Short Takes

March/April 1996

Short Takes

Unsatisfied with the mere absence of rent control in most cities and states, landlords are making advances in their offensive to prohibit local governments from enacting rent control laws. Tennessee Governor Sundquist recently made his state the 31st to preempt rent control by barring local governments or political subdivisions from enacting, maintaining, or enforcing ordinances or resolutions controlling or setting the amount of rent charged for private residential or commercial property. The campaign to enact such laws in all 50 states is spearheaded by the National Multi-Housing Council, reports Housing Affairs Letter.
New York City landlords have turned to the upstate courts to challenge what they see as an inadequate rent increase. Two landlord organizations, the Community Housing Improvement Program, Inc., and the Rent Stabilization Association, filed suit on February 1 against the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal's (DHCR) 3 percent rent hike in the Maximum Rent Base. The increase, adopted biennially, is the lowest in 24 years of rent control in New York, according to the Metropolitan Council on Housing's Tenant/Inquilino. Landlords reportedly claim that DHCR used the wrong formula to determine the amount of the increase. Tenant advocates complain that it took a month for news of the suit to surface, and they see the landlords' decision to file the suit in Albany, when most of the affected tenants live in New York City, as intentionally secretive.
HUD Secretary Cisneros recently announced 25 National Excellence Award recipients, honored for their outstanding examples of community building in the U.S. The awards were part of the City Summit, a pre-conference for the Habitat II international housing conference to be held in Istanbul, Turkey, in June. One recipient, for example, was NeighborWorks® Full-Cycle Lending[SM], a program that helps prepare borrowers for homeownership by providing education before, during, and after the home purchase. For more information on the National Excellence Award, call Faye Haselkorn at HUD's Office of Policy Development & Research, 202-708-3896 x245.
After their landlord opted out of a federal rent subsidy program under the Rural Economic and Community Development Service, elderly tenants in Grapevine, Texas, feared that their rents would rise above their ability to pay. In some cases, rents were to increase nearly 200 percent, the Dallas Morning News reported. Residents worked with the Texas Tenants Union to convince HUD to provide Section 8 rental assistance, which their landlord reportedly agreed to accept. Some residents wept when they received the news in late March. Said Steve Weatherford, Southwest representative to HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, "Today represents what government can do at the local, state, and federal level to be of assistance to residents in crisis." Sandy Rollins of the Tenants Union fears that the plight of these tenants is "only the tip of the iceberg," as more landlords opt out of subsidy programs.
"Poverty, Inc.," is how Hartford Deputy Mayor Frances Sanchez recently described the city's social service industry while speaking to a New York Times article on the Hartford's City Council's six month moratorium on new homeless shelters, rehab homes, and other social services. Hartford Mayor Mike Peters called the city-which has one-fifth of the area's population but serves three-fifths of its needy-"the dumping ground for every project for the needy." Social service providers in Hartford agree that other nearby communities should provide their fair share of services, but argue that a moratorium is a wrongheaded solution that uses social services as a scapegoat for broader economic problems.
It's not all smooth sailing for Fleet Financial Group, the Boston-based bank facing opposition to its merger with NatWest Bancorp from New Jersey Citizen Action and other consumer groups. Citizen Action filed an objection to the merger with federal regulators in March, and has since rejected Fleet's offer of a $476 million commitment to low-income lending. Citizen Action charges that Fleet took advantage of elderly and minority borrowers in New Jersey's urban neighborhoods by setting high interest for home repairs loans and then foreclosing on properties when the customers fell behind in payments.
Fannie Mae Chairman and CEO James Johnson recently announced that the company is living up to its Trillion Dollar Commitment-to provide $1 trillion in targeted home lending by the end of the decade. "...our efforts already have fundamentally transformed how millions of American families now gain access to the mortgage credit system," Johnson said at a press briefing. He reported that the company financed $84 billion in home mortgages for low-income families in 1995, and $186 billion in targeted lending since the initiative began in 1994.
Don Terner, 56, president of Bridge Housing Corp., a San Francisco-based nonprofit housing development company, died recently while on a mission to Bosnia and Croatia with U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.

Terner joined Bridge as president in 1982, after four years as California's director of Housing and Community Development. Previously, he was vice president of a private construction firm and director of a nonprofit housing corporation in New York. He taught at Harvard and MIT, and was an associate dean at U.C. Berkeley. He was a native of Orange, New Jersey, and held a B.A. in Architectural Sciences, a Master of City Planning, and a Ph.D from Harvard.

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