The Daily Newarker

New York Times: Program Will Pay Homeowners to Sell at a Loss

More than five million households are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. The government’s $75 billion mortgage modification plan has helped only a small slice of them. Consumer advocates, economists and even some banking industry representatives say much more needs to be done.

For the administration, there is also the concern that millions of foreclosures could delay or even reverse the economy’s tentative recovery — the last thing it wants in an election year.

Taking effect on April 5, the program could encourage hundreds of thousands of delinquent borrowers who have not been rescued by the loan modification program to shed their houses through a process known as a short sale, in which property is sold for less than the balance of the mortgage. Lenders will be compelled to accept that arrangement, forgiving the difference between the market price of the property and what they are owed.

The Times examined the impact of subprime lending in Newark back in 2007, revealing the heartbreaking impact of this long-running crisis. While the prospect of short sales were originally shunned by banks, the Obama plan introduces some hope of stemming foreclosures and preventing a slide back into economic decline.

NY Daily News: It’s a wonderful loft: Downtown Newark making space for lots of conversions

After Hal Laessig and his wife lost their downtown Newark art gallery and living space in an eminent-domain fight with the Newark Housing Authority over the Prudential Center, they were determined to save an old building.

Three years and $3 million later, an 1879 former button factory in the Ironbound District houses their gallery, the Sumei Multidisciplinary Art Center, and serves as their home. They developed Button Factory Lofts into 14 condo units, nine of which have sold since the building opened in October.

The couple are among a wave of preservation-minded developers turning industrial buildings into loft spaces to accommodate Newark’s growing population of artists and professionals.

“When things were booming, developers were clearing multiple blocks, so a lot of the old industrial buildings got demolished,” says Laessig, 54. “Now, with the few that are left, people are thinking, let’s save them and convert them for living, because otherwise they’ll all be gone.”

Good overview of some recent condo conversions happening in the city and the personalities behind them.

Star Ledger: Black History Month: Newark project honors influential city educator James Baxter

“Every ethnic group needs such a person,” Price said, noting that other ethnic groups also sought to have their leaders’ memories immortalized in brick in some fashion. It’s no coincidence that Newark named its 1955 public housing project placed in the First Ward — then the nation’s fourth largest Italian-American enclave — Christopher Columbus Homes.

Now the tradition of honoring local ethnic groups is frowned upon in some circles, Alderman said. Some school boards around the nation have even written formal policies discouraging naming a school after a person. In many cases, he said, the powers that be are simply trying to avoid controversy.

Great long-form piece on how Baxter Terrace came to get its name, and the history of naming locales as a way to honor great achievements and how that process has evolved. With the stereotypes of drugs and crime associated with the housing complex, will the planned city park maintain the Baxter name?

“No one’s home: Newark and builder at odds over housing project”:http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/07/no_ones_home_newark_and_builde.html

Quality, in-depth report from Sunday’s Star Ledger about a total train wreck in the construction of a public housing project on Elizabeth Ave. The money and time wasted in the pursuit of these failed housing units would be tragic in and of itself, not accounting for the 16,000 Newark residents in line to move into a housing project.

Not surprisingly, the developer approved to complete the work for the housing authority in 2004 was paying to play: former Deputy Mayor Ron Rice was on the developer payroll as a veep of “government and public affairs.”

Mark Harris Berman, an architect and professional planner with Buric, said it’s not uncommon to find such deficiencies in housing construction but that the problems at the Elizabeth Avenue complex were glaring.

“For example, sealant materials were entirely missing,” he said. “They were not installed wrong, they were just not there. If you leave a hole, water will get in.”

There also were examples of poor workmanship, according to Buric. For example, foundation walls on some units did not line up properly.”

It is as if people didn’t know what they were doing,” Berman said. “Just from the visual observations there are a lot of problems. You are not supposed to see daylight through the roofs.”

“The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap”:http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/1harvey.pdf (PDF)

Great piece from the Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 1997, Number 1. New Urbanism is the model that many US cities are attempting to adopt to make sense of their post-industrial communities.

While dipping a toe into the ocean of material about urban design, I was surprised at just how many issues the practice touches — everything from battling crime to creating community to the industrial design of lampposts — and how many of the issues I was at least somewhat familiar with.

But can “community” really rescue us from the deadening world of social dissolution, grab-it-yourself materialism and individualized, selfish, market-oriented greed? Community has always meant different things to different people, so what kind of “community” is understood within the philosophy of the New Urbanism? It is here that harking back to a mythological past carries its own dangerous freight.

The New Urbanism in fact connects to a facile contemporary attempt to transform large and teeming cities, so seemingly out of control, into an interlinked series of “urban villages” where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil and urbane fashion to everyone else. In Britain, Prince Charles has led the way on this emotional charger toward “the urban village” as the locus of urban regeneration. Leon Krier, an oft-quoted scion of the New Urbanism, is one of his key architectural outriders. And the idea attracts, drawing support from marginalized ethnic groups, impoverished and embattled working-class populations left high and dry through deindustrialization, as well as from middle- and upper-class nostalgics who view it as a civilized form of real estate development encompassing sidewalk cafés, pedestrian precincts, and Laura Ashley shops.

“Downtown Newark’s rental market on the rise”:http://www.nydailynews.com/real_estate/2008/06/19/2008-06-19_downtown_newarks_rental_market_on_the_ri.html

Lest we forget about some of Newark’s success stories in all the kerfuffle over zombies, NY Daily News provides some more positive press on Newark’s real estate market.

Sitting two blocks from the Prudential Center and at the southern edge of Military Park, Eleven80 is five to ten minute walk from Newark’s Penn Station and a 15 minute Path Train ride to downtown Manhattan. Stern thinks location, the building’s amenities, gracious apartment sizes and a changing perception of Newark are reasons for this building fast success.

“For years Newark was an easy target for people to poke fun of,” he says. “The reality is there are good areas and bad areas. When someone gets killed in East New York, it doesn’t scare a person in Chelsea. There are areas of Newark with no crime.”

Municipal Council Member Carlos M. Gonzalez calls the downtown area in Newark one of the city’s safest places.

“There is more of a police presence downtown than almost any other Newark neighborhood,” says Gonzalez, the Newark North Ward resident who joined the city government two years ago when Cory Booker became mayor. “We’re working now on bringing businesses and residents back to downtown and employing our citizens. Investment in downtown is increasing at a very fast pace.”

“Suburbs a Mile Too Far for Some”:http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/html_article.php?id=&CALL_URL=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121366811790479767.html%3fmod=alEstateMain_2

A tipster sent in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story on the New Urbanism phenomenon. The article cites demographic changes and rising energy costs as the culprit for the shift in housing preference away from drive-in suburbs — a model that’s been in place since World War II — to cities and walkable communities.

Despite the high concentration of fiber optic cable running through Newark serving its telecommunications industry and universities, the city missed the opportunity to capitalize on the internet-oriented economic boom of the 90s. This new national trend might just catalyze important changes in the city and provide a second chance to benefit from another national trend.

While high gas prices are a boon to New Urbanism and other “smart-growth” planning concepts, in practice such mixed-use projects often are harder to execute — from acquiring local approval to securing Wall Street financing — than the traditional suburban tract-housing model. The challenges for cities are considerable, from investing in public-transportation systems to creating incentives for developers to accommodate the new urban housing demand. 

Cities such as Denver, Charlotte, N.C., and Portland, Ore., are making investments in public transportation and spurring the construction of symbols of the new housing era: multifamily residential and retail complexes at or next to transit stations. Reconnecting America, a nonprofit group committed to transit-oriented development, estimates that the number of households near transit stations will soar to 15 million by 2030, from six million now.

“Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?”:http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/16/suburb.city/index.html

This piece in from a tipster about the changing American landscape. While I found it a bit reactionary about the upward tick in crime in some suburban communities as a result of subprime-related vacancies, the trends outlined by urban planning professor Christopher Leinberger seemed to reflect some of the realities we’re seeing in Newark and other New Jersey cities.

Last year, the population tipped from favoring suburban to urban communities when a study found that the majority of the American public now lives in cities.

I also found it interesting that when I asked Executive Director at Leadership Newark, Celia King, what her five-year prediction for Newark was, that she imagined — over every other prediction she could have made — that Newark would be a walkable community.

“The American dream is absolutely changing,” he told CNN.

This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Leinberger, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.

Instead, they are looking for what Leinberger calls “walkable urbanism” — both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything — from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.

“Newark blueprint has lofty ambitions “:http://www.nj.com/starledger/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1213072608175250.xml&coll=1

The plan introduces zoning changes that allow the city to convert the underused second- and third-floor retail/commercial space downtown to residential units — the lack of which now contributes to that “dead” feeling after dark.

Public affairs expert Roland Anglin emphasizes the need for the city to market itself well and get a handle on crime. But you already knew that.

The first phase of what’s being billed The Living Downtown — part plan, part sales pitch — removes a host of outdated regulatory and bureaucratic obstacles that often deter would-be developers from carrying out rehab and new construction projects in Newark.
That includes eliminating onerous parking and yard-setback requirements and streamlining project review processes. The plan now goes to the city council for final approval. The next phase, yet to be drafted, would establish design criteria and offer some economic incentives to prospective developers.

This type of thinking “is long overdue. Industry is not going to come back and certain retail is not going to come back. So, you have to eliminate regulations and zoning of a bygone age,” said Roland Anglin, a public affairs expert at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, who read the proposal. “This plan is aimed at attracting the so-called creative class, who have been priced out of other markets.”

“An innocent man detained”:http://www.nj.com/hobokennow/index.ssf/2008/05/an_innocent_man_detained.html

Of all the things I worry about living in Newark, having my home invaded by FBI agents doesn’t often make the top of the list. Crazy story.

A technology systems manager for a Hoboken insurance firm was asleep in his Newark home earlier this month when a SWAT team of FBI agents battered through the front door, held him and his 16-year-old son at gunpoint, tied their hands with plastic restraints and then started asking them questions.

Kevin Taylor told the Star-Ledger the agents never produced a warrant – or even a business card. He later discovered they’d been dispatched to arrest Charles “Buddy Musk” Muccigrosso, a 69-year-old reputed member of the Gambino crime family who hadn’t lived there in three months.

“This American Life #355: The Giant Pool of Money”:http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242

Poignant story from This American Life about how the credit and housing crisis occurred, sharing the stories from home-owners on the brink of financial ruin to CDO multi-millionaire brokers who lived like “b-level celebrities” during the high-times of the housing bubble.

The subprime housing crisis roiling the economy has made its mark on Newark’s landscape, “as reported by the Times last year”:http://dailynewarker.com/2007/03/28/subprime-lending-impact-on-newark/. Interestingly, one of the interviewees met with a financial counselor at NACA, “the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America”:https://www.naca.com/index_main.jsp, in their downtown Newark office on Park Place.

Click play below to listen to the podcast in its entirity, which runs about one hour.

This American Life producer Alex Blumberg teams up with NPR’s Adam Davidson for the entire hour to tell the story — the surprisingly entertaining story — of how the US got itself into a housing crisis. They talk to people who were actually working in the housing, banking, finance and mortgage industries, about what they thought during the boom times, and why the bust happened. And they explain that a lot of it has to do with the giant global pool of money.

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