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Creating Safe and Healthy Living Environments

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photo by Will Keightley

The Center for American Progress has released Creating Safe and Healthy Living Environments for Low-Income Families. It opens,

A strong home is central to all of our daily lives. People in the United States spend about 70 percent of their time inside a residence. As the Federal Healthy Homes Work Group explained, “A home has a unique place in our everyday lives. Homes are where we start and end our day, where our children live and play, where friends and family gather to celebrate, and where we seek refuge and safety.” Understanding how fundamental homes are to everything we do, it is troubling that more than 30 million housing units in the United States have significant physical or health hazards, such as dilapidated structures, poor heating, damaged plumbing, gas leaks, or lead. Some estimates suggest that the direct and indirect health care costs associated with housing-related illness or injuries are in the billions of dollars. The condition of housing is even more important for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities who need housing structures that support their particular needs.

The condition and quality of a home is often influenced by the neighborhood in which it is located, underscoring how one’s health and life expectancy is determined more by ZIP code than genetic code. According to a recent report by Barbara Sard, vice president for housing policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, living in neighborhoods of “concentrated disadvantage”—which are characterized by high rates of racial segregation, unemployment, single-parent families, and exposure to neighborhood violence—can impair children’s cognitive development and school performance. Residents of poor neighborhoods also tend to experience health problems—including depression, asthma, diabetes, and heart disease—at higher-than-average rates. This is particularly troubling given that African American, American Indian and Alaskan Native, and Latino children are six to nine times more likely than white children to live in high-poverty communities.

The country’s affordable housing crisis is partially to blame for families and individuals tolerating substandard housing conditions and unhealthy neighborhoods. Half of all renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing—the threshold commonly deemed affordable—while 26 percent spend more than half their income on housing. While housing assistance programs such as public housing and the Housing Choice Voucher program, commonly referred to as Section 8, provide critical support to families struggling to meet housing costs, only one in four households eligible for rental assistance actually receives it due to limited federal funding. Furthermore, millions of Americans face evictions each year. As work by Harvard University sociologist Matthew Desmond has highlighted, eviction is not just a condition of poverty but a cause of it, trapping families in poverty, preventing them from accessing and maintaining safe housing or communities, and corresponding with higher rates of depression and suicide.

This report provides an overview of the conditions of the nation’s housing stock, barriers to accessing housing for people with disabilities, the effects that neighborhood safety has on families, and recommendations for improving these conditions. Given how central homes and communities are to people’s lives, federal and local leaders must work to ensure low-income families have access to living environments that are conducive to their success. (1-2, footnotes omitted)

There were rapid improvements in housing healthy and safety over the 20th century. Since the time of Jacob Riis’ How The Other Half Lives, we went from outhouses being common to the public subsidy of modern apartment buildings in cities and the suburbanization of the rest country.

As a result, many people do not realize the extent to which many households continue to live in substandard housing. Lead paint exposure is perhaps the most known of the  risks, but it is not the only one.

This CAP report also highlights the risks that neighborhoods can present to their residents. Being safe in your home does not mean that you are safe on your street, on your walk to school or on your daily commute.

The report provides provides a useful overview of the challenges that low-income households face, inside and out of their homes.

Buying A First Home

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Realtor.com quoted me in Buying Your First Home? Better Make Sure It Has These 4 Things. It opens,

Finding the perfect starter home is a journey as well as a destination. You’ve got to know what you want, then adjust expectations to meet the reality of the market. In the end, you don’t have to settle on your “forever home”—just a place you’ll call home for at least five to seven years.

But that’s a long time in homeowner years, especially if you wake up each day in a place you wind up hating.

“You want to buy something that’s going to last,” says Carol Temple, an Arlington, VA, Realtor® who loves helping newbies find their first home.

So how do you know what’s going to stand the test of (a decent amount of) time? You’ve never done this before. You’re taking a leap of faith that you have the money, skills, and temperament to maintain the biggest purchase of your life so far.

We know—it’s scary. And overwhelming. But there is a foolproof formula to picking the right starter home.

1. Manageable monthly expenses

If you’ve been renting all your adult life, you’ll be surprised by how much owning a home actually costs. There’s a mortgage, real estate taxes (usually wrapped into your mortgage), insurance premiums, utilities, and the drip-drip-drip of maintenance costs. And here’s the fun part: All these costs usually increase with time!

“New homeowners are often not aware of how expenses can add up when they own a home,” says David Reiss, who teaches real estate law at Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, NY.

When calculating how much you can spend on a house, figure in all these costs, and then add a little more for unexpected expenses. Like replacing LED lightbulbs at $20 a pop. Or hiring a pro to prune that gorgeous oak in the backyard. Or maybe replacing your Grand Palais range that spontaneously combusted.

Make sure your final choice truly fits your budget. Got it? That may mean buying something smaller, older, or farther out than you originally intended.

2. Low maintenance

Maintenance costs are the great unknown in homeownership—the older the house, the more it will cost to keep running. So unless you have the handyman skills and desire to fix whatever comes up, it’s better for your starter house to be newer construction (less than 10 years old).

You may even want to consider brand-new construction, which costs more but whose parts are typically covered by a warranty. Standard coverage would be a one-year warranty for labor and materials, two years’ protection for mechanical defects—plumbing, electrical, heating, air conditioning, and ventilation systems—and 10 years for structural defects.

Whether you buy a new or existing home, don’t forget to hire a good home inspector to thoroughly identify potential problems.

“Even if the home buyers are handy, they may not want to be spending their time up on the roof looking for a leak or in the basement up to their knees in water,” Reiss says.

Buck-A-Home

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abandoned house

The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch quoted me (from an AP story) in Kansas City Presses To Sell Eyesore, Vacant Homes for A Buck. It reads, in part,

Drawn to the idea of buying a house for just a buck, Dorian Blydenburgh paced through the century-old digs in south Kansas City and didn’t mind tree limbs on the living room floor, holes in the ceiling and a funky mold smell.

“This is one everyone is gonna want, and there’s gonna be a fight for this,” said Blydenburgh, 56, a contractor looking at the three-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot house at 4124 Chestnut Avenue as a makeover prospect for a friend, who later applied to buy it. “Some of these places you need a bulldozer to fix, but this is doable. For a dollar, it looks like a go.”

That’s what Kansas City, Mo., officials were hoping to hear. The city and the Land Bank of Kansas City have offered 130 derelict, generally unlivable structures for sale for $1 each to those willing to make them livable again within a year. The buyer’s reward is an eventual $8,500 rebate — the amount it would have cost the city to flatten the houses.

*     *     *

But it’s buyer beware. Applicants must undergo a background check — applicants who are registered sex offenders or have drug-dealing or prostitution convictions are disqualified — and prove through bank statements or unused credit card limits they have at least $8,500 to devote to the rehab.

Ultimately, the program’s backers warn, rehabbing the properties might cost tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps involving installing or repairing roofs, electrical systems, plumbing, heating and air conditioning or foundations. And that’s beyond the cost of tackling troubling unknowns such as lead or asbestos.

“Most of those buildings on the dangerous list are going to have to come down. We know that,” Mayor Sly James said. “But there are other homes on that low level that could be salvaged, and we want people to know they are out there.”

Other cities have tried similar approaches. In Detroit, with the help of tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers, the city has torn down about 7,100 of an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 vacant houses since May 2014, with the mayor planning to have an additional 15,000 homes gone by 2018. More than 1,300 other homes have been auctioned, Detroit Land Bank Authority spokesman Craig Fahle said. Buyers of those properties, many fetching just the opening bid of $1,000, are required to bring the house up to code and have it occupied within six months — nine months if it’s in a historic district.

Chicago and Milwaukee have are unloading vacant lots. Chicago has sold more than 400 vacant parcels since 2014. In Milwaukee, homeowners next to a vacant lot can buy it for $1.

David Reiss, a Brooklyn Law School professor who focuses on real estate issues and community development, urges would-be buyers to understand the expenses beyond the price tag, including property taxes, upkeep and liability insurance.

“A house for a dollar may be an albatross around your neck,” he said. “I would look at it case by case. If it sounds too good, it probably is.”

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