The nation’s home-ownership rate is also falling, to 67% of U.S. households in 2010, after topping 69% in 2004, according to [...]]]> Toronto Given the housing and foreclosure crisis in the United States, it was not surprising to see that homeownership rates have fallen rapidly in recent years.  The Wall Street Journal published an estimate saying:

The nation’s home-ownership rate is also falling, to 67% of U.S. households in 2010, after topping 69% in 2004, according to the Census Bureau, with further declines expected. Each 1% decline represents one million households moving to rentals, housing experts say.

Conservatively that means 2 million fewer homeowners in the USA.  Where are they going?  Into rentals.  The same WSJ article estimates the following:

Renter households now top a record 37 million after increasing more than 3.5 million in the past five years, partly due to the foreclosure crisis. Green Street Advisors expects an additional 4.4 million rental households to be added by 2015.

Part of this increase is fueled by the transfer of owners to renters and part of it is undoubtedly fueled by the tightening credit markets that will produce longer term rents, particularly among the young in expanding markets.

It is hard not to think about tenants in Toronto.  At best only 50% of the city is composed of homeowners and estimates are only a little better than 60% in the greater Toronto area.  In the neighborhoods where ACORN Canada organizers virtually everyone is a tenant in one high rise complex after another.  The longest running organizing campaign not surprisingly has been the effort to win what we call, “landlord licensing,” which would be a process of licensing (and de-licensing) based on inspections (which would lead to repairs and improvements) and finally assure our tenants safe, decent, and even affordable housing.  In this long running battle the real estate interests cry like stuck pigs at our every proposal, but there has been sure and steady progress.  Last year winning a better auditing and inspections process, even though far short of licensing, according to the City of Toronto housing department led to $100 million in landlord upgrades and improvements.  Now ACORN Canada is trying to secure another small, but significant victory in this guerrilla campaign where a box would be required in the lobby of all major apartment complexes where the audit reports and improvements would be available to any tenant seeking to rent creating a transparency that would hopefully steer tenants towards better properties and shame landlords into making needed repairs.

There’s no way to imagine cities with burgeoning numbers of tenants who will no longer be seeing apartments as way stations to homeownership but increasingly as permanent addresses and not realize that the long imbalance where landlords have held the upper hand and tenants in most cities and states have been virtually stripped of any rights, as a time bomb ticking.  New construction of apartment blocks is being accompanied by rental inflation, so there are bound to once again be calls for controls if (when?) greed laps past demand, but perhaps even more urgently there will need to be tenant rights campaigns, like the ones in Toronto, to secure basic housing decency for the millions and millions who now understand that apartments are central to the urban future.

subprime mortgage securitization

New Orleans On ESPN’s Sportscenter during the seasons they have a feature called “Come on!” in which they feature unbelievable or bonehead plays.  We need that in other fields of public life and politics.  Reading about the efforts of banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase along with the various [...]]]>

subprime mortgage securitization

New Orleans On ESPN’s Sportscenter during the seasons they have a feature called “Come on!” in which they feature unbelievable or bonehead plays.  We need that in other fields of public life and politics.  Reading about the efforts of banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase along with the various trade associations to try to get their noses under the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac restructuring tent to shill a profit by issuing government secured mortgages, I could only thing:  Oh, come on!  How ridiculous!!  These are the same banks that just brought us the Great Recession due to their irresponsible lending and securitization schemes, and now they should somehow be allowed to profitably issue government mortgages.  Though by now we all ought to be used to the way that Wall Street thumbs their nose at all of the economic realities that all of us face, this is wildly unbelievable.

Reading the New York Times article by Louise Story, it was clear this was another predator’s ball with not only Wells and Chase at the trough, but also Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley.  All of this reminds me of the scam that the Obama Administration stopped in recent years of allowing private interests to wildly profit as the middle men brokers for federally offered student loans.  Banks were making out like, well how else can I say this, bandits.  Stopping this sticky fingered scandal saved huge amounts of money, but now they are baaaaccccckkkkk with something perhaps even more outrageous.

The other backassedwards part of this is the problem of misdirected blame that still falls in the direction of Fannie/Freddie for supposedly bringing down the house by loaning to lower income citizens without looking at affordability or sustainability.  I understand the ideological need to blame the poor, but it’s important to point out that there is still no factual evidence that these loans, that should have been encouraged by the government, had anything to do with the mess.    Not only would we be throwing out the baby rather than the bathwater, but it seems we would be institutionalizing the bathwater and leaving the baby homeless, so to speak.

There’s probably a debate worth having about how many and how much of the “middle class” need to have federally guaranteed mortgages through these vehicles, but it seems obvious the we will need even firmer support for working class families in the future to have a chance at home ownership in we ever get out of this recession.  We need to slap away the hands trying to pretend this is all a cookie jar, and tell them to not only mind their own business, but maybe even try to get better at it than they have been (let’s see banks portfolio more mortgages on their own before they claim to know how to issue others), and keep federal institutions trying to solve the puzzle of adequate and affordable housing for all Americans again.

From National Geographic Article

Mumbai      Vinod Shetty, ACORN India’s Director, and I had been meeting for hours along Juhu Road at the Sip ‘N Munch going through our work list of what needed to be done on campaigns around remittances, the Commonwealth [...]]]>

From the National Geographic article featuring ACORN International ragpickers.

From National Geographic Article

Mumbai      Vinod Shetty, ACORN India’s Director, and I had been meeting for hours along Juhu Road at the Sip ‘N Munch going through our work list of what needed to be done on campaigns around remittances, the Commonwealth Games, and multi-national food contractors and their labor law violations.  We had discussed the great progress of our Dharavi recycling center.  He had told me the good news that Joseph Campana’s project for us of producing a book that would support our Dharavi work finally had a publisher in Harper-Collins-India.  We had talked about the prospects for acquiring a set of scales and a crushing machine to be able to raise the prices for our plastic recycling and increase our waste pickers wages.  We had checked the dates and filings on our paperwork for the ACORN Foundation (India).  We had discussed our efforts to repackage and sell products being produced in Dharavi for Diwali and other festival dates to our school recycling partners like Eco-Mundial and the American School.  We had taken notes for reports owed to our friends at BCGEU and SEIU.  There were a lot of items ticked off the list.

Finally at that point Vinod pulled out a staff of glossy magazines and newspapers with almost a blush.  The magazines ran the gamut.  One was the Clean India Journal which focused on environmental progress for companies, contractors, and others in India and featured our work in September in a piece called, “Waste Matters for Green Workers” about our ragpicker organization in Dharavi.  Another in a the “green” issue of an upscale fashion monthly called Jade and style magazine was entitled “Green Heroes:  Ragpickers or City Savers?”  (Access both on our website at www.acorninternational.org)   Later he forwarded me another piece published on several websites by a Londoner which was not quite as gushing but referred to our ragpickers as “invisbile heroes” in http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/3790-Invisible-heroes-of-Dharavi.  An article distributed for school children in a “weekly reader” style publication called Robin Age also contained a recent feature.

Looking quickly, the Jade piece by Sugatha Menon ended with the lines:

Ragpickers in the Dharvi Project

As I write this story, a message pops
in my mailbox, the US ambassador
to India is visiting Acorn’s waste
segregation center today… paucity of
time doesn’t permit me to go for the
event, but I sincerely wish for many more
mighty oaks for this Acorn.

Wow!  Feeling the love in Bombay!  What a pleasure to read for a beaten down veteran of the USA based searches like me which are dominated by right wing zealots, conspiratorialists, and general haterators.  Why doesn’t Google search worldwide for me?!?

Reading the Clean India Journal, I couldn’t believe what I was reading.  A straightforward and accurate overview caught my eye:

Laxmi and several others form the recycling clan of Dharavi. And, they are all part of Acorn Foundation (India), Mumbai, a registered charity trust affiliated to Acorn International or the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now. Acorn International is a community based NGO working in 12 countries across the world. It has been fighting on issues like right to affordable housing, living wages, water, sanitation, education and healthcare in India. One of their projects – the Dharavi Project – Acorn aims to organise and train the ragpickers in scientific methods of waste handling, segregation and recycling. Besides Mumbai, the organisation also works to improve the lives of the ragpickers in cities like Delhi and Bangalore.

In the “Invisible Heroes” piece the last paragraphs are equally powerful by Delhi based Anna  da  Costa:

like many countries, especially in the developed world, India already has a skilled recycling and sorting workforce in place. “India’s recycling industry has the expertise and capacity to scale massively, but it needs to be properly valued, formalised and supported,” said Shetty as we sat in his Mumbai office. There are signs of change, “But these need to be magnified.”
I looked down at Shetty’s desk where a series of small ID cards were carefully laid out, identifying recyclers as members of the “Dharavi project”. An image of a young boy, who could not have been more than nine years old, gazed back at me, accompanied by a name in bold type: “Sameer”. For Sameer, this card is the difference between invisibility and visibility, anonymity and belonging. For India, it is a step on the long road to tackling the enormous waste challenge, and creating dignified, green jobs.

One article had such a “crush” line about Vinod that he would have to be careful showing his wife the piece.

It was great praise and a long way from building power, but as we rose it felt like progress in Mumbai for our rag pickers in this huge world capital of the poor.