Learning from the past – How to remake the secondary mortgage market
“The American dream of homeownership did not magically emerge after World War II from some invisible hand of the market. The readily available, low downpayment, thirty-year mortgage that flooded the market with credit in the 40s and 50s was the result of a series of government policies, including those…” read more (by PRRAC Executive Director Philip Tegeler, from the Kirwan Institute’s Race-Talk Blog) Read other articles in this Race-Talk series.
Voices of Integration
We are working our way through many hours of audio and video tape recordings from families who have made moves from high poverty neighborhoods to dramatically higher opportunity communities, as part of our multimedia “Voices of Integration” project. Take a look at one of our audio slideshows in development, “A Safe Front Yard,” excerpted from an interview in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. If you are working with families in your area who have taken advantage of housing mobility programs to move to new neighborhoods, please contact us, we may want to include some of these families in our interviews.
Other news and resources
Listen to a recent NPR story on “Small Area FMRs,” HUD’s pilot program to expand Section 8 family access to higher-rent communities.
Immigrant Communities and Fair Housing: PRRAC is a co-sponsor, along with the National Council of La Raza, the Equal Rights Center, and HUD, of a forum on fair housing issues affecting immigrant communities, July 22, 2011, in Washington, DC. Click here for more information.
Hard data on educational inequality: The U.S. Department of Education released results from Phase I of the Civil Rights Data Collection survey. The survey reports information from about 72,000 schools across the country (most public schools with over 3,000 students). Unfortunately, the survey reveals wide disparities in the type of opportunities provided to students. For example, less than one fourth of school districts run pre-K programs and about 500,000 high school students don’t have access to Algebra II. For more analysis, see this report from Pro Publica.
