, and only 8% held pessimistic expectations about their new neighborhoods' quality of life. Finally, we found that Black homebuyers fared less well than their Latino counterparts, on average, in both objective and subjective measures. [source]

Moving from Public Housing to Homeownership: Perceived Barriers to Program Participation and Success

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2004
Anna M. Santiago
Despite numerous federal policies aimed at enhancing resident self-sufficiency and homeownership through programs run by local public housing authorities, little is known about who participates and who succeeds. This study explores barriers to participation and success in an innovative resident self-sufficiency/homeownership program developed by the Housing Authority of the city and county of Denver. We conduct surveys of participants in the Foundations for Homeownership program, eliciting their perceptions regarding willingness and ability to participate in the program and, thereafter, completing it successfully. We find that at time of entry into the program, participants reported, on average, 4.6 major barriers that they perceive would limit their ability to achieve current goals. OLS and logistic regression analyses were conducted to ascertain the degree to which perceived barriers were associated with participants' demographic, economic, or attitudinal characteristics. [source]

Can Public Housing Authorities Attract and Hold Upwardly Mobile Households?: A Report from Cincinnati

A portfolio approach to maintenance: a case study of a residential estate

QUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, Issue 3 2008
L. K. Chu
Abstract The choice between repairing and replacing a defective piece of equipment is an economic decision that is faced by all maintenance managers, including housing estate managers. Such decisions need to be made within the limits and constraints set by maintenance expenditure budgets and by manpower availability. Our particular problem is concerned with the development of a maintenance policy for a residential estate of the Hong Kong Housing Authority. Our approach is to treat the numerous housing systems as a portfolio and to exploit flexibilities in performing or delaying the repair/replacement of these systems. The cost of a repair/replacement plan for the portfolio is formulated as an integer programme and genetic algorithms (GAs) are employed to generate optimal and sub-optimal solution plans. The novel features of the approach are the model developed and use of GAs in this particular optimization context. The results and discussion of the case study will help practitioners to better understand the difficulties involved in collecting relevant cost data and in formulating repair/replacement plans for a group of buildings. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Mortgage Lending, Sample Selection and Default

REAL ESTATE ECONOMICS, Issue 4 2000
Stephen L Ross
Traditional models of mortgage default suffer from sample-selection bias because they do not control for the loan approval process. This paper estimates a sample-selection-corrected default model using the 1990 Boston Federal Reserve loan application sample and the 1992 Federal Housing Authority (FHA) foreclosure sample. A single-equation FHA default model appears to suffer from substantial selection bias, but the bias primarily arises from the omission of credit history and other variables that are only in the application sample. Therefore, default models that contain detailed information on applicants may not suffer from substantial selection bias. Finally, a test for prejudice-based discrimination is developed and conducted, but the findings are inconclusive. [source]

The Space of Local Control in the Devolution of us Public Housing Policy

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 4 2000
Janet L. Smith
Sweeping changes in national policy aim to radically transform public housing in the United States. The goal is to reduce social isolation and increase opportunities for low income tenants by demolishing ,worst case' housing, most of which is modern, high-rise buildings with high vacancy and crime rates, and replacing it with ,mixed-income' developments and tenant based assistance to disperse current public housing families. Transformation relies on the national government devolving more decision-making power to local government and public housing authorities. The assumption here is that decentralizing the responsibility for public housing will yield more effective results and be more efficient. This paper explores the problematic nature of decentralization as it has been conceptualized in policy discourse, focusing on the underlying assumptions about the benefits of increasing local control in the implementation of national policy. As this paper describes, this conceived space of local control does not take into account the spatial features that have historically shaped where and how low income families live in the US, including racism and classism and a general aversion by the market to produce affordable rental units and mixed-income developments. As a result, this conceived space of local control places the burden on low income residents to make transformation a success. To make this case, Wittgenstein's (1958) post-structural view of language is combined with Lefebvre's view of space to provide a framework in which to examine US housing policy discourse as a ,space producing' activity. The Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation is used to illustrate how local efforts to transform public housing reproduce a functional space for local control that is incapable of generating many of the proposed benefits of decentralization for public housing tenants. [source]

Obstacles to desegregating public housing: Lessons learned from implementing eight consent decrees

JOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2003
Susan J. Popkin
Between 1992 and 1996 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settled a number of legal cases involving housing authorities and agreed to take remedial action as part of court-enforced consent decrees entered into with plaintiffs. These housing authorities faced significant obstacles that impaired their ability to comply swiftly and fully with all of the elements in the desegregation consent decrees. The obstacles fell into two broad categories: contextual obstacles (racial composition of waiting lists and resident populations, lack of affordable rental housing, and inadequate public transportation), and capacity and coordination obstacles (conflict among implementing agencies and ineffective monitoring by HUD). Findings presented here highlight the sizable potential delay between the time a legal remedy is imposed and when plaintiffs in public housing segregation disputes realize any benefits. They also reinforce the argument that implementation problems will be legion when policies impose a significant scope of required changes on a large number of actors who must collaborate, yet are not uniformly capable or sympathetic to the goals being promoted. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [source]

Moving from Public Housing to Homeownership: Perceived Barriers to Program Participation and Success

Attracting Middle-Income Families in the Hope VI Public Housing Revitalization Program

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2005
David P. Varady
But is this feasible? Our comparative case study analysis of four HOPE VI sites in Cincinnati, Louisville, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, suggests that it will be difficult to achieve the mixing of lower- and middle-income families with children. None of the four developments explicitly sought middle-income families with children as part of their marketing. Louisville's HOPE VI site was the only one involving close collaboration between the school district, the housing authority, and city government from the beginning of the HOPE VI process. Moreover, the Louisville site was the only one successful in attracting middle-income (and not simply subsidized moderate-income) families with children. Strategies for making inner-city HOPE VI sites more attractive for middle-income families are discussed. [source]