The Economic Impact of the Pandemic on Older Adults

The global health pandemic exacerbated existing economic disparities for many older adults who struggled as a result of structural inequality. Even before the onset of COVID-19, many older adults of color showed signs of financial precarity as they were more negatively impacted by the housing crisis of 2008, losing their homes at disproportionate rates or never recovering the loss of equity in their homes. Older adults of color shoulder the burden of this reality, and their lives have been further devastated by the pandemic, resulting in greater economic instability, and expanding income and wealth gaps.

The Effects of Homeownership on Wealth Distribution

Within the broader context of new dimensions of poverty such as housing poverty, energy poverty, etc., this article describes dependencies between household income, real estate ownership and socio-economic trends. We argue that income is not the principal determinant for home ownership rate, but rather recent lifestyle changes can better explain the homeownership decreasing trend in developed economies. Job mobility, family formation determinants and demographical trends seem to find well-supported basis in literature and data. Using data for the US states we have proved that the decreasing rate of home ownership may be explained by social aspects of changing lifestyle such as increasing share of population moving from rural areas to cities, age of marriage, divorce rate, career-oriented lifestyle, rather than by the frequently cited price-income ratio. We have also observed a short-term correlation between financing availability and homeownership rate, but we conclude that property prices would adjust to lose monetary policy without any long-term effect on homeownership rate. It results that government or monetary policies aimed to cushion the housing unavailability (recently increasing value of price-income) ratio may distort the housing market. We propose a new insight in the housing availability discussion.

Assessing the Effects of COVID-19 on Housing Vacancy Survey Estimates Using a Revised Nonresponse Adjustment Factor

Rising COVID-19 case counts in early 2020 led to changes in the data collection procedures used for the Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey (CPS/HVS), an important source of information about vacancy rates and the homeownership rate in the United States. This report examines the implications of these data collection changes for CPS/HVS estimates. The analyses draw on multiple auxiliary data sources to understand the extent to which changes in nonresponse outcomes accompanied the changes in data collection procedures. The report then develops an alternative nonresponse adjustment factor that corrects for the observed changes in nonresponse. The results suggest that changes in nonresponse likely contributed to the sharp increase in the homeownership rate estimate for the second quarter of 2020. Conversely, the vacancy rate estimates are not similarly sensitive to the alternative nonresponse weighting adjustment;however, the results illustrate the potential for the vacancy rate estimates to underestimate the actual vacancy levels due to the weighting methodology's assumption that all nonresponding housing units are occupied. These results suggest that the CPS/HVS estimates of vacancy rates and the homeownership rate should be interpreted with caution for the period affected by the changes in data collection procedures.

Editorial 15-3 International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis

The methodology uses hedonic regression and propensity score matching econometric techniques to analyse the price of single-family housing prices. [...]the study combines data about zoning changes at the parcel level with nearby housing sales transactions to study any potential externality effects because of rezoning induced by private parties. The seventh paper from South Africa examines the dynamic relationship between house prices and household income per capita in the lower- and low middle-income housing segments. The tenth paper from Australia examined the impact of the recently completed light rail on the level of residential property values.

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xiv + 349 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 978-1-469-65366-2

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership chronicles an often overlooked period in the affordable housing literature to show how the shift from racially exclusive housing policies in the 1940s and 1950s (where it was nearly impossible for Blacks to buy high-appreciating homes using low-cost and low-risk federally insured mortgages) to a regime of more inclusive policies in the late 1960s and 1970s laid the foundation for Blacks to lose massive housing wealth decades later during the 2007–2009 Great Recession. [...]instead of finding ways to increase the supply of public housing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) adopted federal housing policies, which continue to this day, that depend on public-private ventures (like Housing Choice vouchers) to house the poor. [...]the book's greatest contribution to the affordable-housing literature is Taylor's blistering account of Nixon administration decisions that forever ceded control of federal housing policies to private mortgage bankers, real estate agents, home builders, speculators, and appraisers (a cabal I label the real estate industrial complex, or REIC).

Evictions, Foreclosures, and Global Housing Speculation in Palma, Spain

Over the last two decades, the property bubble and the subsequent economic crisis and post-crisis policies have heightened urban inequalities, mainly in cities in southern Europe. The gaps between social classes have widened with the configuration of new urban spaces characterized by segregation and exclusion. Palma is the capital of one of the top tourist destinations in the Mediterranean (the Balearic Islands) and it is usually regarded as a successful tourism model and a land of opportunity for property investors. Nevertheless, serious problems of inequality exist in the city. The centre of this dual city is split between a process of spreading gentrification and the urban blight of its poor neighbourhoods. Son Gotleu is a particular case in point. The neighbourhood is home to a large number of social housing blocks (1960s) with residents from mostly migrant backgrounds. Within a global context of new redefined rent-seeking mechanisms, this article analysed impoverishment in Son Gotleu, based on three variables associated with housing: evictions, foreclosures and the property market. Our study shows that evictions were a determining feature of impoverishment, linked to the emergence of new speculative investment interests. Indeed, investment funds are very probably the most influential urban agents today.

Housing Policy Recommendations for the Biden/Harris Administration

Housing policy has taken on a heightened profile in recent years, and especially in the wake of COVID-19. Rents have increased faster than renters’ incomes, while Black homeownership has declined. And COVID-19 has hit renters, especially lower income ones, particularly hard, with many unable to pay their rent and facing possible eviction. Of course there are pressing needs that the Biden–Harris administration will need to address in its first 12 months concerning the pandemic, including the effective deployment of rental assistance, ensuring that well-designed mortgage forbearance is made available to all homeowners who would benefit from it, continuing and improving the eviction moratorium, and providing funding to high-capacity nonprofits and local governments to acquire distressed properties and preserve them for affordable housing. The High-Cost Cities Housing Forum (2020) has detailed many of these short-term policy needs. The focus here is on longer term, fundamental housing policy issues that, although brought more into the light by the pandemic, mostly preceded COVID-19.

Confronting the gated community: Towards a decolonial critique of violence beyond the paradigm of war

This article investigates the works of Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe as representatives of a tendency in the field of decolonial thought to assume the templates of warfare and the camp as the archetypal registers of violence in the contemporary world. Identifying this focus as the remnant of a Eurocentric vocabulary (the paradigm of war), the article proposes a shift from the language of warfare predominant in the field to a language of welfare. The article turns to the gated community (GC), instead of the camp, and the imperatives of (re)creation, instead of the logics of elimination, as new templates with which to make sense of modern/colonial violence. Moving beyond militaristic imagery, the analysis shows a form of violence that emerges as a response to the endless search for a life of convenience inside the walls of the GC. To this end, the article advances the concept of the dialect of disarrangement, the enforced but uneasy encounter between two subjectivities that inhabit the GC: the patrons (the homeowners who consume the easy life) and servants (the racialised service staff). In the GC, violence emerges in attempts to respond to this (in)convenient encounter via misrepresentations of both patrons and servants as out of their place.