Barbara Samuels

Baltimore. These December sunsets come so early but they are beautiful.

It always has.

With lower incomes & responsibility for children, women headed households make up a disproportionate share of those who suffer most from severe housing burdens & unhealthy, unsafe housing.

HUD investigating Boston for alleged housing discrimination The move marks an escalation in the Trump administration’s overhaul of fair housing enforcement.

Instead of solving the fair and affordable housing crisis,
@hudgov.bsky.social is attacking basic civil rights. Voters demanded solutions like the ones in the city of Boston that are increasing the supply of affordable housing and access to the American Dream.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Take a lesson John Harbaugh and Ravens!

I despair of ever planning far enough ahead to get a table.

Just a 3.3% increase in the Housing Choice Voucher budget!
The barrier to adequately fund vouchers & services for all eligible households is political, not fiscal. If we work together to can muster the political will, we can unlock the power of HCV to cut child poverty in half & end homelessness.

Eileen Higgins Elected Next Mayor Of Miami With Real Estate's Backing Some of South Florida's largest developers poured thousands of dollars into her campaign.

the affordability message is working ⤵️

“We’re living in the state of Florida, where we have people that are building cages for our residents rather than affordable housing for them.”

www.bisnow.com/south-florid...

Politically, upzoning paired w/ Inclusionary assurance & tenant protections is a winning combination. Fighting w/ each other benefits the status quo & true NIMBYs. So everyone’s time would be better spent refining pragmatic complementary strategies that work instead of ideological bantering.

Could Philly's $2 Billion Bet on Housing Help Reduce Gun Violence? Research has found that fixing up abandoned homes can make a city safer. The H.O.M.E Plan calls for building and rehabbing 30,000 homes in four years.

Philly is about to embark on an ambitious affordable housing plan, hoping it will help reduce shootings in the years to come.

It's the kind of long-term public health approach to gun violence that experts say city officials should pursue. More from Mensah Dean for @thetrace.org

Yes.

This 1800s duplex packs over 6,000sf of total living space, with a shared backyard, on a small 4,300sf lot.

This is illegal to build essentially everywhere in Massachusetts today… including on this same lot.

📍Salem, MA

ALL of America’s Children are DONE Waiting Their Turns & Demand Voters vote for them. Children are NOT born Red or Blue. They are Purple & belong to ALL of Us. They are demanding Voters choose Them & commit to Food/Housing Security, Pub Ed, Civil Rights! youtu.be/rbmWyeF2iUo?... go.bsky.app/R2tjqFU

“We haven’t built enough housing in the Country for a long time.”
- Fed Chair Powell

Between 1996 and 2017, NYC lost 1.1 million units of affordable housing. The most recent Housing Vacancy Survey indicates a vacancy rate of less than one percent for affordable apartments in NYC.
Families entering shelters come from a few clustered zip codes in the poorest neighborhoods in NYC.

We call it Inclusionary Housing in Baltimore & its very complementary to original movement against exclusionary zoning—which was about racial & economic deseg, not just exclusion of apartments. Without IH/IZ, upzoning doesnt assure a share of new growth affordable to those below upper-mid class.

Are you managing a rental property? Lessons from the FTC’s lawsuit against Greystar Price can be one of the most important factors people consider when looking for housing. But what happens when the rental price advertised doesn’t represent the price your tenants end up paying? Accor...

Property management companies need to pay attention to this lawsuit and its resulting settlement. www.ftc.gov/business-gui...

PE buying single family homes in the suburbs & Sunbelt NOT same as pattern in Baltimore’s low income Black n-hoods where slumlords financed by hard money lenders long bought & milked packages of 100’s of rental rowhouses. PE & Wall Street finance hard $$ guys but dont get their hands dirty w/ houses

And it will all be decided by the whims of one person, the councilmember for the district where the property is located.

The Banner's Giacomo Bologna went to Las Vegas to keep following this important story about how private investors are triggering a foreclosure crisis here (and maybe elsewhere).

Thanks @petesaunders.bsky.social for this piece. It crystallizes my discomfort w/ YIMBY agenda & discourse—despite sharing its goals for zoning reform. E.g Its elevation of maximum MR production above desegregation or deep affordability, constant attacks on IZ & veneration of filtering for the poor.

What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1 This happens when you throw the baby out with the bath water.

True: ‘As BLM became an albatross around the neck of urbanism…the YIMBY movement w/ its focus on housing affordability allowed urbanists to toss aside the more deeply imbedded aspects of our society, like segregation, economic inequality & economic immobility.’ 1/

open.substack.com/pub/petesaun...

‘Intentional Chaos’: Judge Chastises HUD in Dispute Over Homelessness Programs The Department of Housing and Urban Development temporarily rescinded its earlier blueprint for how to qualify for funding for homeless programs.

It is intentional -- and malevolent -- chaos.

"'Are we going to see another 2025 [NOFA] without the proper procedure in place tomorrow?'...Judge Mary S. McElroy asked...there is a process for 'agency action...It’s not by tweets and it’s not by last-minute orders or last minute withdrawals.'"

Mt Laurel leverages market rate as well as Affordable units because so many projects are built as inclusionary mixed income. Also true of Massachusetts Ch 40B law.

The Trump Administration and its hashtag#CFPB are proposing to eviscerate enforcement of the hashtag#EqualCreditOpportunityAct (hashtag#ECOA), which has been a major tool for improving access to credit in housing markets, auto lending, consumer lending, and small business lending. COMMENTS ON THE PROPOSAL ARE DUE THIS WEEK, DECEMBER 12. The Trump Administration's proposed rule would: 1) Remove hashtag#DisparateImpact from ECOA; 2) Severely narrow the rule on “discouragement," and allow geographic targeting to the detriment of protected classes; 3) It would dramatically shrink the legal use of “special purpose credit programs,” making them unable to focus on helping groups that have been adversely impacted by current or historical discrimination. Please *share* this post and have your organization submit comments. The National Consumer Law Center has created a web page to help folks submit their own comments, ideally including quantitative and qualitative evidence documenting continued disparities (including due to disparate impact) in markets for home, car, consumer, and small business financing. Drawing from recent analysis or reports by your or other organizations that illustrate continuing disparities in lending markets, home appraisals, home ownership rates, subprime auto loans, predatory financial activity, etc. is particularly impactful.

Please share/repost

The Trump-Vought CFPB is trying to eviscerate Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which has been a major tool for attacking discrimination in housing, auto, consumer, & small business lending markets.

COMMENTS ON PROPOSAL DUE THIS WEEK, DECEMBER 12

www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-im...

This seems like a practice that should be challenged by the a state AG & consumer protection agency. Arguably, advertising a (lower) price to lure applicants to an open house & bidding war is a material misrepresentation & deceptive practice under state UDAP laws.

Can we get all pro-housing/YIMBY/Abundance advocates join in fightingTrump on this cruel & anti-housing rule:
“Under new rules HUD will place new restrictions on $3 billion in homelessness aid, allowing no more than 30% of federal grants to be used for permanent housing.”

Could I ask why you feel so compelled to stretch to fit your ideological opinion? The 30 year IH tax credit fills the gap between market and IH rent revenue. This credit is layered ON TOP of the pre-existing lucrative 10 year tax credit the City gives all new MR rental buildings. More than adequate!

Again, the old law was not funded.

Easy fix if this is happening. Just change the statute to specify rounding down instead of up.

Again, there are no waivers under the new funded IH law. The developers were asking for, and automatically getting, waivers under the old law,