News Roundup

  • HUD Releases 2019 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report
    /

    This week, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released their 2019 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, detailing trends in homelessness across the country. Notably, HUD finds that even though most states recorded reductions in their one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness, there was a 3 percent nationwide increase on this metric. HUD attributes this increase to California’s 16.4 percent increase in homelessness in the past year.  

  • Advocates Assert California’s Homeless Encampment Sweeps Pose Health Threat
    /

    Many California state and local agencies have authorized sweeps on homeless encampments and claim encampments pose substantial health risks for public areas. However, many people experiencing homelessness and their advocates assert that these sweeps create another public health crisis, as police and sanitation workers often throw away personal possessions, including prescribed medicine and medical devices. “If cities spent half the energy on trying to provide access to sanitation as they did on trying to find constitutional ways to take people’s belongings, they could address homelessness,” said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

  • Carbon Monoxide Leaks in Durham Public Housing Highlight Federal Gap
    /

    Several residents of Durham’s McDougald Terrace, North Carolina’s oldest public housing complex, were hospitalized last week after carbon monoxide exposure. The Durham Housing Authority reported that 84 of 198 units have active carbon monoxide leaks. HUD does not require carbon monoxide detectors in public housing, and congressional legislation to require and fund detectors stalled in the Senate. To bypass this gap, the Trump administration announced last spring that it would pursue changes through the rulemaking process and make funds available through HUD. Public health expert Emily Benfer of Columbia University has urged the administration and Congress to take action, as “every moment of delay exposes residents to grave harm.”

  • Home Sharing Has Made Housing More Expensive in Some DC Neighborhoods
    /

    New research from Zhenpeng Zou at the University of Maryland found that from 2015 to 2017, home-sharing services, such as Airbnb, caused single-family home prices to increase an average of 2.24 percent in Washington, DC. The effects were modestly larger in some “historically minority populated neighborhoods,” such as Columbia Heights and Trinidad, and even higher closer to tourist areas. Zou did not look at the effects on rents.

  • Houston Is the Fastest Gentrifying Metropolitan Area in Texas
    /

    A recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reports that Houston is the fastest-gentrifying major metropolitan area in Texas. Between 2000 and 2015, the median income of neighborhoods within three miles of downtown Houston increased 67 percent, reflecting higher incomes among new residents. In comparison, median incomes in equivalent neighborhoods in Dallas increased by 49 percent, in San Antonio by 39 percent, and in Austin by 65 percent.