Housing
sastyk | May 10, 2016
As I mentioned some months ago, we are planning on selling our farm in Knox, NY (The farm is in the town of Knox, but the address is 43 Crow Hill Road, Delanson, NY - for reasons obscure to us even after a decade and a half, the mail goes two towns away) and moving to urban Schenectady. Well,"The time has come, the time is now..." We've loved living here and chronicling our adventures, and are leaving our wonderful home, our wonderful neighbors and our small nurturing community and school system with regret - and excitement about our new ventures.
The happiest thing for us would be to see…
lborkowski | March 22, 2016A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas at ProPublica: Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds
Anna North in the New York Times: What Planned Parenthood Really Does
Alison Young and Mark Nichols in USA TODAY: Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states
David Roberts at Vox: How your taxes ended up enriching coal executives who are betraying their workers
Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce: Why We Must Build (“We can’t build our way out of the housing…
kkrisberg | July 31, 2015Superstorm Sandy came ashore nearly three years ago, pummeling the New England and Mid-Atlantic coast and becoming one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the U.S. This week, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study released two new reports finding that the health impacts of Sandy continue to linger, illustrating the deep mental footprint left by catastrophic disasters and the challenges of long-term recovery.
Led by researchers at Rutgers University and New York University, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study is based on 1,000 face-to-face interviews with adults in the nine…
kkrisberg | July 11, 2014Last year, the U.S. Census reported that record numbers of people were living in poverty. In fact, the 46.5 million Americans living in poverty as of 2012 was the largest count since the Census began measuring poverty more than 50 years ago. But along with overall poverty numbers, the Census recently reported that concentrated poverty is up, too — and that’s worrisome because it means that more people may face even greater barriers and fewer opportunities to moving out of poverty.
The Census Bureau designates any census tract with of a poverty rate of 20 percent or more as a “poverty area.”…
kkrisberg | February 28, 2014It’s probably no surprise that people who experienced foreclosures during the Great Recession may have also experienced symptoms of depression. However, researchers have found that the mental health effects of foreclosure go beyond the individual to the community at-large.
“For the most part, discussion of foreclosure has focused on the individual experience, the people who are in this circumstance, who are at risk of losing their homes, of losing that nest egg,” said Kathleen Cagney, a professor within the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. “But we wanted to think about…
lborkowski | October 25, 2013Ian Frazier's in-depth New Yorker article on homelessness in New York seems especially timely, coming after a government shutdown that demonstrated how quickly low-income workers can fall into homelessness if their paychecks suddenly stop. (The shutdown also demonstrated some things about Congress, but I won't get into that here.) Here in DC, contract employees who serve food and clean offices in federal buildings were abruptly out of work. John Anderson, a line cook at a Smithsonian Museum, told the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley he had to work out a deal with his landlord because he…
lborkowski | October 16, 2013As Kim Krisberg reported earlier this year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition has found that in no state can full-time workers earning minimum wage afford the average rent for two-bedroom apartments without spending more than 30% of their income on housing. The combination of rising rents and stagnating wages has left many families struggling to afford basic necessities, and unstable housing situations negatively affect health and children's school performance.
The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program allows low-income tenants to rent apartments and pay 30% of their income for…
lborkowski | April 26, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Another day, another study that shows investing in public health interventions can make a serious dent in health care spending.
A new study recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that banning smoking in all U.S. subsidized housing could yield cost savings of about $521 million every year. That total includes $341 million in secondhand smoke-related health care expenditures, $108 million in renovation expenses and $72 million in smoking-attributable fire losses. In fact, just prohibiting smoking in public housing alone would result in a savings…
lborkowski | September 21, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It really is a chemical world, which is bad news for people with asthma.
According to a recent report released in August, at this very moment from where I write, I'm fairly surrounded by objects and materials that contain chemicals that are known or suspected asthmagens — substances that can act as asthma triggers if inhaled. There's formaldehyde (it's in office furniture, wood flooring, curtains and drapes); maleic anhydride (it's in interior paint and tile flooring); hexamethylene diisocyanate (it's in metal storage shelving and decorative metal); and diisodecyl phthalate (…
mikethemadbiologist | July 28, 2011David Wogan brings up an important point--if we're serious about global warming, we need to lower the amount of energy buildings use:
Consider this: according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, our nation's buildings consume over 40 percent of the energy consumed across all sectors - that is even more energy than consumed by the transportation sector (29 percent). And in our homes and apartments, nearly half (49 percent) of all energy is used for heating and cooling.
As he points out weatherization is something you can and should do to lower energy consumption. But there's…
mikethemadbiologist | July 2, 2011I haven't talked about Big Shitpile (the housing-initiated economic collapse in a while), but this report from the Essex County Register of Deeds (Massachusetts) describes nothing less than the breakdown of the property title system in the U.S.:
Yesterday at the Annual Conference of The International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers (IACREOT), Register John O'Brien revealed the results of an independent audit of his registry. The audit, which is released as a legal affidavit was performed by McDonnell Property Analytics, examined assignments of mortgage…
mikethemadbiologist | April 3, 2011A while ago, I raised the problem--an inconvenient truth, if you will--that moving to a renewable energy future is going to be difficult:
My impression reading a lot of commentary about renewable energy is that there's this fantasy that we just have to build a bunch of windmills, install some solar panels, buy a Prius, and replace our windows and all will be well. But the brutal reality is that we need to urbanize our suburbs. We need to discourage detached housing. We need to massively fund local mass transit--not just SUPERTRAINS. We can't have people firing up their own personal combustion…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2011The whole CDO binge (aka Big Shitpile) led to a whole slew of perverse incentives to not help a borrower who is having difficultly paying the mortgage, even though, in the era before mortgages were treated as commodities to be sold, banks routinely went out of their way to avoid foreclosure--usually the costs were too great to make foreclosure a routine act. I've argued that if banks aren't willing to work with homeowners due to financial reasons, then homeowners should also act in their best interests: if that means walking away ('strategic default'), so be it.
Nicholas Carroll runs the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2011By way of Digby, we come across this proposal of how to reach 95% percent renewable energy by 2050. Before I get to some of the issue I have with the study (which is actually pretty good), I want to lay out my general views on energy use.
First, I'm not a 'fan' of nuclear power. While thorium-powered reactors would be a vast improvement over traditional reactors (and newer designs regardless of energy source would fail much more safely compared to older ones), even thorium isn't perfect. But what's really stupid are all of the calls for immediately stopping the use of nuclear power. (…
mikethemadbiologist | March 14, 2011In light of the nuclear power plant partial meltdowns in Japan, there are calls for not expanding the U.S. nuclear power plant capacity, and even shutting down existing plants. What bothers me about this is that there is no discussion of how we make up the energy production shortfall--I'll get to energy conservation in a bit. As the U.S. begins the 21st century, we still are generating most of our power by lighting things on fire: oil, gas, and coal. While renewable energy (which despite its name still has some CO2 footprint) could pick up some slack, given our dysfunctional political…
mikethemadbiologist | December 10, 2010Leave it to conservatives to actually conduct the War on Christmas (Got Scrooge?). I give you National Review editor Kate O'Beirne on the problem of hunger (italics mine):
O'BEIRNE: And then the title of our gathering is so crucial; "Less of Washington and More of Ourselves". The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows... broad bipartisan support. And if we're going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can't rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don't…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2010I've written before about how the housing fiasco required fraud and perjury. Well, there's no end in sight for the damage done by Big Shitpile. The latest chapter involves foreclosing on homeowners who not only are able to make their payments, but have actually done so. How does this Kafkaesque nightmare happen? Yves Smith explains:
It's called servicing errors and fraud. And whether by mistake or design, when a borrower gets caught in the servicer hall of mirrors of compounding fees and charges, there is no way to appeal and pretty much no way out.
Let's look at how this begins. A…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2010They're almost there. The NY Times' Joe Nocera on Foreclosuregate:
The lawsuit uncovered a raft of similar examples -- case after case where the loan officers not only knew that fraud was being committed, but were actively engaged in committing it. "By about 2006," says the lawsuit, "Countrywide's internal risk assessors knew that in a substantial number of its stated-income loans -- fully a third -- borrowers overstated income by more than 50 percent." And that is just one small subset of what went on at Countrywide. The truth is, any rock you turn over in the Countrywide subprime portfolio…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2010Over the weekend, as the tweets that only 18% in the U.S. could correctly define what a molecule is and less than a third could define DNA--and these were an open-ended questions--my first thought, after looking at the study (pdf, p. 48), was that all of the open-ended questions did worse than the multiple choice ones. (An aside: The DNA answer has improved over twenty years). It's much easier to answer a multiple choice question for something you might not have seriously thought about for decades, simply because you don't remember it. My second thought was that most people don't have to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2010While most of the commentary, including mine, about the collapse of Big Shitpile (aka the housing crisis) has focused on the financial and economic effects, building more housing than we needed--and couldn't afford--also had environmental effects. Take, for instance, Prince William County, VA:
Stewart and other Prince William officials hope a new developer will soon be found to construct Harbor Station, the nearly 2,000-acre parcel near Dumfries with the glittering golf course.
McLean developer Robert C. Kettler and partners had planned on building 4,000 houses, a town center with luxury…