To aid municipalities in regulating anonymous investor buying of 1-4 unit homes we drafted this model ordinance. A companion memorandum analyzes its legality and effectiveness under New Jersey law.
Read MoreContinuing CLiME’s work on regulating institutional investors of 1-4 unit dwellings in cities like Newark, this legal research memo explains and accompanies model legislation, showing cities exactly how to mandate transparency of ownership among anonymous LLCs.
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Few race-conscious public policies displaced African-American individuals and families like the federal urban renewal program from 1949 to 1974. Hundreds of cities spent millions of taxpayer dollars engaging in "slum removal" of entire neighborhoods only recently occupied by Blacks from the Great Migration. Their forced relocation—almost always without statutorily promised relocation expenses and assistance—was a harbinger of the modern ghetto and a blueprint for urban planning approaches that continue to this day.
As part of CLiME's Displacement Project, we began a broad inquiry into urban renewal in 2021. The results will follow in the form of academic papers, policy briefs and here, a growing archive of hard-to-find data on the program's implementation in select U.S. cities. CLiME Fellow and Bloustein graduate Erica Copeland assembled variables on the location, demographic variables and costs associated with primarily African-American displacement for a select period of time. We hope this contributes to a growing body of academic research on an under-appreciated aspect of systemic racism carried out by the federal and local governments at midcentury, whose wealth-retarding effects persist.
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This report shows that the national trend in investor buying of 1-4 unit homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods is most acute in Newark, New Jersey where almost half of all real estate sales were made by institutional buyers. The trend grew out of the foreclosure crisis that wiped out significant middle-class wealth in particular Newark neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods became the targets of investors seeking passive returns from rents. Those largely anonymous outside companies now set neighborhood housing markets on terms that primarily benefit their investors.
While CLiME detected no illegal activity, the threats to Newarkers and government policy goals are significant. They include rapidly rising rents, decreased homeownership, higher barriers to affordable housing production goals, renter displacement and less stable communities. Sadly, this reality continues a long pattern of economic threats to predominantly Black and increasingly Latino neighborhoods in a state whose communities are among the most segregated in the country. From racial exclusion to predatory lending, from foreclosure to the extraction of rents, Newark’s experience demonstrates what can happen when local economies ignore equity.
CLiME’s analysis documents a dramatic increase in institutional investor activity in Newark’s residential market starting around 2013. As of 2020, almost half of all Newark’s residential sales were to institutional buyers.
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Orange, East Orange, and Irvington are Black working-class suburban communities. While home to just under 20% of Essex’s population, they are home to almost 40% of all Black residents and only 2% of White residents. These communities are also growing fast, with surging Latino and immigrant populations from the Caribbean.
These inner-ring suburbs are challenged by elevated rates of poverty and a growing unaffordability, and they have few resources to address these pressing needs. In 2020, Orange, East Orange, and Irvington residents generated only $30,000-$40,000 in tax basis for essential public services, such as police, education and sanitation. Meanwhile, nearby Summit residents generated almost four and a half times as many resources as any of these communities, and to serve a much smaller population.
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This is a structural analysis of police brutality, primarily the exercise of lethal force against unarmed persons, following the 2020 summer of racial reckoning when millions braved a virulent pandemic to protest the lack of legal and institutional accountability that predictably follows the police killings of unarmed black people. A consistent lack of accountability is what binds the individual acts to a design structure in which evidence clearly shows that black bodies are subordinated to some other systemic goal. We do not identify that goal, but we do evaluate the structure that produces predictable outcomes. Our aim is to set out much of the reform landscape—the issues, approaches and proposals from law to policy—and to evaluate them on structural grounds.
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CLiME conducted an affordability and gap analysis of Newark's housing stock and found a severe gap in low-rent units. We estimate that the City needs an additional 16,234 units renting for about $750 per month to meet residents' existing needs.
CLiME’s approach to assessing affordability is rooted in the local context. We calculate a Newark Median Affordable Rent (NMAR) of $763 per month. This is $330 less than Newark’s median market rent, and more than $600 less than Fair Market Rent (FMR), created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We also develop a methodological innovation to integrate the City’s rental housing subsidies into the affordability analysis. This procedure, the first of its kind as far as we know, provides a much closer picture of affordability in a City where at least 28% of all units are subsidized.
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Land banks are government-created institutions whose mission is to return vacant, abandoned and tax-delinquent properties into productive use. Land banks are empowered to acquire land, eliminate back taxes and tax liens attached to a property in order to create a clean title, maintain the land in compliance with local and state ordinances, and convey the property back into active use. As a mechanism for expediting the disposition of city-owned and/or abandoned properties, land banks can be a significant local government tool either for equitable growth or for more conventional economic development.
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In this first installment of a faculty essay series, CLiME asked Rutgers professors affiliated with the center to provide brief analysis on some of the many institutional crises exacerbated by the Coronavirus pandemic and to offer solutions. Law Professor Rachel Godsil discuses the loss of public revenues to struggling communities and offers a pipeline to millions. Political Scientist Domingo Morel reveals the growing crisis in public pension fund commitments and a possible path to meeting those obligations. Law Professor Laura Cohen takes readers inside juvenile justice to show the increased risk of viral infection incarcerated youth face as well as the steps advocates are taking on their behalf. Director David Troutt looks into the future to interrogate claims that “we are all in this together” and offers an alternative set of policy priorities we would pursue if mutuality really mattered.
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The Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity joins the national push for transformative change to dismantle systemic racism, a call that follows the coronavirus pandemic and recession and the police killings of several African Americans, including George Floyd. But what does systemic racism mean?
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The coronavirus pandemic resembles nothing in any of our lifetimes, and its impact will be felt long after it ends. As an economic story, it will mean immediate loss and uncertainty for many households, probably recession, possibly depression. People who can’t afford to hoard or have jobs that can’t be done remotely will be exposed more often, putting everyone in their households at greater risk and subject to an overburdened health care system. These effects will heighten the social determinants of health for populations that already struggle with underlying conditions statistically more than others. And, with predictable cruelty, it will target black, Latino and lower-income families for disparate death and loss. Recent reports from counties that keep data on race show that it has.
Read MoreWhat is Universal Basic Income and how can I read more about it? As UBI is featured in more discussions of mobility policies and progressive federalism, CLiME provides an overview.
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As a member of a local affordable housing coalition and partner to Mayor Baraka's effort to implement the second right-to-counsel (RTC) ordinance in the country, CLiME led the research design of such a system and the supporting basis for its legality under New Jersey law.
This memorandum was submitted to the City of Newark in early February, with recommendations for implementing a system of free legal services for indigent Newarkers (incomes below 200 percent of the median) facing imminent eviction proceedings in Essex County court.
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Making Newark Work for Newarkers is the full report of the Rutgers University-Newark Project on Equitable Growth in the City of Newark, written by CLiME and incorporating research conducted in conjunction with a university working group whose work began last April. We viewed the goal of equitable growth first in the context of housing issues before expanding to think about the fabric of community life and economic opportunity in the city.
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On May 5, 2017, the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) hosted an interdisciplinary all-day conference on the institutional responsibility of schools in responding to childhood psychological trauma, particularly in low-SES communities where early life trauma exposure is disturbingly ubiquitous. The conference brought together a group of panelists and audience members from diverse fields related to childhood trauma.
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This analysis addresses the disparity in prenatal health outcomes between the City of Paterson and Wayne Township in New Jersey. It guides the reader through the experiences of a hypothetical pregnant woman living in Paterson to examine the institutional and non-institutional factors that prevent this pregnant woman, and others like her, from accessing appropriate prenatal care. This paper also discusses the relationship between the inability to access proper prenatal care and the perpetuation …
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Each year, psychological trauma arising from community and domestic violence, abuse and neglect brings profound psychological, physiological and academic harm to millions of American children, disproportionately poor children of color. This Article represents the first comprehensive legal analysis of the causes of and remedies for a crisis that can have lifelong and epigenetic consequences. Using civil rights and local government law, it argues that children’s reactions to complex trauma represent the natural symptomatology of severe structural inequality—legally …
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County, New Jersey between 2000 and 2015. The number of children living in poverty in Essex County has increased over the past 15 years, and in some places, quite dramatically. Increasing numbers of Essex County’s poor children live in neighborhoods of extreme poverty. There are also preliminary signs that child poverty has spread into formerly no- or low-poverty neighborhoods.
Read MoreMORRISTOWN, N.J. — When the morning rush begins at Alexander Hamilton Elementary School here, students lugging oversize backpacks and fluorescent-colored lunchboxes emerge from the school buses that roll in, one after another, for 15 minutes. By the time it ends, children from some of this area’s most privileged enclaves, and from some of its poorest, file through the front doors to begin their day together.
The Morris School District was created in 1971, after a state court decision led to the merger of two Northern New Jersey communities — the mostly white suburbs of Morris Township, and the racially mixed urban hub of Morristown — into one school district for the purpose of maintaining racial and economic balance.
Read MoreWhat would an equitable DC look like? Communities of color have faced decades of systemic racism and discriminatory policies and practices. These actions have barred people of color from certain jobs and neighborhoods and from opportunities to build wealth, leaving a legacy that persists today. If the nation’s capital were free of its stark racial inequities, it could be a more prosperous and competitive city—one where everyone could reach their full potential and build better lives for themselves and their families.
Washington, DC, is one of most racially segregated cities in the United States, stemming from public policies and private actions that once limited where black residents could live, whether they could secure mortgages, and whom they could buy homes from. Today, Wards 4, 5, 7, and 8 on the east have a majority of black residents, and Wards 2, 3, and 6 on the west are majority white. About half of Hispanic residents live in Wards 1 and 4.
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