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CURS Releases "Boulevard Homes Final Report: Changing Communities, Transforming Lives"
CURS has released the Boulevard Homes Final Report: Changing Communities, Transforming Lives, written by CURS director Bill Rohe, CURS faculty fellow and associate professor of city and regional planning Mai Thi Nguyen, CURS research associate Michael Webb, and CURS research assistant Kirstin Frescoln. Short for “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere,” the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program funded the demolition and redevelopment of distressed public housing developments throughout the country.
 The most recent HOPE VI grant awarded to the Charlotte Housing Authority was for the razing and redevelopment of Boulevard Homes, which was physically obsolescent and plagued with crime. The newly constructed development—called the Renaissance—includes 274 apartments reserved for low-income families and 60 market rate units. The Renaissance also includes a K-8 public school (currently under construction) and an early childhood development center that is in the planning stages.
Over the past five years, CURS has been evaluating this redevelopment project, with a particular focus on the experience of those who were relocated from the original development. Building on our previous evaluation reports, this final report provides an overview of the Boulevard Homes redevelopment process and its outcomes. It describes and assesses the redevelopment process, including the design of the new development, the relocation of former residents, the attitudes of the former residents toward the relocation process and outcomes, the supportive services offered to relocatees, and the redevelopment’s impacts on the surrounding neighborhood and much more.
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Latino Housing Faces Barriers, Offers Major Untapped Market
North Carolina’s 800,000 Latinos represent the fastest-growing segment of the population and a significant potential market for the housing industry, researchers at the Center for Community Capital (CCC) report in a new study, The State of Latino Housing in North Carolina 2015.
But a range of obstacles inhibit homeowner and renter markets from growing. Given the state’s aging native-born population, the much-younger Latino population (50 percent are under age 25) will play a major social and economic role in coming decades.
“Thus, it is a strategic imperative to ensure that Latinos are fully integrated into the mainstream of the North Carolina economy, housing market and society more generally,” wrote researchers Roberto Quercia, professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning and director of CCC, James H. Johnson Jr., William R. Kenan Jr. distinguished professor of strategy and entrepreneurship and director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Mark McDaniel, senior research associate for CCC and the institute.
The Latino Community Development Center (Latino CDC) and Latino Community Credit Union (LCCU) commissioned the study to better understand the housing needs of the state’s Latino population, barriers they face in securing housing, and market potential they represent.
Latinos are more likely to rent (57 percent) compared to all North Carolina households (33 percent), the study finds. Half of all Latino renters and 37 percent of Latino homeowners are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Rents and security deposits are especially high for larger Latino families that need bigger units.
On the home-buying front, the recession brought sharper declines in mortgage applications and greater loan denial rates for Latinos compared to North Carolina households overall. For instance, Latino applications for site-built homes fell 68 percent in 2011-13 compared to 52 percent for all households. Denial rates for Latino home loan applications were 19 percent in 2011-2013 compared to 14 percent for North Carolina households overall. Latino households also rely more on subprime, Federal Housing Administration, and Veterans Administration loans than the market as a whole.
Researchers found that Latinos lack knowledge about their rights to home buying, ways to build and repair credit, and ways to acquire a mortgage loan.
The study recommends that housing and community advocates collaborate to develop and implement an action plan for providing better information to Latinos, correct misperceptions, and address barriers. Policy actions, such as expanding the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit and fully funding the National Housing Trust Fund, could add to the supply of affordable housing. Increasing funding for the Housing Voucher Choice Program would enable more Latinos to afford quality rental housing.
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How Worker-Friendly Laws Are Changing the Restaurant Industry
While efforts to increase the minimum wage have stalled at the federal level, dozens of cities have passed or are considering local increases that will bring the minimum wage up to $15 per hour. The pace and scale of recent wage increases—spurred on by an organizing drive by fast food workers in the “Fight for $15” movement—leave policy makers and analysts wondering about their eventual impacts. While the impact of publicly mandated labor standards on employment is well studied and remains highly controversial, there are still important missing pieces in our understanding of how locally-enacted labor laws impact the labor market.
T. William Lester, CURS faculty fellow and assistant professor of city and regional planning, has released a paper, Inside Monopsony: Employer Responses to Higher Labor Standards in the Full Service Restaurant Industry, that directly examines employer responses to higher labor standards through a qualitative case comparison of the full service restaurant indust ry across two fundamentally different institutional settings. Research was conducted in San Francisco—where employers face the nation’s highest minimum wage, no tip credits, a pay-or-play health care mandate, and paid sick leave requirements—and in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region—where there are no locally enacted labor standards.
Evidence shows that higher labor standards led to wage compression in San Francisco even while some employers continued to offer greater benefits to reduce turnover. Employers in San Francisco exhibit greater investment in finding better matches and tend to seek higher-skilled, more professional workers, rather than invest in formal in-house training. Finally, higher wage mandates in San Francisco have exacerbated the wage gap between front-of-house and back-of-house occupations—which correlate strongly with existing racial and ethnic divisions. Initial evidence shows that some employers have responded by radically restructuring industry compensation practices by adding service charges and in some cases eliminating tipping.
The study has received coverage in the The Washington Post.
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Coaching the Coaches: Preparing Student-Athletes for College
College is supposed to be full of opportunities, a place where dreams come true. But for many student-athletes, especially males of color, college can be a place where dreams are dashed. That’s because many young sports stars—propped up by their athletic ability and the media-driven prospect of success in their chosen sport—devote less attention to school work than to athletics, only to find they are woefully unprepared for the academic rigors and realities of college life. The result: significantly lower college graduation rates at Division I schools for black male athletes compared with the undergraduate student body as a whole.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, including Mark McDaniel, senior research associate at UNC’s Center for Community Capital, have proposed a solution: a full service program preparing young athletes when they are in middle and high school to succeed in college and beyond. The new program, the Bridges2Success Scholar Athlete Initiative, will sup port: 1. “Scholar Athlete Zones” staffed by academic coaches who provide tutoring and support in core subject areas and coordinate life skills sessions during and after school; 2. Student athlete mentorship that matches high school student athletes with former collegiate student athletes; 3. Professional development for middle and high school athletic coaches. This third element is crucial, writes the research team, because “research reveals that middle and high school coaches have an indelible impact on the student athletes they work with in organized sports.”
The coaches training academy program was piloted this past spring with a total of 24 coaches and athletic directors in the Durham Public School System, all of whom serve a majority of males of color as their core demographic. Results are preliminary, but after just a short time in the program, coaches have shown gains in understanding perceptions of hyper-masculinity in sports, building youth resiliency on and off the field, having a positive impact on community, and nurturing positive relationships. Staff is currently negotiating with Durham public schools to train a new cohort of athletic coaches in the 2016-2017 school year.
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News from the Center
CURS Launches Urban 2 Point 0
CURS is thrilled to announce the launch of our new blog, Urban 2 Point 0. Focusing on urban issues relevant to North Carolina and beyond, Urban 2 Point 0 will present easily digestible data analysis complemented by infographics, maps, and other visuals.
Our first series of posts examines the issue of mixed-income neighborhoods and income inequality in North Carolina’s three largest metro areas: Charlotte, the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham), and the Triad (Greensboro and Winston-Salem). Each post features interactive maps that allow readers to see how income groups cluster, and where income inequality is greatest. In the future, look for posts on affordable housing demand, how cities have recovered from the Great Recession, and how high-tech industries have disbursed throughout the state.
Urban 2 Point 0 is edited by CURS researcher Michael Webb and managed by public communications specialist Lauren Rose. If you’re interested in contributing a post to the blog, please contact Michael at mdwebb@unc.edu.
Center for Community Capital Receives $1.05 Million Grant from JPMorgan Chase & Co.:
The Center for Community Capital (CCC) has been awarded a $1.05 million grant from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to conduct three affordable housing and financial capability research and evaluation projects. These projects aim to help under-resourced communities become more vibrant and economically inclusive across the nation.
 "We look forward to working with local partners to explore what is working and what is not, always a critical part of innovation,” said Roberto Quercia, director of CCC, who is co-directing the project with executive director Lucy Gorham. “Our findings can be disseminated beyond the university and into the real world where they can inform public policy and practice on the ground.”
For more information on the projects, please click here.
#ICYMI: CURS participates in Twitter talk
In January, CURS director Bill Rohe participated in a Twitter talk with How Housing Matters and other experts focusing on work requirements in public housing. The talk followed the release of a CURS study, Work Requirements in Public Housing: Impacts on Tenant Employment and Evictions—forthcoming in the journal Housing Policy Debate—which was the first empirical analysis of the effect of work requirements in public housing on employment and evictions. How Housing Matters—a product of the MacArthur Foundation and the Urban Land Institute Terwilliger Center for Housing—also covered the study on their website.
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