Next City, January 20, 2022, Housing in Brief: Mayors Say They Don’t Have Tools to Deal With Homelessness
A survey of 126 mayors in 39 states found that mayors felt reducing homelessness was outside of their control, that most did not have a metric for success, and that a third of those interviewed were using their police departments to handle homelessness. The report, published by the nonprofit Community Solutions in collaboration with the Boston University Initiative On Cities, is the eighth annual survey of its kind and the first to include questions about homelessness. According to the report, 73 percent of mayors believe they are held responsible by residents for homelessness while only 19 percent believe they have control over reducing homelessness in their cities.
A report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition looked at shifts in mortgage lending during the Covid-19 pandemic. It found a gap in homeownership rates between Black and white families that was at a 120 year high.
Parsing these findings is also getting more difficult, because private lenders are providing race-identifying data less often, the report says. The report recommends federal policies that explicitly target race to improve mortgage lending for underserved communities. This is something lawmakers tend to avoid, as policies that are not race-neutral in their language are more susceptible to court challenge.
