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The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments in Suburbs
The YIMBY movement isn’t just for liberals any more. Legislators from both sides of the political divide are working to add duplexes and apartments to single-family neighborhoods.For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals: not enough bike lanes and transit, too many restrictive zoning laws.The event began in 2016 in Boulder, Colo., and has ever since revolved around a coalition of left and center Democrats who want to make America’s neighborhoods less exclusive and its housing more dense. (YIMBY, a pro-housing movement that is increasingly an identity, stands for “Yes in my backyard.”)But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting, which was held at the University of Texas at Austin in February. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.The first day featured a speech on changing zoning laws by Greg Gianforte, the Republican governor of Montana, who last year signed a housing package that YIMBYs now refer to as “the Montana Miracle.” Day 2 kicked off with a panel on solutions to Texas’s rising housing costs. One of the speakers was a Republican legislator in Texas who, in addition to being an advocate for loosening land-use regulations, has pushed for a near-total ban on abortions.Anyone who missed these discussions might have instead gone to the panel on bipartisanship where Republican housing reformers from Arizona and Montana talked with a Democratic state senator from Vermont. Or noticed the list of sponsors that, in addition to foundations like Open Philanthropy and Arnold Ventures, included conservative and libertarian organizations like the Mercatus Center, the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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A City Built on Steel Tries to Reverse Its Decline
Gary, Ind., was once a symbol of American innovation. The home of U.S. Steel’s largest mill, Gary churned out the product that built America’s bridges, tunnels and skyscrapers. The city reaped the rewards, with a prosperous downtown and vibrant neighborhoods.Gary’s smokestacks are still prominent along Lake Michigan’s sandy shore, starkly juxtaposed between the eroding dunes and Chicago’s towering silhouette to the northwest. But now they represent a city looking for a fresh start.More than 10,000 buildings sit abandoned, and the population of 180,000 in the 1960s has dropped by more than half. Poverty, crime and an ignoble moniker — “Scary Gary” — deter private investors and prospective homeowners.As U.S. Steel stands at a crossroads — a planned acquisition would put it under foreign control — so does the city that was named for the company’s founder and helped build its empire. A new mayor and planned revitalization projects have rekindled hope that Gary can forge an economic future beyond steel, the kind of renaissance that many industrial cities in the Midwest have managed.In theory, the potential is there. Gary sits in the country’s third-largest metropolitan area, astride major railroad crossings and next to a shipping port. A national park, Indiana Dunes, is a popular destination for park-loving tourists and curious drivers.“We have the recipe for success,” said Eddie Melton, the newly elected mayor. “We have to change the narrative and make it clear to the world that Gary is open to business.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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The Work-From-Home Economy and the Urban Job Outlook
Restaurant Associates is not the company it used to be. It has long operated restaurants, catered events and run corporate dining rooms for clients including Google and the Smithsonian Institution. Now it employs about half of the 10,000 or so people it had on staff before the pandemic.As its lines of business dried up, the company invented new ones. It has made soups and side dishes for the online grocer FreshDirect. It has delivered meals to displaced Wall Street traders working from Connecticut, and to guests attending “virtual galas” from home.Restaurant Associates is probably going to have to keep improvising. Just as things started looking up in the summer — with some museums reopening, businesses scheduling a return to the office, and catered galas bouncing back in full force — the Delta variant of the coronavirus brought everything, again, to a halt.“We were very hopeful that by September we would start coming back strong,” said Dick Cattani, the chief executive. Now, he said, “we don’t know what’s happening, what’s next.”This anxiety is widespread across the American economy. As Kevin Thorpe, chief economist of the commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, noted, “The longer the virus lingers, the more transformative it is going to be.”A critical question is whether the urban service economy — the restaurants, hotels, taxi services and entertainment venues that employ millions of workers — can recover from the multiple waves of Covid-19 that have kept their customers away.After months of social distancing and remote work, this will depend to a large extent on how employers and workers readjust their attitude toward proximity and density — toward space.Three researchers — José María Barrero of Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago — estimate that from April to December 2020, half of the working hours in the American economy were supplied from home. After the pandemic ends, they think, the share will fall to around 20 percent. That is still four times the amount of work delivered remotely in 2017 and 2018.And remote work will be concentrated among the most highly paid workers in the most densely populated places. For instance, over half of the workers in high-skill, information-intensive services — in finance and insurance, information, professional services and management — were still working from home in January, according to researchers from Princeton, Georgetown, Columbia and the University of California, San Diego.Big cities face a dual threat of losing both their most skilled workers and the consumer service economies they sustain, the researchers wrote. “As a result,” the authors added, “they may shrink in size unless they manage to provide advantages that justify the costs of urban density when residential choices are set free from proximity-to-workplace considerations.”About 18 percent of office space in central business districts across the United States is vacant, compared with 12 percent before the pandemic, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Groupon, Twitter, United Airlines and other businesses are shedding office space. Some are rethinking their use of space entirely.Restaurant Associates, which has long operated restaurants, catered events and run corporate dining rooms, is working with about half of the 10,000 or so people it employed before the pandemic.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesAs its lines of business dried up, the company invented new ones.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesRestaurant Associates now delivers meals to guests attending “virtual galas” and Wall Street traders working from home.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe sports equipment retailer REI sold the corporate headquarters it was building in the Seattle area, meant to house some 1,800 employees, and is setting up three smaller satellite offices around the area, for workers to gravitate to if they wish. They can work entirely from home, too.“We felt there are moments when being physically together makes a difference but it doesn’t have to be all the time,” said Christine Putur, REI’s executive vice president for technology and operations. “We want to move forward with more habits, new norms — let the outcomes drive when and how we get together.”This reconfiguration of work is likely to reconfigure the American economy, changing wages and spending patterns.Google, for instance, is allowing employees to work remotely. But it will adjust compensation depending on the local cost of living. In a blog post to employees, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, estimated that some 20 percent of them would choose to work from home permanently. And the company developed a calculator for employees to figure out the effect on their pay.Mr. Davis of the University of Chicago and his co-authors estimate that the increase in working from home will reduce spending in city centers by 5 to 10 percent, hurting business at restaurants, bars and other spots that rely on the spending of office workers.“Some of the leisure and hospitality activities will follow those people that are no longer in the downtown area,” Mr. Davis said. But the spending of newly suburbanized workers may be different, including fewer lunches and happy hours than when they worked downtown.America’s economic geography looks different from what it did two years ago. New York City’s share of the nation’s employment fell to 2.8 percent in July 2021, from 3.1 percent in July 2019. That means about 375,000 fewer jobs than if the city had at least kept pace with the country as a whole. More
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After Pandemic, Shrinking Need for Office Space Could Crush Landlords
Some big employers are giving up square footage as they juggle remote work. That could devastate building owners and cities. More
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Use It or Lose It: Tenant Aid Effort Nears a Federal Cutoff
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUse It or Lose It: Tenant Aid Effort Nears a Federal CutoffEmergency pandemic funding to help renters must be distributed by Dec. 30. But getting the money to those who need it is no small task.Gregory Heller of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation is scrambling to get emergency aid into tenants’ hands before a federal deadline.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020Updated 7:15 p.m. ETFor several months, Gregory Heller, an official with a Philadelphia nonprofit group, has grappled with an unusual problem. He had $60 million in rental aid to help low-income tenants weather the pandemic — and a whole lot of trouble spending it.Designing questionnaires, verifying bank statements, processing stacks of paperwork: There is a wide administrative gap between the goal of getting money to renters who need it and the reality of cutting a check to their landlord. People like Mr. Heller are trying to bridge it.He is among hundreds of public servants and nonprofit employees nationwide who are scrambling to unload hundreds of millions in federal aid for tenants before a Dec. 30 deadline. They don’t have enough money to address a growing rental housing crisis yet are struggling to pay out what they have — an undertaking that has become even more urgent as other federal emergency programs, including unemployment benefits and an eviction moratorium, are also about to expire.Working from a home office in front of a laptop whose spreadsheets represent roofs over families’ heads, Mr. Heller, senior vice president for community investment at the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, is so engulfed in his efforts that he now supplements the work of his support staff by taking calls from tenants and landlords on his cellphone. That way he can pitch in on answering questions and review applications on the fly, part of a rush to stave off a wave of evictions, one tenant at a time.“I get calls all day, every day,” he said. “I’ve basically joined the help desk.”Philadelphia is a case study in the simple-but-not-easy task of helping tenants with the rent. Social programs are often a partnership in which cities provide funding and lay out rules but delegate the execution to quasi-governmental nonprofit organizations like Mr. Heller’s. Like most places, Philadelphia isn’t close to satisfying the need for help. But through rounds of rejiggering and three phases of funding — each with its own maze of rules and requirements — Mr. Heller’s group built a team to distribute aid, whittled down the processes that delayed it and ultimately concluded that the best way to help was the most straightforward: Give the money directly to renters.“There’s a societal belief that poor people can’t spend money the right way, and I think it’s important to start questioning that assumption,” Mr. Heller said.Almost from the moment the pandemic spread across the United States, advocacy groups have warned that the economic fallout could cause mass displacement of low-income tenants. In response, more than 400 state and local governments have used money from the federal CARES Act to set up funds to cover at least $4.3 billion in rental assistance — money that has helped tenants pay their bills and landlords stay current on their mortgages, according to a database set up by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a policy group.But now many jurisdictions are reporting trouble spending it, and with barely two weeks left in the year, they are on pace to have more than $300 million left over, according to the coalition’s database. In a pattern that predated the pandemic, the programs have been complicated by bureaucratic hurdles, competing budget demands and a reluctance among landlords to take part.There was shifting federal guidance on how CARES Act money could be spent. States passed legislation that piled local rules on top of the federal rules. Each layer was ostensibly created to improve programs — preventing fraud, making sure the money went to the neediest tenants — but added numerous hurdles for both tenants and landlords, and in the end cost time.“In trying to build bulletproof programs, you build programs that take a long time to get off the ground or simply don’t work because they are too clunky,” said Brad Gair, a principal with Witt O’Brien’s, an emergency-management consulting firm that has helped about a dozen state and local governments create rental funds.Hoping to distribute the remaining aid before it is forfeited, many states and cities are simplifying applications and moving money from nonprofits that can’t process the aid fast enough to those that can. Others are redirecting the funds to different purposes, lest they go unspent.Philadelphia is a case study in the simple-but-not-easy task of helping tenants with the rent. Like most places, it isn’t close to satisfying the need.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesNone of this is for lack of demand. In interviews, more than a dozen officials of nonprofit groups and housing administrators reported a deluge of applications, while reports show tenants are piling up credit card bills, back rent and loans. Moody’s Analytics estimates that by the end of the year some 11 million lower-income renters will be about $70 billion in arrears.Tenant advocates, landlord organizations and local-government associations have called on Congress to extend the Dec. 30 deadline. “The idea of reverting that money back to the Treasury just as the eviction moratoriums expire and renters are on the brink is absurd and cruel,” said Diane Yentel, chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.Like most U.S. cities, Philadelphia had a housing problem long before the pandemic. Rents are lower than in markets like New York and San Francisco, but the burden on tenants is still high. In 2018, about a third of the city’s tenants spent at least half of their pretax income on rent, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.Despite this, federal aid for housing has been declining for decades, part of a continued disinvestment in the social safety net. The line for the federal Section 8 program, which gives vouchers to low-income renters, is more than a decade long in Philadelphia. At the same time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Program is giving the city less than half of the funding that it received in 1995, adjusted for inflation.Looking to expand aid, Mayor Jim Kenney announced in early March that the city would budget $50 million for a five-year program to assist low-income households. It would also run an experiment, giving one group of households rental vouchers while another group of families got unrestricted cash assistance.The coronavirus ended that by blowing a hole in the city’s budget. But the CARES Act added some $60 million in new funds, some through the state and some in direct federal support to cities. The catch was that it had to be spent quickly. And that’s where Mr. Heller’s group came in.Mr. Heller, 39, has spent his career in the nonprofit world and has been a consultant on neighborhood development projects in two dozen cities. In 2016, he was appointed to run the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, a role he still holds, and last year he joined the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 15, 2020, 4:17 p.m. ETEuropean Central Bank will lift ban on bank dividends, a sign of cautious optimism.Top congressional leaders met to discuss a stimulus deal and a year-end spending bill before the deadline on Friday.European truck makers say they will phase out fossil fuel vehicles by 2040.Money can come in an instant, but running new programs involves a bunch of mundane but important tasks. Mr. Heller’s organization could not take applications or distribute aid until it had built new information technology infrastructure, with a web portal for claims and 18 full-time employees to review applications and field calls.The first phase was rolled out on May 12 and covered up to $2,500 in rent over three months. Within four days the city had 13,000 applicants. About a third were approved, consuming $10 million of the eventual $60 million.At the same time, Pennsylvania used CARES Act money to start a separate rental-aid program. This was confusing to landlords and tenants, because while that money was also distributed through nonprofits like Mr. Heller’s, it had different criteria from Philadelphia’s program. The major distinction was that the state program would cover no more than $750 in rent, and to receive it property owners had to agree to forgive the balance, and to waive late fees and back rent. This caused a number of landlords — especially in Philadelphia, where the median rent is $1,600 — to balk. And without landlords’ consent, tenants couldn’t get the aid.Victor Pinckney, a landlord and former president of HAPCO, a city landlords’ group, said the reason was simple: He and others didn’t want to take less than the market rent, or give up the right to collect back payments. “It was a no-brainer,” he said.The result was that tenants like Christy Lee Nicholas, who spent two days filling out the questionnaire and assembling pay stubs and bank statements, didn’t even have their applications looked at because the city couldn’t process them without landlord forms.Ms. Nicholas, 42, made about $1,400 a month from a part-time teaching job but was laid off during the pandemic. She recently applied to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, and pays $1,100 a month in rent. She is one month behind on rent and applied for the city’s program, but her landlord didn’t send in his own forms.Linda Harkins applied to the city’s rental assistance program, but was denied because her landlord did not send in a form.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York Times“I got an email that said, ‘Sorry, but unfortunately participation requires your landlord,’” she said.This problem went far beyond Philadelphia. Vincent Reina, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania, recently found that in some cities as many as half of tenants could not get landlords to cooperate with rental assistance programs. The reasons included not wanting to deal with bureaucracy and an unwillingness to comply with terms like waiving back rent or losing the right to evict tenants collecting aid.“We’ve consistently created programs where owners have ultimate veto power over whether a tenant can access the housing assistance that they’ve applied for and need,” Mr. Reina said.To coax more landlords into the program, Philadelphia used its own CARES Act money to augment state rental funds, allowing it to cover up to $1,500 a month in rent. That took care of an additional $30 million, but even with a higher rent cap, 37 percent of landlords still refused to take part.With the end of the year approaching, the city gave Mr. Heller’s organization $20 million for a third program for tenants. This time, instead of having separate applications from landlords and tenants, the organizers asked people who weren’t able to get aid from the first two rounds to reapply — for a cash payment.“We don’t want to penalize them just because their landlord won’t play ball,” Mr. Heller said.One of them was Linda Harkins. Ms. Harkins is a 67-year-old retiree who makes about $1,200 a month from a pension and Social Security, and until recently supplemented it with about $600 a month from a part-time job with the Census Bureau. When her position was cut, Ms. Harkins applied to the city’s rental assistance program.Her application, like Ms. Nicholas’s, was denied because her landlord did not send in a form. Last month, she applied for the new direct-aid program. Ms. Harkins is hoping the check will arrive by Christmas, or at least the first of the month.With the new cash program, Mr. Heller said he was confident that all $60 million would be spent by year’s end. But the need for help will continue.“We now have a whole program set up to funnel millions of dollars to tenants and landlords,” he said. “This issue predates the pandemic and it’s going to continue after. The question is whether we’re going to continue to fund it, or not.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
