Rethinking and Re Strategizing our Neighborhoods: The Neighborhood Homes Investment Act
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lack neighborhoods are at risk! Two decades ago, black neighborhoods were doing well financially, but today, most of them are poverty-stricken! A good example is Cleveland which had more than 900,000 residents in 1950, but by the year 2000, its population had fallen below 500,000. Large cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia are losing great not unless we start doing something. Why are these once glorious black neighborhoods and cities slipping into poverty? What’s causing it? What does the NHI Act propose? Is that all we need, or could the industry do more? Let’s find out. Over the past two decades, most of the famous and glorious black neighborhoods have fallen into poverty. What is happening? In 2005, a record of 307 families purchased houses in 16 neighborhoods dominated by Middle-class African-Americans in Cleveland. About 13 years later, in 2018, the number had dipped by three-quarter, with more than half of the 73 home purchases occurring in just
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one neighborhood. Of the 16 neighborhoods, five attracted zero buyers. From this, we get that lack of homebuyers in the once-glorious Black neighborhoods is a major contributor, which has created “a crisis of non-replacement,” according to Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress. A lack of home buyers also results in a vicious cycle, bringing a further decline to those neighborhoods.
Of the 300 neighborhoods all with good median incomes in 2000, “a large majority had slipped into poverty in 2018.” The study further determined that homeownership had dropped, while vacancy and poverty rates were up in almost all the neighborhoods. The big question here is, why is this happening? According to the findings of the study, there has been less focus on the health of the places where AfricanAmericans live. Mallach further notes that neighborhoods are more than just a collection of people. Rather, neighborhoods represent both fixed assets, such as homes, businesses and schools, as well as less tangible assets such as civic and cultural engagement.
“The more poverty increases, the more the remaining middle-class homeowners are going to leave, and fewer middle-class buyers are going to be coming in,”
Another huge contributor to the fall of Black neighborhoods is discrimination in real estate, including in lending and appraising. According to the Brookings Institution, homes in Black-dominated neighborhoods are undervalued by $156 billion nationwide. And folks, this is not a small number.
Meanwhile, Mallach proceeded to carry out a study focused on the fortunes of Black middleclass neighborhoods in six large cities in the US, including Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, and Cleveland— and his findings were “disturbing.”
At this point, you could be wondering, is there any hope left? The Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA). The NHIA is a federal proposal that was formed to break the stalemate of distressed neighborhoods that cannot retain or attract working families
Mallach says.
