The Fair Housing Act at 50

by David Luberoff
Deputy Director

Fair housing can and should be a centerpiece of efforts to expand economic opportunity, asserted Dr. Raphael Bostic, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who gave the 18th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on Tuesday, April 10 (watch video).  His talk, on the past, present, and future of the Fair Housing Act, was given one day before the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the measure.

Bostic, who also served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from 2009 until 2012, explained that decades of research show the strong positive impacts that neighborhoods can have on children's education and future earnings. Given this, he noted, it is in everyone's interest to support efforts to expand opportunities for all families. "Fair housing is a key to economic mobility," he explained. "It is an economic development issue as well as a community and personal development issue."

Bostic went on to discuss the two main strategies for achieving the law's ambitious (and, in many cases, unfilled) goals. One approach has been enforcement of the fair housing act’s prohibition on discriminatory treatment in the housing market– including actions brought by HUD against communities, and sometimes brought against HUD by activists and non-profit groups. The other strategy derives from the act’s mandate that federal grantees also have an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing, taking steps to promote integration and not just combat discrimination. During his HUD tenure, Bostic was instrumental in developing a new approach to structuring how HUD-funded communities should go about identifying and implementing such affirmative steps.

While the former approach can achieve some success, it can ultimately produce only limited results, he observed. However, if carefully designed, the latter strategy has significant potential, asserted Bostic, as plans designed by the communities themselves with input from local stakeholders have a greater chance of being actively embraced. Given the current administration's efforts to slow and roll back some of those efforts, in the short run, enforcement efforts are likely to be the primary way in which supporters of fair housing will achieve their goals, he said. However, in the long run, people and communities will come to adopt more proactive approaches if only because an increasing number of them understand that America's long-standing history of upward economic mobility is at risk and that fair housing can be part of a solution to making sure that the next generation (and the ones that follow) continue to have access to the American Dream.

Boston Mayor Gives Annual Dunlop Lecture

by David Luberoff
Senior Associate Director

In a more two-decade career that began in the construction trades and now brings him into a host of debates about federal policies, Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh says he’s “learned a lot about housing: how it gets built, the role it plays in working people’s lives, and the role it plays in community development.”

Walsh, who gave the Joint Center’s 17th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture on March 20th before more than 300 people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, hailed the fact that, in positions that included serving as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and as U.S. Secretary of Labor, John Dunlop “spent his career bringing together academics, government officials, workers, and labor leaders to better understand our shared challenges.” Such collaboration, “is something we could use more of today,” noted Walsh, who added, “I’ve found that kind of dialogue and collaboration to be invaluable throughout my career,” particularly when it comes to housing.

Walsh, who emerged from a crowded field to win Boston’s mayoral race in 2013, said that upon taking office, “one of the first things I confronted was what more and more people were calling a housing crisis. Rents and home prices were rising beyond middle-class, working-class, and low-income people’s budgets.”  Addressing those challenges, he said, not only required setting and achieving ambitious goals, such as building more than 50,000 additional housing units by 2030, but also doing so in ways that go beyond “simply matching housing units to the population, or meeting market-driven demand.”

Rather, he said, “the challenge is to embrace our success as a city while retaining the core values that got us here. Those values center on inclusiveness, on opportunity, on social and economic diversity. We are a community that welcomes all and leaves no one behind. These aren’t just ideals. They are pragmatic needs.” The mayor, who also spoke about city initiatives to provide more housing, reduce homelessness, and address evictions, added that those efforts further highlight “the role of housing not just in community development but also in human development.”

Turning to current debates about the federal budget and other federal policies, Walsh said the Trump administration’s recent budget proposals and other federal initiatives are “an effort to end the system of federal partnerships that date to the New Deal and Great Society commitments of the 1930s [and] the 1960s.”  Left unchecked, he said, such policies would exacerbate the already significant problem of economic inequality in Boston.  Therefore, he added, he and other mayors are actively trying “to educate people on the impacts of inequality, and advocate for solutions” such as “health care; paid family leave and affordable daycare; strong labor laws and fair tax laws; financial regulation; [and] infrastructure investments.”

While these are daunting challenges, the mayor said, “I’m still counseling confidence” because the work the city has done and continues to do puts Boston “in a good position to respond to this moment. Even if the funding arrangements we’ve built seem threatened, the relationships we’ve built are strong. They will produce new solutions and new ideas. They will bring new partners to the table.”  Those partners, he concluded, hopefully will include the many graduate and undergraduate students who attended the lecture. “We are going to need you in the years ahead,” said the mayor.

Watch Mayor Marty Walsh deliver the 2017 Dunlop Lecture.

Terwilliger: "Feds Should Focus Less on Subsidizing Homeowners; More on Helping Low-Income Renters and Low-Wealth Owners"

by Kerry Donahue
Communications
Manager

There are few people with more experience in housing than J. Ronald Terwilliger, chairman emeritus of Trammell Crow Residential and this year’s presenter of the John T. Dunlop Lecture.

A graduate of the Harvard Business School, Mr. Terwilliger returned to Cambridge last week to present his vision of a more balanced federal housing policy.

Before a standing-room-only audience at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Mr. Terwilliger urged Washington policymakers to abandon “prevailing orthodoxies” and re-direct the $200 billion the federal government spends annually on housing to support those families with the greatest needs.  As Mr. Terwilliger explained, we are at an inflection point in our nation’s history that requires federal housing policy to “focus less on subsidizing higher-income homeowners and more on helping lower-income renters as well as low-wealth homeowners.”  He specifically cited the mortgage interest deduction as in need of reform because it disproportionately benefits the wealthiest Americans. 

Mr. Terwilliger’s remarks were entitled Housing America’s Increasingly Diverse Population.  Central to his call for a more balanced housing policy is the fact that America’s demographics are dramatically changing:  Our nation is becoming older and more racially and ethnically diverse.  At the same time, many of our nation’s young adults, the 62 million echo boomers, are beginning to form households for the first time. As Mr. Terwilliger argued, these trends will challenge housing policymakers to develop new, more effective strategies, including ways to increase the supply of affordable rental housing to meet the rising demand in the marketplace.

It was wonderful to hear Mr. Terwilliger’s evocation of John Dunlop, a man who served presidents of both political parties and spent a lifetime bridging differences.  At a time when our nation’s politics seem so broken, we can no doubt use more men and women like Professor Dunlop in Washington. 

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We thank the National Housing Endowment for supporting the Dunlop Lecture.  Click the video below to watch Ron Terwilliger's speech. We welcome your comments and responses.

Bridge to Recovery: Senator Mel Martinez Frames a Vision for Housing

by Pamela Baldwin
Deputy Director

October in Cambridge means the Head of the Charles, fall foliage, students settling in, and the Joint Center’s annual John T. Dunlop Lecture.

Last week at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, former U.S. Senator and HUD Secretary Mel Martinez delivered an address entitled America’s Housing Policy: Charting a Course for Recovery.  In an auditorium filled with students and faculty, members of the Joint Center’s Policy Advisory Board, and the general public, Senator Martinez outlined why bipartisanship and bridging ideological differences will be the critical components of any policy agenda that seeks recovery, both for the U.S. economy in general and housing markets in particular.  Speaking from his current perspective as Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center Housing Commission and Chairman of the Southeast and Latin America at JPMorgan Chase, Senator Martinez called on federal policymakers to make housing and reform of the nation’s housing finance system a central priority, regardless of the outcome of the November election.  He set out a broad vision of housing at the center of national economic policy discussions and offered recommendations for addressing four of the deepest challenges affecting homeowners, renters, lenders, and communities: homeownership and access to credit, foreclosure mitigation, overhauling the housing finance system, and the future of multifamily and rental housing.

That the path to recovery is truly a bridge is a welcome theme for a lecture that honors the life and work of the late Professor Dunlop.  His career as a labor economist, emeritus professor, dean, and advisor to every president from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George W. Bush was characterized by his dedication to bridging the worlds of business and government, and leveraging academic research to provide knowledge that informs effective decision-making in both spheres.  As an embodiment of his legacy, the lecture delivered by Senator Martinez was a fitting tribute, evoking Professor Dunlop’s vision of bringing balance and civility to national policy discussions, and calling on both political parties to be mindful of the “shared destiny” implicit in repairing and recovering the American dream of safe and affordable housing for all. 

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We thank the National Housing Endowment for supporting the Dunlop Lecture.  Click the video below to watch Senator Martinez’s speech. We welcome your comments and responses.

Photo by Jared Charney