Today, March 5, 2010, the St. John's University School of Law and its Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development will host an important symposium entitled "The Fall of the Economy: How New York Can Rise to the Challenge." This day long symposium sponsored by the Ronald Brown Center for Civil Rights will feature searching explorations into the following subjects:(1) The Economic Collapse: Big Business Issues and Reform
(2) Big Business Collapse: Government Bailouts and other Government Policies
(3) A Colloquy on Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis
(4) The Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis and Effect on Housing, Citizens and Society.
The featured speaker during the event is former Congressperson and current CEO of Common Cause Bob Edgar.
The proceedings of this event will be published by The Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development. For more information, go to: The Fall of the Economy: How New York Can Rise to the Challenge.
A small-minded and/or narrowly tailored approach to economic development will never solve the crisis the United States (and global) economy has experiences in the last couple of years. An approach outlined by Prof. Immergluck in his series of articles on the subject are the kind of innovative approaches our public policy shapers need to challenge themselves with.
ReplyDeleteDan Immergluck, from the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech, wrote in his article Neighborhoods in the Wake of the Debacle: Intrametropolitan Patterns of Foreclosed Properties.
Abstract:
The problem of growing numbers of foreclosed, vacant homes in U.S. neighborhoods during the mortgage crisis rose on the national policy agenda during 2007 and 2008. This paper describes the intrametropolitan accumulation of foreclosed homes (often referred to as “REO” properties) at the depths of the crisis in late 2008. After describing city and suburban patterns of REO across different types of metropolitan areas, a model of REO accumulation from late 2006 to late 2008 at the zip code level is estimated. In addition to declining housing values and increasing unemployment, a variety of other factors are found to be associated with increasing REO, especially the origination of high-cost mortgages during the subprime boom. Other factors include poverty rate, the median age of the housing stock, central city location, and state foreclosure processes. After controlling for these other factors, the proportions of a zip code’s population that are black or Hispanic are found to be negatively associated with REO growth, although only the relationship with proportion Hispanic is found to be statistically significant.