Tuesday Metro Council Work Session Has Opportunity Mapping on Agenda.

Agenda item starts at PDF page 24 of the agenda packet HERE. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog. 

Home Forward Tuesday Public Hearing on Moving to Work Draft Plan for FY 2013, Including Voucher Mobility Provisions.

I have added the Tuesday December 13th Board Package to the Home Forward YTD Board Packages link in the right pane [meeting starts at 6:45 this month]. As is frequently the case the Board package has some goodies.  (This December package completes the CY 2011 Home Forward Board Packages, all [searchable] 766 pages).

On pages 26-32 you will find an Oregon Legislative report.

In addition this meeting will serve as the public hearing for the draft FY 2013 Moving to Work Annual Plan. While I have not read the entire document yet, there are some mobility related restrictions and incentives that caught my eye; I will read and I highly recommend to others reading the draft plan and submitting written testimony or testifying at the public hearing.

Mobility Related Provisions

The full draft MTW Draft Plan can be found HERE, and the mobility related sections start on PDF page 18: 

1. As a cost cutting measure Home Forward is proposing to RESTRICT mobility and to  

..deny requests for portability moves to another jurisdiction when:

• The receiving housing authority intends to administer, rather than absorb, the voucher; and
• The combination of higher payment standards and/or more generous subsidy standards would result in a higher payment standard for the household than the payment standard applicable within Home Forward’s jurisdiction.

Home Forward will make exceptions to this policy and will allow households to use portability to move to a higher cost area in any of the following circumstances:

• A member of the household has confirmed employment in the new area;
• A member of the household is confirmed to be enrolled in school [emphasis added] or in a training program in the new area; or
• A documented household emergency requires the household to move to the new area.

[My read is that this restriction would not apply if families have a child enrolled in school for the new area].

2. Conversely, Home Forward is proposing to offer some limited landlord INCENTIVES related to mobility (PDF page 42):

Landlord incentive program: Home Forward will implement a landlord incentive program to attract new landlords and units in low poverty areas to the Housing Choice Voucher program. 

In its initial year of testing, the program will offer a one time, $100 incentive payment for each eligible unit a landlord leases to a Housing Choice Voucher participant. A landlord will be eligible to receive up to ten incentive payments per multifamily complex. 

Eligible units must be located in zip codes considered low-poverty areas and not have had a Housing Choice Voucher tenant in the prior 24 months.  

[It's not clear to me if prior 24 months restriction relates to project or to zip code]. 

3. Elsewhere in plan (PDF page 12) HF indicates that they will be providing some mobility counseling to voucher holders:

Home Forward has been awarded a grant from Metro to work collaboratively with the three neighboring housing authorities to develop tools to provide mobility counseling to Section 8 participants. This project, once implemented, will educate Section 8 participants about the costs and benefits of choosing housing in various locations, and provide them with tools for comparing the relative costs of living in various areas. The goal for this project is to reduce the combined housing and transportation costs for Section 8 participants.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog. 

2011 and Earlier Lists of Distressed or Underserved Nonmetropolitan Middle-Income Geographies

Thanks to BeSpacific summary below the posting HERE [which includes links to download data by year] caught my eye.

"The federal bank and thrift regulatory agencies today announced the availability of 2011 list [and lists from previous years] of distressed or underserved nonmetropolitan middle-income geographies where revitalization or stabilization activities will receive Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) consideration as "community development." "Distressed nonmetropolitan middle-income geographies" and "underserved nonmetropolitan middle-income geographies" are designated by the agencies in accordance with their CRA regulations.

I count 64 Oregon non metro census tracts in the 2011 listing. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

HUD Oregon 2 BR Small Area Rents by Zip Code Using ACS Rents, Illustrated with Opportunity Map.

HUD has published updated small area demonstration rent data (Excel file HERE) that use 2005-2009 ACS data instead of 2000 Census data.  (See my prior post HERE for more background and an earlier map that uses Census 2000 data).   

I thought it would be interesting to create/update a simple opportunity map with shading of zip codes based on the % the ACS based zip code rents would be above or below the actual 2 BR FMRS for FY 2011.  I have pasted the legend for the maps below along with an embed of the map I created in Google Fusion; a direct link to the map in Google Fusion is HERE. 

A cursory comparison with the earlier map shows no zip codes with rents below 90% of the current FMR, compared to 3 zip codes in Portland metro that would have been under 90% of the FMR.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

New Data Useful for Analysis of Impediments/Opportunity Mapping: 3 County PDX Racial /Ethnic Rates of Use of HUD Housing Vouchers.

In discussions about the budget and program analysis what is often missing are discussions about who benefits from specific programs at the local level. 

For that reason I thought it might be instructive to look at the uses of HUD housing vouchers by race and ethnicity in the 3 county Portland Metro area.

I choose HUD housing vouchers because they are the largest source of HUD federal rental assistance in Oregon.

The data may be useful for Analysis of Impediments purposes but may have equal value in thinking about how to better use a large 3 Portland metro county existing housing resource [$60 Million+ annually @$6,000 per unit] to use the mobility feature of vouchers to encourage voucher holders to voluntarily tap into public agency efforts to better define areas of opportunity.

My analysis is found on the 3 page PDF HERE; it includes counts of renters and voucher holders, counts of all renters, and usage rates, all broken out by race and ethnicity. By dividing the total number of renters in racial and ethnic groups by the number of voucher holders in those groups I was able to estimate county level usage rates for individual groups and the share of vouchers used by different racial and ethnic groups.  Page 1 is a graph of voucher usage, pages 2-3 are detailed data tables.

My observations [3 county unless noted]:

1. 3 County total of 10,539 vouchers/240,331 rental households=overall utilization rate of 4.38 vouchers for every 100 renter households.
2. 1 in 5 African American renters (20.7%) use a HUD housing voucher; the rate varies from as low as 13.3% in Clackamas County to 22.4% in Multnomah County.  
3. The White utilization rate is 3.8%  and varies from 3.3% in Multnomah County to 4.3% in Washington County.
4. 2.8% of Hispanic renters use a HUD housing voucher; the rate varies from 1.9% in Clackamas County to 3.4% in Washington County. 
5. Alaska Native/American Indian renters rate of usage is 5.6% , that varies from a high of 17.8% in Clackamas County to a low of 1.5% in Washington County.  
6. The rate of use by Asian renters is 4.4%, and varies from 1.4% in Clackamas County to 7.3% in Multnomah County.
7. For Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders the overall rate of usage is 5.5%, but that varies from a reported zero vouchers used by this renters in this group in Clackamas County to a rate of 9.6% in Washington County.
8. Details on the % of all vouchers in use by racial and ethnic group are found in table 5 of the attachment. Table shows for example that 25% of the 10,539 vouchers in use in three Portland metro counties are used by African American renter households, [37% of all vouchers in Multnomah County] and 7.2% of all vouchers are used by Hispanic renter households. Data in this table can be compared to the share of all renters in each racial and ethnic group found in Table 4.

READ: Data Sources and Caveats

1. Data Sources: For renter counts, ACS 2007-2009. For voucher renters in Clackamas and Washington County, HUD MTCS Tenant Characteristics Report; for Multnomah County /HAP, the most recent HAP Dashboard Report.[Updated Census 2010 renter data should become available late Summer or early Fall, 2011].
2. In the MTCS report and HAP Dashboard report the data field for White is not clearly defined. The ACS data has a field for White Non Hispanic and I have elected to treat the MTCS and HAP Dashboard White data field as representing White, Non Hispanic renters. If that is not accurate that would under count the number of White renters and voucher holders, and change the usage rates for whites. When I do a revision to these tables after Census 2010 data becomes available I will attempt to refine this calculation; for now I would look at the estimates for White voucher holders and White usage rates as subject to a greater margin of error than other racial and ethnic groups. 
3. IMPORTANT: While this data shows rate of use for ALL renters; the ideal comparison would be the rate of use for income eligible renters (generally below 50% MFI). As minority renters generally have incomes less than whites this would change the usage rates for some or all minority groups, but perhaps in a variable manner. [Not clear to me when and if this level of county level renter income data by tenure will be available from Census]. 
4. Note that undocumented status would reduce the eligible universe for any group, and increase the usage rate.
   
5. Data on vouchers used in Clackamas and Washington County are based on income verification forms during reporting period [1,503 and 2,705 units]; this is close to but less than entire universe of all voucher holders; inclusion of additional units would increase usage rates. HAP voucher data is from their monthly Dashboard report and should be close to complete.
6. Usage rates generally are conservative and do not include all HUD rental assistance programs.
7. Inclusion of Public Housing would increase the rate of use of HUD rental assistance by all groups; that data is available at the local level.
8. Inclusion of Project Based rental assistance would also increase the rate of use of HUD rental assistance by all groups, but that data is not available on the local level.
9. Other forms of HUD funded rental assistance like HOME and short term rental assistance programs are also not included in this analysis; those programs may offer lesser levels of income support than vouchers, public housing, and project based rental assistance. This data by racial and ethnic group is likely not available at the local level.
10. As always, I consider this research a starting point and not an ending point and I welcome additional work by others to further refine this kind of analysis; readers can of course download ACS, MTCS, and HAP Dashboard data to construct their own analysis.  

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

Comparision Of May 11 Draft Portland Con Plan Analysis of Impediments with April 13 Draft AI.

Using Google search I discovered that there is a 12 page May 11 version of an Executive Summary of the Analysis of Impediments for the City of Portland, Multnomah County, and City of Gresham Consolidated Plan. 

I also located a 9 page April 13 draft of that same document and though it might be interesting to compare, so I prepared two documents: 

1. The PDF file HERE has both documents bookmarked. Printing and displaying both documents side by side will provide an "old school" way of seeing changes OR
2. The comparison PDF I created HERE shows color coded differences on the May 11 draft vs the April 13 draft; Start on page 2 and look carefully at the color coding to see the type of change. Note: At the beginning of many of the color codings you will notice a superscript note symbol, if you mouse over the symbol it will reveal a text box with text comparing the old vs new document. [First time I have used this compare feature in PDF, any feedback on how well it works will be appreciated].

Note that these are executive summaries ONLY and not the complete Analysis of Impediments. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.