When a driver strikes someone walking or biking, the tendency to blame the victim runs deep. Ask Raquel Nelson, who lost her young son to a hit-and-run driver, then got convicted for vehicular homicide, even though she was just trying to walk across the street with her children from a bus stop to her home. Or witness the reaction to the death of Amanda Phillips, who was struck by a truck driver while biking in Boston recently.
Why do people blame victims, and can anything be done to lead them to reconsider this response? New research published in the journal Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that personal values play a large role in determining whether someone assigns culpability to victims or perpetrators—and that the way incidents are described can influence these attitudes.
Writing in the New York Times, study authors Laura Niemi and Liane Young say that people who value “loyalty, obedience and purity” are more likely to view victims of sex crimes and physical violence as “contaminated” or responsible. Psychologists refer to these as “binding values” because they’re associated with a worldview that prioritizes group cohesion. People who hold binding values tend to more more religious and more politically conservative.
On the other end of the spectrum are people who subscribe to “individualizing” values like fairness and reducing harm. This group is less likely to blame victims, Niemi and Young write, and tends to be politically progressive.
People’s values tend to be fixed, but Niemi and Young found that the way incidents are framed can influence how they perceive victims and perpetrators:
[W]e explored whether nudging people to focus on perpetrators versus victims could affect people’s moral judgments. We did so by placing either the perpetrator or the victim in the subject position in a majority of sentences in descriptions of sexual assault (e.g., “Lisa was forced by Dan” versus “Dan forced Lisa”). We then asked the participants to assign percentages of blame to the victim and perpetrator.
Consistent with our previous findings, the more participants endorsed binding values, the more blame they assigned to victims and the less blame they assigned to perpetrators. But we also found that focusing their attention on the perpetrator led to reduced ratings of victim blame, victim responsibility and references to victims’ actions, whereas a focus on victims led to greater victim blaming. This was surprising: You might assume that focusing on victims elicits more sympathy for them, but our results suggest that it may have the opposite effect.
Victim blaming appears to be deep-seated, rooted in core moral values, but also somewhat malleable, susceptible to subtle changes in language. For those looking to increase sympathy for victims, a practical first step may be to change how we talk: Focusing less on victims and more on perpetrators — “Why did he think he had license to rape?” rather than “Imagine what she must be going through” — may be a more effective way of serving justice.
While Niemi and Young found this effect was small compared to the moral orientation of the observer, it applied to everyone across the spectrum of values.
Louisville’s Google Fiber revolution looks like it might begin in the Meriwether neighborhood. That’s where Metro Louisville is carving off a small, 50-foot-by-38-foot parcel of land it owns at the intersection of Meriwether Avenue and Hancock Street for one of eleven planned Google Fiber Huts.
No, these huts aren’t some Tiki-inspired super-fast Wifi hangouts, they like fiber optic substations that convert Google Fiber’s enormous capacity to something that can be used by consumers. As such, they need to form a network throughout the city.
Location of eleven Google Fiber Huts across Louisville. (Montage by Broken Sidewalk)
Development plans for the first eleven huts were filed in April of this year. According to Google Fiber, these huts are built on city owned properties and typically leased to the tech company for use in the Fiber network. Besides this location at 535 Meriwether Avenue, Google Fiber Huts are planned at 3250 Seventh Street Road, 8346 Dixie Highway, 8703 Ferndale Road, 13401 Reamers Road, 1000 Amphitheater Road, 3029 West Muhammad Ali Boulevard, 2900 Hikes Lane, 4610 Holzheimer Lane, 3000 Frankfort Avenue, and 7709 Preston Highway.
Location of the Meriwether Avenue Fiber Hut.
Now, the Metro Louisville has begun carving out parcels on which the Fiber Huts can be built, including a parcel on Meriwether Avenue submitted on July 18.
(Courtesy Google Fiber)
“Building a fiber network is a big job, so advance planning goes a long way toward helping us minimize disruption for residents and build in an efficient manner,” Google Fiber wrote in a checklist it prepared for cities. An “important part of network design is determining where to place Google Fiber network huts. These network huts house Fiber’s electronic equipment and serve as key distribution points between the backbone of our network and customers’ homes.”
An example of a Google Fiber Hut. (Courtesy Google Fiber)
“City owned sites generally make sense as hut locations because they are zoned appropriately and dispersed throughout the city,” the document continues.
Each Google Fiber Hut is a prefabricated unit trucked in and installed on a concrete slab. The huts measure around 12 feet by 29.5 feet and stand 9 feet tall. Huts are designed with an aggregate “washed stone” finish.
The site of the Meriwether Avenue Google Fiber Hut indicated in red. (Montage by Broken Sidewalk)
Each hut site typically measures 32 feet by 50 feet and is surrounded by a 10-foot-tall chain link fence. An on-site power generator is also included, but only run when there’s an outage. Huts also contain HVAC units that Google Fiber compared to the sound of a “mid-size pickup truck idling.” Huts can serve up to 40,000 households each.
A Google Fiber Hut will be installed at the former Exmet site on Meriwether Avenue. (Courtesy Metro Louisville / U of L)
If you’re still unsure how fiber optic internet works, take a look at this video for some background info on the technology:
While we’re looking at the Meriwether neighborhood, it’s worth noting that the site of the Google Fiber Hut, on the brownfield site of former fertilizer manufacturer Exmet, was recently studied by the University of Louisville’s Center for Environmental Policy and Management (CEPM), Metro Louisville, and consultants Lord Aeck Sargent.
The larger site around the Google Fiber Hut was studied in the Louisville Central Rail Corridor Area-Wide Brownfield Plan.
In a report titled “Louisville Central Rail Corridor Area-Wide Brownfield Plan,” researchers identified the larger 3.2-acre site among five “Catalyst Sites” throughout the corridor. The report proposed creating an “Eco-Industrial District” in the neighborhood. According to the report:
The western portion of the site was used for fertilizer manufacturing since early in the Corridor’s development when Federal Chemical built a plant to produce a variety of products under the “Daybreak” name. The site was divided roughly in half by the extended right-of-way of Hancock Street, but as there was no corresponding street north of the Short Line, the public land was absorbed into the plant property… After an EPA-funded assessment found hazardous materials including heavy metals and acids, the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection cleared the site and performed limited site remediation. The property was transferred to the current owner and is currently being used for general storage of LMG’s municipal waste collection equipment, including trucks and dumpsters. The site factors into LMG’s long-range plans to develop additional waste minimization and recycling capacity at its adjacent waste transfer station.
Tragedy struck the Parkland neighborhood Friday afternoon when the facade of a historic two-story building collapsed, trapping and killing one person who was working on the structure. The building was located at 28th Street and Grand Avenue.
Work was being done illegally to the building according to files released by Metro Louisville, and the property was the subject of multiple stop work orders and violations within the past several years. Reading through the long list of violations, accumulated from several city agencies, it’s a wonder the building remained standing this long.
The Grand Avenue side of the building. (Via Google)
John Dozier, 71, was killed during the collapse. His body was found “pinned between a large beam and a metal drum” beneath a pile of brick rubble, according to WLKY. WDRB reported that Dozier was working on the building for its owner. A smaller, secondary collapse complicated the recovery effort, according to a followup from WLKY.
The structure is a holdout on its side of the block. Most of the rest of the vacant property here is owned by the adjacent Reynolds Metal. (Via Google)
“A lot of people in the community have had serious concerns about the safety of that building over the past several years,” Jerald Muhammad, a family friend of the victim, told WDRB in a followup article. Dozier was sent to the emergency room while working on the building two years ago when he fell through the floor.
Joseph Coleman told the Courier-Journal he previously worked part time on the building’s brick facade, but quit because he felt the building was unsafe. Randy Skeens, who worked at Les’s Meat Market on the structure’s ground floor, had just left the building and witnessed the collapse.
The structure circa 1925 showing the Daughters of America at Parkland Hall. (Via Parkland History Project)
The structure is actually the old Parkland Masonic Hall, dating to 1916, according to a stone piece once set in the facade. The hall would have been entered along the Grand Avenue entrance. An ornate stained glass window with Masonic insignia marked the spot. In the front were two storefronts set off by a cast-iron facade. The Greek patterning of the windows seen in Les’s Meat Market were not original. The original storefronts were symmetric and contained a recessed front door, typical of many retail structures of the era.
Detail of the building’s cast-iron facade. (Courtesy Metro Louisville)
The structure, 1064–1066 South 28th Street, is listed as owned by Hama, LLC, which, according to the Kentucky Secretary of State, is an inactive organization that was dissolved in 2013 after not filing its annual report. Other city documents refer to Dwight Sweeney of Virginia Avenue a few blocks from the 28th Street structure as the building owner and person behind the LLC.
Despite large amounts of work done to the building in recent years, no building permits had been issued for the structure in the past five years. The latest permits issued to the property are dated 2011. The last of those permits is dated July 14, 2011, when Develop Louisville issued an electrical permit (303166) to Collins Electric of Kentucky for emergency repair work on the building valued at $1,000. Other permits going back to February of that year covered installation of refrigerator units for meat and general tenant fit up for Les’s Meat Market, then known simply as The Meat Store.
(Courtesy Metro Louisville)
Trouble with the building appears to have begun in earnest in 2014 shortly after it apparently went into foreclosure. Inspectors made repeated and frequent visits to the structure over the following two years. Inspectors from various city agencies regularly spoke with Elias “Les” Estephane, owner of Les’s Meat Market, about problems with the property. Many of the violations revolved around his business.
One story remains constant throughout that time: Estephane repeatedly told inspectors he was on the verge of purchasing the property and would repair the violations once the sale went through. He stuck with that story for two years, and inspectors duly noted it in reports each time.
(Courtesy Metro Louisville)
The first log of the impending sale dated to May 29, 2014. By then, a barber shop in the building called Brand Nu Kuts and later the 28th Street Barber Shop had closed. Estephane told inspectors that the previous owner, Sweeney, lost the building in a foreclosure auction, but had a buy-back option with 12 percent interest with the new owner. Estephane also stated that “he has worked out deal to buy entire building for 50K [sic] and will renovate entire building at that time,” according to the inspector’s notes.
(Courtesy Metro Louisville)
Two months later, the story was the same. “Ultimately meat market woner (sic) [Elias ‘Les’ Estephane] was buying building,” a July 25, 2014, inspection stated.
By September 11, 2014, Estephane had a date for the sale to be completed. He told inspectors he was still planning to purchase the building and expected the sale to go through in December. That report stated: “Owner Mr. Sweeney lost building at foreclosure auction to a Mr. James Stanford. December 1 will mark one year since this happened. Mr. Sweeney had that one year to buy back the building if he could come up with what is owned [sic]. Les says this will not happen and that he has already made a pending deal with current owner.”
(Courtesy Metro Louisville)
On November 4, 2015, inspectors noted that the building was missing shingles and work was taking place on the second floor. That work would have been going on without a permit.
An inspection report dated January 28, 2016, revealed that Les’s Meat Market was using an open wood fire inside the building for heat causing smoke to fill the building. “Fire Marshal instructed owner to eliminate any further indoor fires,” the report states. The following day, a letter from the Fire Marshal about the fire also instructed the owner to “Discontinue demolition of the building. A permit from Metro Louisville Codes and Regulations must be obtained before any work can be continued.”
Floor joists in the back of the first floor have been removed. Similar moves have resulted in major structural damage in other buildings around the city. (Courtesy Metro Louisville)
And the work taking place at this time certainly appears to be more demolition than anything else. Massive quantities of brick had been removed and stacked, window openings were left open to the elements, holes were visible in the walls, the barber shop’s storefront had been entirely removed, and a large number of floor boards had been removed from the back of the first floor.
Apparently the December sale didn’t go through and Sweeney’s Hama, LLC was again the owner, but Estephane was still imminently prepared to purchase the building. On January 29, 2016, Estephane told inspectors that he was now in the process of purchasing the building from Hama, LLC. “Les is buying the property,” an inspection report states. “He has paid the listed owner 8 payments and says that he has 4 more. He is working on the building and loves it. He said that he will continue to work on it.”
Several violations were issued for leaving large amounts of debris, like these cardboard boxes, around the property. (Courtesy Metro Louisville)
Four months later, nothing had changed. “Spoke to owner Les during today’s visit,” a Complaint Investigation Report to Les’s Meat Market dated May 17, 2016, states. “Les advised that he is purchasing the building and is having the roof and outer openings repaired.” While cardboard and debris had been hauled away at the request of the city, the inspector noted that “walls, floors, and ceilings in need of repair is (sic) some places, however, no critical violations apparent today as a result of work in progress for remodel / repair.”
Estephane’s purchase was also noted in another May 17 report in which he said he expected paperwork to be complete by May 20. “[H]e stated that once the purchase is official he has contractors lined up to start work on the roof and work from there down on the property,” an inspection report states. “[O]nce the roof work is complete he has masons lined up for wall and window work.” Estephane told the inspector the goal was to bring it back to its original 1910 design.
(Courtesy Metro Louisville)
On a follow-up visit on May 20, an order was issued to seal up the outer openings of the building with a deadline of June 20. Photos dated July 19 show the building as an active construction site. Flooring is missing from the second floor, windows are improperly sealed with only a sheet of plastic film, and a storefront is open to the elements.
On May 24, a civil penalty of 1,005.17 was applied to the property in the form of a lien. Then on June 6, Estaphane told an inspector that the building sale “still hasn’t gone through at this time due to a previous lien but it is being worked on.”
(Courtesy Metro Louisville)
Meanwhile, the building continued to deteriorate. On June 9, an inspection report noted that the structure’s brick walls showed deteriorated mortar joints and loose bricks. Other problems included: the structure’s cornice needed to be sealed up and holes patched, hardware added to doors, a proper drainage system installed, and a deteriorated and damaged roof.
Van seats used as benches were the subject of another violation. (Courtesy Metro Louisville)
The list went on, including an issue with the Meat Market’s choice of street furniture: “Only exterior designed furniture is permitted for outdoor use (car seats not permitted).” It gave a deadline of June 17 to fix the violations.
The last entry on the building’s violation log is dated Friday, July 22: “Building collapsed. 71 year old man died when the building collapsed on him.”
On July 25, three days after the collapse and eventual demolition of the structure, Develop Louisville sent Hama, LLC, a final violation notice with the following comment: “Windows, doors, and framing have been removed, alterations of a commercial structure without approved plan and building permit. Stop work immediately and obtain proper permits.”
Following the collapse, inspectors were again on the scene evaluating the rest of the structure. “We have Metro Government’s building inspectors on site, structural engineers to help us assess the structural stability of what remains of the building,” Fire chief Sal Melendez told WDRB news Friday. Firefighters sought an emergency demolition order and brought down the rest of the building Friday.
No official cause of the collapse has been released. The events surrounding the year’s long illegal renovation and the predictable slow and steady deterioration they helped cause certainly did not help the situation. From the long list of violations and the seemingly out of control renovation moves, this tragedy has been unfolding for several years, building to the final collapse. There must be a more effective way to handle such slow-motion events before they end up in potentially fatal rubble in the street.
Donald Trump may have made his name building on the most transit-rich real estate in the nation, but he hasn’t changed the party’s stance on transportation at all. The transportation plank in the newly updated GOP platform [PDF] is as extreme and hostile to cities as ever.
Here are some of the lowlights:
1. Eliminating federal funding for transit, walking, and biking
The Republican Party platform calls for cutting all federal funding for transit, walking, and biking.
The loss of federal funding would cause chaos for transit agencies and transit riders, disrupting and diminishing capacity to operate, maintain, and expand transit systems. The reason this proposal goes nowhere in Congress is that even a sizable share of Republicans realize it would be disastrous to kneecap transit in the nation’s urban centers, where so much economic activity is concentrated.
During a Bloomberg Politics event on infrastructure last week at the RNC, Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer (a big Trump booster) toed the “no gas tax for transit” line. She suggested that transit could be funded by a “user fee” on “ticket sales” — apparently unfamiliar with the term “fares,” let alone the fact that roads don’t come close to paying for themselves either.
Republicans are also out to squelch the measly 2 percent of federal transportation funding that goes to walking and biking projects. The GOP platform specifically calls out “bike-share programs, sidewalks, recreational trails” as undeserving of federal support.
2. Obama’s conspiracy to “coerce people out of their cars”
The GOP has gotten away from explicitly calling any attempt to improve transit, walking, or biking a United Nations conspiracy — apparently that was deemed too crazy. But it’s still completely acceptable to accuse President Obama of orchestrating the conspiracy instead.
Obama has secured some additional funds for transit and rail via relatively small programs like TIGER, and may adjust federal rules to nudge state DOTs in a more multi-modal direction. This amounts to tinkering around the margins of federal transportation policy, which remains heavily tilted toward highways and allocates tens of billions of dollars a year for roads. For this, the GOP accuses the Obama administration of trying to “coerce people out of their cars” and “social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.”
3. No mention of 35,000 traffic deaths on American streets annually
Traffic fatalities are on the rise and the Centers for Disease Control recently pointed out that America is falling far behind peer nations when it comes to reducing the death toll. But the GOP surface transportation platform doesn’t mention safety at all. The document does refer glowingly to the 1980 Republican platform, which led to the revocation of the national speed limit, freeing states like Texas to raise limits to speeds like 85 miles per hour.
[This article has been cross-posted from our partner, Streetsblog.]
Here’s a bit of quirky Germantown history for you: If you look closely at the roof of the cinderblock warehouse building housing Ackerman Millworks at Goss Avenue and Boyle Street, you might see the roof of a shotgun house poking up in one corner. That’s because the structure was actually built around two shotgun houses sitting on the corner in 1982.
Ackerman Millworks under construction in 1982. (Courtesy Three Points)
“George [Glassner] built his bakery, Glassner’s Bakery, behind the houses (the small brick building in the backyards of the houses),” according to neighborhood beautification group Three Points. “In 1975, Ray Ackerman purchased the properties with the intent of moving his booming business from a garage on Schiller Avenue to the new space. Ray built his new building around the 2 houses that stood on the corner. One of the houses would eventually come down, but the skeleton of the other is still inside of the new building.”
Ackerman Millworks under construction in 1982. (Courtesy Three Points / Facebook)
“I think the history of the area is just so vibrant,” Jennifer Chappell said of the Germantown and Schnitzelburg neighborhoods. Chappell is founder of Three Points Beautification, the group that, in 2014, installed murals and landscaping improvement a couple blocks west at the intersection of Goss and Logan Street. She’s back with her latest mural plan at the site of the Ackerman building.
The Ackerman Millworks building today. (Google)
Plans for a large mural at Goss Avenue and Boyle Street in Germantown have met their fundraising goal and are moving forward—but there’s still time to get involved. The group, Three Points Beautification, which in 2014 installed murals and landscaping improvement a couple blocks east at the intersection of Goss and Logan Street is spearheading the new project.
Concept sketch for the Goss Avenue mural. (Courtesy Three Points)
Concept sketches of the Goss Avenue. Community members can buy faces on the mural for themselves or loved ones. (Courtesy Three Points)
Besides general fundraising, the campaign offered the community a chance to be directly inserted into the mural. For $20, a person’s name is included in the mural, but for $200, mural artist Stephen Paulovich will add a person’s face into the scene.
“That’s something that’s really spoken to people about the project—getting a face on the wall,” Chappell told Broken Sidewalk. Faces will be close to life scale. “A lot of people are putting relatives up as a surprise. Some people are putting themselves up there.” Around 20 people have already signed up to have their face or a loved one’s face included. “We have a lot of people that are really ingrained in the community—fixtures of Germantown,” she said. “It’s good to give them an opportunity to be recognized.”
The total cost of the mural and planned improvements is $15,000. Funds from the Ioby campaign help offset that, and Chappell said she hopes to raise as much as possible from the campaign. The remaining cost will come from the Three Points bank account, corporate sponsors, and, hopefully, from Councilpersons David Tandy and Pat Mulvihill. But that still leaves about a $3,000 funding gap that needs to be covered.
“Anything we get above the $5,000 on the fundraising site now is so helpful because it fills in that gap of $3,000 we’re missing,” Chappell said. She added that Three Points is considering hosting additional fundraising nights at local bars like Four Pegs to cover that gap. “Every penny goes toward the mural project.”
The mural will fill two sides the Ackerman Millworks building across from the newly completed Germantown Mill Lofts. The mural design will honor the history of the building, formerly Glassner’s Bakery and now Ackerman Millworks, and the old Louisville Cotton Mill across the street.
“The front side of the building (facing Goss Avenue) will look as if the building was spliced down the center and you are peering inside at a bustling work day,” Three Points wrote of the design. “The side of the building (facing Boyle Street) will have a life-size painting of the old Glassner’s Bakery truck.”
“It’s very real to life—very detailed,” Chappell said of the mural. “It won’t go up as fast as a traditional mural that might have a lot of color blocking.” She compared the mural to an old sepia photograph but with more color, noting that they didn’t want to overwhelm the area with a mural too bright or busy. “It should blend seamlessly with the streetscape.”
Three Points also plans to add landscaping to the corner, improve lighting on the exterior of the building, and replace a dry-rotted door on the structure.
Chappell and Paulovich will be on the ground during the upcoming Three Points CycLOUvia on Sunday, August 7 working on the mural. The wall will have already been primed and prepped for work to begin in earnest. “I will have a tent set up at the Ackerman building,” Chappell said. “The wall will be primed and he’ll be painting live. The artist has already started it in his shop, drawing things out.”
This upcoming Saturday, July 30, Three Points will be hosting a Volunteer Day. Chappell and others will be around the area laying down new mulch and landscape fabric, planting new plants, and sealing the previous Three Points mural.
Once the fundraising campaign ends on July 31, Chappell said she will be able to finalize all of the names and faces that will be included in the mural and get the to the artist to finalize the design. If all goes according to plan, the mural should wrap up next summer—Chappell noted that they have to take a break as you can’t paint during the winter.
The more people bike on the streets, the safer the streets are for everyone who bikes. This phenomenon, originally identified by researcher Peter Jacobsen, is known as “safety in numbers.” And that’s exactly what American cities are seeing as they add bike infrastructure—more cyclists and safer cycling—according to a new report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials [PDF].
The report is part of NACTO’s research series on implementing equitable bike-share systems. NACTO makes the case that large-scale bike-share systems can improve access to jobs in low-income communities by extending the reach of bus and rail lines, and—citing the safety-in-numbers evidence—that good bike lanes have to be part of the solution. Otherwise dangerous street conditions will continue to discourage people from biking.
Cities adding bike infrastructure are seeing a “safety in numbers” — more people on bikes plus lower risk of severe or fatal injury. (NACTO)
NACTO tracked changes in bike commuting, bike lane miles, and cyclist fatalities and severe injuries in seven U.S. cities that have added protected bike lanes and bike-share systems over the past decade or so. In all seven cities, cycling has grown along with the bike network, while the risk of severe injury or death while cycling has declined.
In five of the cities—Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, and Portland—the absolute number of cycling deaths and severe injuries fell between 2007 and 2014, even as cycling rose substantially. In the two other cities—San Francisco and Washington, D.C.—deaths and serious injuries increased somewhat, but not as much as the increase in bicycle commuting.
New York City, for example, has added about 54 miles of bike lanes per year since 2007. Chicago has added about 27 miles per year since 2011. Over that time the risk of severe injury or death while cycling has decreased by about half, NACTO reports.
Among people open to biking but concerned about safety, 81 percent say protected bike lanes would make them feel comfortable on a bike. (NACTO)
Surveys show that concerns about safety are a major deterrent to biking across race and gender lines, but creating safe street conditions for cycling is especially urgent for people of color, NACTO notes. The fatality rate for black cyclists is 30 percent higher than for white cyclists, and the fatality rate for Latino cyclists is 23 percent higher, according to a 2014 study by the League of American Bicyclists [PDF].
More cities can prevent cyclist fatalities and bring about the “virtuous cycle” of safety in numbers, NACTO says, by designing streets that appeal to the 60 percent of people who are “interested” in cycling but “concerned” about safety. The type of infrastructure that appeals most to people who hesitate to bike? Protected bike lanes. Among the “interested but concerned,” 81 percent say bike lanes that offer some physical protection from car traffic would make them feel comfortable biking, according to researcher Jennifer Dill [PDF].
[This article has been cross-posted from our partner, Streetsblog. Top image of a bike lane on Chestnut Street by Bike Louisville.]
In last week’s post on homeownership, we described why homeownership is such a risky financial proposition for low income households, who tend to be disproportionately people of color. From a wealth-building standpoint, lower income households tend to buy homes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, face higher financing costs, and have less financial resilience to withstand the fluctuations of housing and economic markets. Yet we continue to persist the the belief that homeownership is a universal elixir for wealth building. In fact, there’s some strong evidence that our excessive investment in housing—and our subsidies for homeownership—have worsened our income inequality problems. This suggests it might be time to rethink our national outlook on housing and wealth building.
Has Homeownership Actually Heightened Inequality?
New research from Zillow’s Svenja Gudell shows that the collapse of the housing bubble actually worsened inequality. Modestly priced homes saw the biggest price declines, and the households who owned these homes lacked the equity to cope with the downturn, and were much more likely to be foreclosed upon: “When the bubble popped, less-expensive homes—often bought by low-income homeowners—were more likely to be foreclosed on than higher-end homes.”
In many important respects, the case for homeownership as wealth creation is a circular argument: We proclaim that housing is a great investment, and encourage families to go heavily into debt to purchase homes, and then use the fact that so much household wealth is tied up in housing to justify additional subsidies and regulations to drive up home values. These regulations include local zoning (which limits the supply of housing, helping drive up prices or as it’s usually expressed “to protect property values”), but go much further. The federal government directly or indirectly provides or guarantees most home mortgages (and prices lower and terms more favorable that would be the case in a purely private market). And the federal tax code provides something on the order of a quarter of a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to homeownership. If homeownership is a good investment, it’s substantially because government policies have made sure that it pays off.
From a distributional standpoint, it’s clear that the emphasis on homeownership has actually led to a greater concentration of wealth, and not greater equality. As Matthew Rognlie showed, virtually all of the increase in wealth inequality in the United States in the past four decades is accounted for by the increase in the share of capital in housing. Mian and Sufi plotted the ratio of the amount of home equity owned by the highest income quintile compared to the middle quintile of the U.S. population. In the 1990s, a household in the highest income quintile had about 5 times as much housing equity as the average, middle quintile. By 2010, this difference had nearly doubled: to 9 times as much housing equity.
Particularly over the past decade, housing has a poor record as a wealth creator. Overall, homeowners collectively lost something on the order of $7 trillion in the collapse of the housing bubble. To put that number in some perspective, consider the average home equity of a household in the middle of the income distribution, with a household head aged 35 to 44 years. Data compiled from the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finance by David Rosnick and Dean Baker show that while inflation-adjusted home equity for this group grew from 1992 through 2007, since then it has fallen sharply. Today the households in the middle quintile of this age group have less than half as much home equity as in 2007.
(Survey of Consumer Finance)
Time to Rethink Homeownership?
The collapse of the housing bubble erased all of the growth in the homeownership rate in the United States since 1980. On the upswing, the bubble generated lots of (paper) wealth, and drew millions of households into ownership. The homeownership rate peaked at more than 69 percent in 2007, then plunged to less than 64 percent, as millions of households lost their homes.
The aftermath of the bubble should remind us that homeownership is a risky endeavor, and that for a substantial portion of the population, it’s not a feasible or prudent strategy for trying to build wealth. It’s time to rethink the role of homeownership in promoting wealth, especially for the poor. There are three big takeaways here:
Pushing homeownership as a universal wealth building strategy for the poor, is a snare and a delusion. It’s likely to hurt many families. Policies that lower the bar for home purchases, like very low down payment loans, may actually expose those least able to handle the risks of homeownership to even greater probability of loss.
The efforts to extend homeownership down the economic spectrum in many ways simply constitute a way of providing political cover for subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction that chiefly benefit upper income households, thus actually worsening income inequality.
As a nation, we have no substantial policy for helping renters build wealth. More than a third of our population, including its youngest, poorest, and people of color are, and will continue to be, renters. We might, for example, consider repurposing some of the $250 billion annually in federal tax subsidies to homeownership to help reduce rental costs or subsidize savings programs for renters.
[This article has been cross-posted from Portland, Oregon–based City Observatory, a think tank dedicated to data-driven analysis of cities and the policies that shape them. Top image by jwilde / Flickr.]
It’s important to keep in mind that absentee property ownership operates at multiple scales. Absenteeism can take place between two neighborhoods in the same city, between adjacent cities, or between cities in completely different states or countries thousands of miles away.
Non-local ownership is particularly important because it represents what the urban planner Kathe Newman has called the process of “de-linking property from place,” as the value of properties flows outside of the city and community, with the property’s exchange value elevated in importance over its potential use value to local people.
There are a total of 109,929 parcels of property in Lexington. Of these, we identified 10,466 that have listed owner addresses outside of the city, representing 9.5 percent of the city’s total number of parcels and 18.3 percent of the city’s total land area. Of these non-locally owned properties, 70.8 percent are owned outside of the contiguous counties to Fayette, though only 56 properties are owned outside of the country altogether.
Non-local property ownership: All properties with owner addresses outside the city of Lexington. (Lexington Housing Studies)
But while property ownership in general is important, we’re particularly interested in the question of housing. So looking at just the 98,209 parcels classified as either “residential” or “multi-family” properties, we see 8,308, or about 8.5 percent, of these being owned outside of the city.
Based on the overall rates of non-local ownership across property types, we can thus see that residential properties are actually less likely to be owned outside of Lexington — or even the contiguous counties — than other types of property. Indeed, 17.4 percent of all farm properties in the city are owned non-locally, as are 24.9 percent of all of Lexington’s commercial properties.
Non-local housing ownership: All residential properties with owner addresses outside the city of Lexington. (Lexington Housing Studies)
In order to understand the overlaps between non-local and concentrated ownership, we identified all residential properties in Lexington that are owned by individuals or companies who own a total of 10 or more residential properties. Excluding properties owned by subsidiaries of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), as well as any number of financial institutions, this yielded a total of 961 properties owned at 53 different addresses by 52 different ownership groups outside of Lexington.
Non-local, concentrated housing ownership: All residential properties with owner addresses outside the city of Lexington, owned by owners with 10+ properties. (Lexington Housing Studies)
Five of these 52 owners own more than 30 properties in the city, with three of these being located outside of the state altogether. Indeed, the largest single non-local property owner is Douglas Kroll whose properties are registered to an address on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.
Of the 53 locations that these concentrations of ownership are located, just 11 are out of state, so it’s notable that three of these 11 are among the largest owners. Beyond the owners in Hawaii, the Atlanta suburbs, and Portland, OR, Lexington’s concentrated property owners are located in places like Ona, West Virginia, Lakewood Ranch, Belleair Beach and Palm Coast, Florida, Livingston, Tennessee, Martinsville, Virginia, and even Los Angeles, California and Brooklyn, New York.
Top 5 non-local owners of residential property in Lexington.
Across these 53 owners and 961 properties, there’s no clear spatial pattern that applies equally to all — non-local, concentrated ownership of residential property is fairly diffuse and affects all parts of the city. The largest cluster of these properties, however, appear to be in the area along Nicholasville Road across from the University of Kentucky campus, stretching from State Street to Westwood Drive, where properties owned by REI LLC in Alpharetta, GA are concentrated. But since the relatively small number of parcels on the map make the patterns a bit difficult to see, we aggregated the parcels to the census tract level and calculated the odds ratio, as visualized in the map below.
Non-local, concentrated housing ownership: Proportion of residential properties with owner addresses outside the city of Lexington, owned by owners with 10+ properties, relative to total number of residential properties in each census tract. (Lexington Housing Studies)
In short, the odds ratio quantifies whether the value for a given area — in this case, the number of residential properties owned by non-local, concentrated owners — exceeds what one would expect for that area based on the ratios across the whole city.
A value of 1 would indicate that the number of these properties as a proportion of the total number of residential properties is the exact same as the citywide ratio, while values above 1 indicate a much greater concentration of these types of properties than one would expect, and vice versa for values below 1.
So not only can we confirm the raw concentrations of these properties along Nicholasville Road, but we can also say that Census Tract 18, where most of these are located, has nearly 11x more of its residential property controlled by non-local, concentrated owners than one would expect, the highest such value across the city.
Moving farther into the center of the city, Census Tract 9 and Census Tract 1.01 also have high odds ratio values, owing in part to the cluster of properties owned by Douglas Kroll near the intersection of High and Rose.
While we haven’t yet delved into the subject here at LHS, this map points towards the need to consider that one of the groups most affected and exploited by absentee, concentrated landlords in Lexington are students living near the University of Kentucky campus, a finding that should surprise absolutely no one with any awareness of the city’s housing situation.
[This article was cross-published from research group Lexington Housing Studies. It appears here with permission. Top image by Jwombles / Flickr.]
(Note: The Demo Watch section of Broken Sidewalk highlights properties eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places that are slated for demolition. These are simply announcements to keep you informed of how your city is changing. Unless expressly stated otherwise, they do not imply any opinion from Broken Sidewalk on the merits of these buildings or their planned demolition.)
A wrecking permit (WR992380) has been requested for a house at 2312 West Madison Street in Russell between 23rd and 24th streets.
(Google)
The 1,200-square-foot house sits on a 3,280-square-foot lot and is listed as built in 1910. The wooden shotgun house had been in foreclosure and sold for $6,700 to the Commonwealth of Kentucky in June 2015. Today, the structure is owned by the Louisville & Jefferson County Landbank Authority. (Information on purchasing property from Metro can be found here.)
Demolition can take place beginning August 11.
If you’d like additional information about this case, you can contact Mike Beard, Plan Review Supervisor, at 502-574-3321 or Cynthia Johnson, Metro Historic Preservation Officer, at 502-574-2868.
When a driver strikes someone walking or biking, the tendency to blame the victim runs deep. Ask Raquel Nelson, who lost her young son to a hit-and-run driver, then got convicted for vehicular homicide, even though she was just trying to walk across the street with her children from a bus stop to her home. Or witness the reaction to the death of Amanda Phillips, who was struck by a truck driver while biking in Boston recently.
