Late June Update

Homelessness (again!) and Housing

I do my best to represent and serve 4^th Ward residents regardless of their alignment on national issues. That does not change the fact that I am a Christian progressive who longs for a just world for all, kindness and care for the vulnerable and oppressed, and humility in our encounters with one another.

War is sometimes necessary. This war is not necessary. We are on a dangerous precipice, with sociopaths and war criminals pushing us closer to world war.

I am proud of the good parts of our American story. I am ashamed of the bad parts. And I always pray that we might one actually be what we claim to be, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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In recent weeks, I’ve had two opportunities to speak about the housing crisis. I’ve started each talk with a look at the factors that created the crisis, moved to a snapshot of the situation in the city, and concluded with some concrete steps we could take to promote the development of available, affordable, and accessible housing. I’ve placed an abbreviated version of the talk at the end of this Substack.

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You may wonder why the bullies in the pro-encampment “Stop the Sweeps” movement only target me and my employer. The reason is that the ban on encampments in the city was not the start of the conflict.

In the Fall 0f 2023, local activists approached The Park Church about hosting a “Cease Fire” event in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. We were clear that we would prefer a rally that called for a cease fire and the release of non-combatants, but we were willing to allow use of our facilities with only one condition. We made clear that The Park Church would not serve as a platform for antisemitic calls for the destruction of Israel. The group considered this an unacceptable restriction on their free speech* and held their event elsewhere. Two members of that group were church members, one actively. That member broke with the church after we set boundaries around that war.

The irony is that I have supported the Palestinian right to self-determination for years, and call out Islamophobia as often as I call out antisemitism. But because I wasn’t willing to go to the most extreme position, I became the enemy.

* Of course, “free speech” only means the government cannot restrict speech. A religious organization can choose speech appropriate to its values, just as corporations restrict speech. Heck, I don’t have the right to come to your house and say things you find offensive!

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If my toilet doesn’t work and I don’t have running water, my house will be posted and I will be ordered out. If I have junk and debris in my yard, Code Enforcement will order me to clean it up, and if I don’t, they will and charge me. Why should residents who maintain their property have to put up with this from encampments in their neighborhood? Never mind the discarded needles.

I stand by my contention that the overwhelming majority of the un-sheltered in our area are struggling with mental illness, addiction, or are dual diagnosed. I want them to live and to get the treatment and services that will make that possible. I know the dorm shelter doesn’t work for everyone, and have tried for six months to engage the radicals, hoping they would help me identify service gaps so I could advocate with the county and state to address those gaps. Instead, the only cases we have been offered are individuals who describe encampments as a lifestyle choice. It simply is not an acceptable lifestyle choice in an urban area.

The two council members who voted against the ban could introduce a resolution to repeal it. They won’t. Their constituents support the ban, as do the overwhelming majority of city residents and business leaders. Pro-chaos is not going to get anybody elected.

I have tried repeatedly to engage these folks. After the recent dog-whistle pamphlet, I’m done. If you cannot listen, learn, and compromise, I’ve got no time for you. I will continue to try to insure we have available, affordable, and accessible housing.

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Our housing crisis is what motivated me to run. I found a great partner in a mayor that loves this city. Together, we have met with key staff members regularly to coordinate our “Fight on Blight.” It isn’t always obvious, but we have been making steady progress. In addition to improvements in enforcement, we’ve improved the registration process for rental properties and vacant properties. At our meeting last Tuesday, our Director of Code Enforcement said he believes increased fees are leading to property owners putting homes back online. But as you’ll see in the “talk” portion below, we have a long way to go.

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Here is an abbreviated version of a brief housing talk I have offered in recent weeks:

I first became seriously interested in housing challenges while serving a church on the coast of Maine, a very different setting than Elmira. There, single family homes were being purchased and converted into short-term rentals, AirBNBs. The real estate market was already challenging in the local area, as much of the property was waterfront or at least had a water view, a geography of peninsulas, islands, the Atlantic Ocean and hundreds of lakes and ponds. What was once a summer getaway for Boston brahmins had also become a retirement destination. Hancock County had the highest average age in the State of Maine, while Maine had the highest average age among the fifty states.

The pressure on housing was so great that families who had been there for generations were being squeezed out, and the very businesses that depended on tourists and retirees couldn’t find employees. The owner of the local grocery store, Tradewinds, built an apartment building to make sure he could keep employees.

Of course, like many of you, I listen to NPR and read the New York Times, so I was aware of the role of housing in the 2008 financial crisis. But it was only when I got to Elmira that I began to understand the systemic obstacles to available, affordable, and accessible housing. I will share some of what I have learned with you tonight.

First, four caveats.

One: I am trained as a public theologian, so my approach to every issue is values-based. I am neither an economist, a sociologist, nor an urban planner, the latter a profession that does not come off very well in our story.

Two: I despise what economists call rent-seeking, not to be confused with the practice of being a landlord. Rent-seeking is any economic activity that seeks to extract value without producing value. The most obvious villains here are private equity funds and hedge funds, though they are far from the only predators who game the financial system.

Three: while there is some overlap between our chronically un-sheltered and our housing crisis, I will not be dealing directly with the thorny matter of institutionalization and mandated treatment for those with mental illness and/or substance abuse disorder, though I would refer you to changes in the mental hygiene law included in the Executive Budget last month, a good first step in addressing the crisis.

Four: datasets are fuzzy in our area. Much of what is available is broken down by zip code, and as you know, our political jurisdictions do not align with our zip codes. Where city-specific data is available, I use it. Where only zip code-specific is available, I use 14901.

Now, back to the matter at hand.

Many will know some of the culprits in building what the organization “Strong Towns” calls “the housing trap.” Robert Moses, the New York urban planner skewered in Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker,” his erstwhile opponent Jane Jacobs, accused of gentrification when it came to her own neighborhood, and the relatively unknown J.C. Nichols, a developer from Kansas City.

The problem can be divided into roughly two separate but connected issues. The first is housing as a financial product. The roots of this go back to the period right after World War II. Fearing that the economy would slip back into depression, the federal government created massive programs to help the white working class purchase homes and get an education. Housing was an economic engine, though only for some. I think everyone in this room knows about red-lining, when maps literally had red-lines to indicate minority communities. Public opinion turned against government programs for housing and education only when the Civil Rights movement opened them to black-identified people of color, and those programs have been attacked and systematically dismantled over the last half century.

The creation of long-term mortgages laid the foundation for home ownership and the classification of housing as an asset class rather than as shelter, but it was the creation of mortgage-backed securities that led to the 2008 crisis. Bundling mortgages for resale and speculation was bad enough, but the financial industry’s appetite for rent-seeking exceeded the supply of mortgages, so two things happened.

First, banks started lending greater amounts of money to riskier borrowers, who were often underwater from the start. We know these as sub-prime loans. Second, developers went on a spree, building exactly the kind of housing that fed into irrational exuberance, exactly the wrong kind of housing for most of the individuals and families moving into home ownership, McMansions and single-family homes in sprawling suburbs.

When the bubble finally burst, the government protected the banks, which meant protecting the speculators and propping up the housing market. Many individual subprime borrowers lost their homes, though home prices generally remained high, even as a tremendous amount of housing stock sat empty. Then, for the first time, institutional investors like private equity began buying up large amounts of residential property, especially single-family homes. Instead of the landlord down the street who knew the community and cared for it, there were third party property managers representing anonymous and often out of state landlords.

The math of the free market made it profitable for these investors to keep some units empty, to keep prices high, and to avoid difficult and low-profit tenants. Combined with de-industrialization, de-population, and properties seized by banks, the supply of available housing dropped in cities like Elmira. We have approximately 466 empty properties in Elmira as of two weeks ago, the overwhelming majority residential. One of our most notorious corporate owners recently went into receivership, and put 99 residential properties on the market. Half were vacant.

We could spend an entire day on the housing economy, but in the interest of time, let’s move to the second major barrier to housing justice.

The city of Somerville, Massachusetts, where I lived my final year at Harvard, recently made the news when masked government agents abducted a Tufts University student for thought crimes.

Despite this, there is much good to say about Somerville. It has mass transit, is walkable, and has what city planners call a “sense of place.” People want to live there.

It is also 80% illegal, not the residents, but the residences. You could not build 80% of the buildings in Somerville given the city’s current zoning and the building code.

Like almost every city in America, Somerville relies on an international building code standard that is bureaucratic, out-dated, and creates a critical gap in housing. Specifically, building codes make it almost impossible to build what is called “missing middle” housing, residential property with between two and six units, profitably. But it isn’t just code’s safety features.

A perfect example is the three-up triplex, a charming residential structure that can be found throughout New England. It provided affordable housing for waves of immigrants. It was described by the privileged as dirty and noisy, which had everything to do with class and ethnicity and nothing to do with actual conditions in working class neighborhoods. Like the duplex, the triplex was zoned into extinction as an economically viable development model. NIMBY-ism, that is “not in my backyard,” has always been about race and class. And for the record, I’ve lived in a three-up triplex, and it was anything but dirty or noisy. In fact, where they still exist, they can be quite expensive.

Elmira has allowed NIMBY-ism to kill important housing projects. Pro-business libertarians aren’t quite so libertarian and suddenly pro-government interference when it comes to obstructing changes in their neighborhood.

NIMBY-ism is one more economic and structural obstacle to the housing we need, as residents with political power obstruct any development they fear will hurt their property value, while the city as a whole falls into disrepair and despair, and developers avoid a city with a reputation for killing projects. I’m pretty sure the burned out home down the block that was filled with squatters and a meth lab is already hurting property values.

One last uncomfortable reality. Not every old house can or should be preserved. Historic preservation is great for communities with wealth and privilege, but it is not the organic way our cities were formed and thrived. Cities developed incrementally, and buildings are meant to be torn down and replaced as needs, technology, and the market change. This has contributed to the flight to the suburbs, as people seek homes with new technology and new styles.

These are some of the primary structural obstacles to available, affordable, and accessible housing, bad actors in the market, structural racism, and our refusal to adapt to changing needs.

In Elmira, 44% of our housing stock is renter occupied, while another 14% is vacant.

Our poverty rate is over 30%, over 40% for children. These numbers are double New York State averages.

We have an estimated affordable housing gap of over 1000 units. 30% of our renters pay more than half their income for rent. SSI barely covers what HUD considers a fair rent for a studio apartment in Elmira.

Our housing stock is old. In the city, 56% pre-dates World War II. While last year’s Chemung County Housing Study ignores missing middle housing as a viable model for the structural reasons mentioned earlier, it estimates a need for somewhere between 679 and 717 additional rental units in the next five years. I actually prefer better paths to individual home ownership, but the bottom line is we have a shortage of available, affordable, and accessible housing stock.

There is more data and there are more challenges, but let’s take a look at some solutions.

While the State of New York is aggressively pushing housing, the scale of need exceeds state resources. We can applaud one item in the 2025 Executive Budget, which bars institutional investors like private equity firms from purchasing residential property for the first 90 days it is on the market, though it is unclear how that law will be enforced, and our county tax auction contributes to blight in a way not covered by the new law.

We cannot depend on the federal government anymore, as it transfers wealth to billionaires and pursues race wars at home and abroad.

Our solutions must be local solutions, and will happen only if county leaders decide that Elmira, our county seat, it worth saving, and become active partners in reforming our housing.

First, let us authorize the construction of “accessory dwelling units,” ADUs, in all zones. These are sometimes called “granny-flats.” This might also help us get some of our elders out of homes that are too big for them, and quite frankly, are not always safe.

Second, help the public understand the true costs of NIMBY-ism and the zoning trap, then change to permissive zoning that allows us to build what we need. The City of Kingston has managed to eliminate single-family zoning completely. While that may not fit Elmira, we can learn how they educated and persuaded the community to embrace a sustainable housing model.

Third, lower the cost of development by creating a menu of pre-approved plans small developers can choose from. The planning process can add 20% to construction. Imagine that a developer has a lot of the proper size, and an organization like my employer, The Park Church, has sponsored a pre-approved plan for that three-up triplex I love. Let’s say that this model is known as a Beecher House, a nod to the congregation’s history. If the plan is on the pre-approved menu and the lot fits, you can build.

This creates an economically viable path to infill development on empty lots throughout the city.

Add pre-approved models for row-houses and cottage courts, and we start two important shifts. One, we create the possibility of owner-occupied multi-unit rentals. The resident owner has an immediate interest in the property and the community. Two, we have an intermediate step for individuals buying their first home. It is easier to buy a row house or a unit in a co-op than to purchase a single-family home on a lot as your first entry into the market.

In fact, given the chronic mismanagement of properties like Woodlawn Court, an experiment in co-ops is urgently needed. I will be joining our Director of Community Development on a call about New York State co-op structures on Monday.

Four, encourage local partners to work on their scale. And by local partners, I’m not talking about Capriotti Properties, though they have done some lovely work. I’m talking about churches, educational institutions, locally-owned corporations.

Let them adopt a four or six square block area. Get to know the property owners and residents. Watch for houses to come on the market, and bring them up to modern standards or replace them. Build missing-middle infill.

The model of development I have been describing is called “incremental” development, and is the best path forward for a small impoverished city. Incremental development is the historic pattern that built America’s small cities in the first place.

I have encouraged the mayor, my partner in the city’s “fight on blight,” to call for a housing summit, where we bring everyone to the table. And I will soon introduce legislation on ADUs, though I expect resistance from NIMBY elements in our community and on the City Council.