A trilogy complete

 The third film in the documentary film series Making Sense of Place, Portland: Quest for the Livable City, will begin airing on public television stations around the country in May. The 57-minute film by Northern Light Productions chronicles the Oregon city's attempts to reduce its carbon footprint and grow more densely within an urban growth boundary, while at the same time confront tough issues including fairness and property rights, gentrification, and citizen participation in the planning process. Oregon Public Broadcasting is set to air the film Sunday May 10 at 1 p.m. Preview showings in Chicago and Rochester, N.Y., garnered strong ratings.
     "We were impressed from the very beginning at the incredible story that had unfolded in Portland, and we think we captured both the drama and tension, and the essence of the city as a place to live," said Bestor Cram, president of Northern Light Productions. The film crew made seven trips to Portland between October 2007 and July 2008 for a total of 30 shooting days, with 160 hours of high definition footage and 90 people interviewed.
     Incorporating historic footage of Portland's growth as the self-proclaimed "City that Works," and recent interviews with city leaders and neighborhood residents, the film tracks ballot-measure battles on the land-use planning system established in 1973, leading to the urban growth boundary containing development within a 22-square-mile area. Portland sought to protecting surrounding farmland and open space, established a regional governance system spanning 24 municipalities and three counties, and built an ambitious system of light rail and streetcars to service more dense, compact, mixed-use urban form. Then, in 2004, voters passed Measure 37, which allowed development outside the boundary and raised questions about property rights and the fairness of the entire planning and regulatory framework. A competing initiative, Measure 49, was then put on the ballot in 2008 to reverse those changes.
     "Portland has been a notable experiment in land use planning, and the film shows how challenging that can be," said Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute. "The issues that come to life in the film – property rights, the value of land, density and transportation, the process of planning – include many that we think cities all over the U.S. will need to confront."
     Portland: Quest for the Livable City was made available to 351 public television stations, 134 of which have already scheduled.airing times, including in large markets in Indianapolis and North Carolina. Over the coming months in Oregon, an outreach effort will focus on community screenings and discussions of the issues raised in the film. The DVD will be available soon at www.lincolninst.edu, and more information is available at the Northern Light Productions Web site here. The first two films in the Making Sense of Place series were Phoenix: The Urban Desert, which examined the sprawling growth and associated issues of that metropolitan area, and Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City, a look at a shrinking industrial city and its efforts to reinvent itself.

Live from Minneapolis

     Infrastructure -- what type to invest in, and how to pay for it -- has been the dominant topic at this year's annual national conference of the American Planning Association, being held in Minneapolis. This morning Michael Lind from the New America Foundation provided a reality check by suggesting that a "revival of deficit-reduction politics not seen since Ross Perot" is likely to slow down significant investments and transfer even more responsibility for many projects to state and local governments; he also said the creation of an infrastructure bank to fund infrastructure on a merit-based system would be a "hard sell," as Congress is unlikely to relinquish control over spending. Meanwhile, reauthorization of federal transportation funding and a climate cap-and-trade or "cap-and-dividend" legislation are proceeding on paralell tracks and could be integrated, said Jeff Boothe from Holland+Knight LLP, particularly if revenues from what will essentially be a carbon tax can be channeled for transit and other sustainable projects in major metropolitan areas (the so-called Clean TEA initiative). That, he said, would be preferable to an increase in the gas tax or a VMT (vehicle miles traveled) tax. Reauthorization must "look forward to the next 50 years," he said, providing transportation choices to a changing demographic and increased population in cities -- not backwards to the last half-century of highway-building, increasing capacity and trying to reduce congestion.
     On Sunday, Bill Klein from APA and Armando Carbonell from the Lincoln Institute led a presentation by William Anderson from San Diego, Barbara Sporlein from Minneapolis, and Harriet Tregoning from Washington, D.C., on how infrastructure and capital improvement programs, including some funding from the stimulus package, are being integrated with planning at the local level. The streets of Minneapolis are getting a major transit-and-pedestrian overhaul as we gather here. The trick is to use recovery funds to follow through with city-revitalizing plans to locate housing near transit, and to continue to plan on a regional basis, said Tregoning. The session was based on the Lincoln Institute's annual fall gathering of planning directors from the 30 largest US cities. Another panel today will feature planning directors from cities large and small from the Twin Cities region -- Minneapolis, Duluth, La Crosse, Sioux Falls -- and will be moderated by Peter Pollock, the Lincoln Institute's Boulder, Colo-based Ronald Smith Fellow. Armando Carbonell is set to discuss megaregions as a planning framework for investments in major infrastructure tomorrow, followed by the final "sneak preview" of Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes, due out later this month, with Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute, covering performance measures in transport and the environment; Gerrit Knaap from the National Center for Smart Growth and the University of Maryland covering land consumption and housing; and Allan Wallis from the University of Colorado, Denver, providing a political science analysis on how smart growth policies have evolved over time.

Betting it all

     The bursting of the housing bubble not only revealed fundamental problems in subprime lending, speculation and house-flipping, but something even more basic: how so many Americans put so much of their wealth in one single, volatile asset -- their home. In the recently released Housing Markets and the Economy: Risk, Regulation, and Policy, editors Edward L. Glaeser and John M. Quigley, economics professors at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley respectively, and two of the nation’s leading authorities on housing and regulation, explore how this notion of risk has played out in the $20 trillion real estate market. The book is a series of essays from the 2007 Lincoln Institute conference, “Housing and the Built Environment: Access, Finance, Policy,” held in honor of Karl “Chip” Case, the influential Wellesley College economist and co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index.
     Regulation and local housing policy played a role in the run-up to the housing meltdown, along with the extension of credit to poorly qualified customers, says Lincoln Institute president Gregory K. Ingram in the foreword. Contributors assess the way that home ownership entails financial risk as well as rewards, the advance of derivative markets, and the role that home equity insurance plays in reducing risk. Other factors examined in the volume include the role that the regulation of government-sponsored enterprises have played in extending credit to home purchasers in low-income neighborhoods, and the associated growth in the market for subprime mortgages; and the unintended consequences of low-income tax credit programs for housing construction. A postscript by David Warsh, former columnist for The Boston Globe and author of the blog Economic Principals, celebrates the legacy and influence of Case.
    As Michael H. Schill, dean and professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, points out, “at no time in our history since the Great Depression has an understanding of the housing market been so critical."

Fewer foreclosures

      Homeowners in community land trusts are much less likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than owners of market-rate homes, according to a survey released by the National CLT Network and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. At the close of 2008, homeowners in community land trusts had a foreclosure rate of 0.52 percent, compared to 3.3 percent among market-rate homeowners. Among 1,930 CLT homeowners responding to the survey – representing about 60 percent of all community land trust homeowners nationwide – only 1.4 percent were behind 90 days or more on mortgage payments at the end of 2008; up to 23 percent of market-rate homeowners were late.
     In a community land trust, a non-profit organization such as a community development corporation lease land and sells the homes at below-market rates. Buyers benefit from front-end guidance to acquire safe loans, and continuing support and counseling to keep up with mortgage payments. In exchange, homeowners agree to limit the price of their homes when they sell.
     "Community land trusts are proving to be a highly effective way to create and sustain stable neighborhoods," said Roger Lewis, executive director of the National CLT Network, a coalition of 230 nonprofits that operate community land trusts. "That's partly because community land trusts don't allow the kind of 'too-good-to-be-true' financing that has taken down so many American families." Support stems from the unique, long-term relationship between community land trusts and homeowners, he said, prompting help before the first mortgage payment is missed.
     There are over 200 community land trusts including some 6,000 homes across the US, from Delray Beach in Florida, to Austin and Chicago, and Irvine, Calif. Many CLTs have a track record of zero foreclosures among homeowners. Communities that are set to receive federal funding for neighborhood stabilization and long-term housing affordability should consider investing in community land trusts, Lewis said. Over half of survey respondents already have received, applied for or will apply for neighborhood stabilization program funds from the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act. CLT organizations will use those funds to purchase foreclosed or abandoned homes and expand the community land trust model. The survey was conducted in February, 2009 of 230 community land trusts in 45 states. Respondents represented 1,930 CLT homeowners among 85 community land trusts in 32 states, including Washington, D.C.