The Foreclosure Crisis: The Same, But Different
The economic news relayed via our blog this week has not been much for confidence building, and we close the week with reports of a bleak twist in the ongoing foreclosure crisis. The news of the past couple of weeks has been that reporters and most of the fifty states’ attorneys general have been pursuing the ‘robo-signing’ services‘ that have churned out foreclosure proceedings on people who might even have been in good standing. Now third-party investors are demanding that the banks they support clarify who owns which properties and who owes what amounts to whom. Turns out that the banks can not readily provide that information, as the paperwork and loans on the properties were sliced-and-diced in a process called ‘securitization.’ Some pundits see in this latest twist the undermining of some of the first principles of capitalism: private property and the legal right to register, retain, and/or resell it.
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, News and Current Affairs | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Foreclosures Slowly Start Moving Again, Though Distrust Remains
A week or so ago, Bank of America announced it would put a hold on its foreclosure proceedings while it reviewed the processes that moved the foreclosure claims past lawyers, whose signatures were required. Other financial institutes followed suit. The decision came in the midst of growing fears that the foreclosures on tens of thousands of homes had taken place without real human oversight of the paper trail legally required for the process. Today Bank of America announced it would return to the process in at least 23 states, confident that their materials in those states were being properly vetted. How have politicians and neighborhood associations responded to the hold and release?
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, Local/Maryland, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
A Compendium Of Recent News About (The Effects Of) Unemployment
Perhaps rainy days and Mondays can get us down, but so can recent economic news. And we have had a fair amount of that in the last few days. For example, the last jobs report before the midterm elections shows a notable reduction in public-sector jobs (mostly caused by the ending of the last of the Census 2010 jobs and the firings/redundancies made by state and local governments) with a slight uptick (ca.64,000) of private-sector jobs. An uptick is an uptick, but the drain of long term unemployment has made most Americans somewhere between hankering and obsessed with changing the political makeup of Congress in a few weeks time. Long term unemployment – after the credit and banking meltdown, after the housing bubble popping – has also sorely curtailed our abilities to support our charities and not-for-profits, as recent reports demonstrate.
| Category Banking & Finance, Grants and Funding, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Nonprofit, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Fundraising: What Is Next For Philanthropy? Acting Bigger And Adapting Better
Earlier this summer The Monitor Institute released a significant white paper penned by Katherine Fulton, Gabriel Kasper, and Barbara Kibbe that wants to challenge philanthropic organizations to see beyond the present fundraising doldrums toward the structural changes that requires such organizations to behave differently, whatever the economic environment. Their answers challenge some of the standard presuppositions they believe that nonprofit and fundraising organizations have been using since the turn of the twentieth century. (more…)
| Category Banking & Finance, Grants and Funding, Nonprofit | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Is Your Organization’s Status With The IRS Up-To-Date?
http://www.irs.gov/charities/index.html
In our final follow-up/ announcement concerning a subject we (and many others) have periodically discussed over the last year, the IRS has established 15 October (in but one week!) as the deadline for all tax-exempt nonprofits and charitiable organizations to re-assert their status via the Form 990. Tax-exempt organizations are likely to keep their status once the form is submitted, but if they do not submit the form, they will find their organizations retroactively taxed back to May 2010.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
TARP: Unpopularity Of Program Belies Its Success
In the interests of full disclosure and blogospheric transparency, I should admit I was against the TARP program when proposed by the flailing George W. Bush administration in 2008. It seemed a rush job and a chance for the administration’s friends to get painlessly out of an operation they had botched themselves with absurdly risky loans divvied into absurdly anonymous proportions to resell back to their colleagues. Yet the ledgers of surviving banks (albeit too-much-bigger-to-fail) and the money moving back toward the Treasury suggest that TARP might have been the best bad way to keep the economy at least alive on the table. But as TARP passed with overwhelming support through a Democratically controlled Congress to a Republican White House, who gets political credit?
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Philanthropy: Baltimore’s Long Tradition Of Civic Philanthropy Unbroken By Great Recession
Baltimore likes to call itself the 'City of Firsts,' which has given it a proud heritage of innovation, civic uplift, and educational creativity. The city has struggled, like so many others on the eastern seaboard and in the upper midwest, with declining industrialization and population shifts to exurbs and to the Sun Belt. And yet, perhaps for the same reasons that such cities have endured such flight, Baltimore has not been ravaged by the housing bubble and Wall Street bailout that have so gravely weakened the economy generally and boom towns in places like Florida and Nevada specifically. One of the striking things about Baltimore, in good times and bad, is its long and deep tradition of civic philanthropy that goes back into nineteenth-century industrialism and continues in twenty-first century online and knowledge-based communities. We would like to celebrate that tradition today.The Peabody Library
Though not a native of the area, George Peabody spent a good deal of his business life in Baltimore, and he showed his appreciation by giving some of his largest philanthropic grants (in money, properties, and educational resources). In his book “All The Money In The World” (Random House, 2007) has this to say about George Peabody: “Even before the Carnegies and Rockefellers became philanthropic legends, there was George Peabody, considered to be the father of modern philanthropy.” Peabody made his wealth in dry goods and cotton at the turn of the nineteenth century, then used that capital to finance railroads in the US and Britain in the middle of that century. He gave the buildings, library, and resources to found the Peabody Library and Musical Institute at Johns Hopkins University, for example. And he sought to improve housing for the working classes around the harbor, whose labor he needed for his overseas shipping interests.
A generation later Johns Hopkins used his fortune made in groceries and dry goods, and then (like Peabody) with the railroads to ensure the foundation of a university that bears his name. His Quaker roots instilled in him a philanthropy based on religious morality, a foundation his father gave him by doing such things as freeing his slaves and asking Johns and his siblings to help work the family farm until debts could be paid.
That tradition of philanthropy in and to Baltimore by the titans of finance carries on today, with the likes of George Soros, about whom we reported earlier this week. Soros’s donations to the Open Society Institute in Baltimore have been in the many millions of dollars and are likely to continue beyond his lifetime. But while the big-splash – nay, gargantuan-splash – donations get the lion’s share of attention, Baltimore has a strong new tradition of micro-donations and giving circles that do not get the attention they deserve.
Paul Sturm recently shined a spotlight on the modern spin to the tradition for BMoreMedia.com:
If manufacturing is the muscle that historically propelled Baltimore’s economy, with higher education providing the brains, then the nonprofit sector –particularly the neighborhood and community-based organizations often operating on a shoestring — has earned its place as the city’s heart and soul. Baltimore and its surrounding region are blessed with an abundance of organizations that make a difference every day in the quality of community living.
Over 10,000 non-profit organizations are registered in the greater Baltimore region, and they employ over 85,500 people, who in turn help tens of thousands with a multiplier effect that is the envy of Austan Goolsbee. Sturm spoke with those who work in the educational, housing, greening, lending/finance, and conflict-resolution sectors, and they all stress not just the breadth of benefits such organizations bring to the city, but the fact that such mega-philanthropic organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Open Society Institute are based in Baltimore, which act as magnets for other such organizations.
The most recent development, though, is the ‘giving circle’ type of organization that draws like-minded, but not wealthy, micro-philanthropists to pool their contributions and use social media to broaden their reach at almost no cost. Lionel Foster at UrbaniteBaltimore.com ran a story on The Baltimore Women’s Giving Circle at the end of 2007, which is part of a movement that really picked up steam at the turn of the millennium.
The rapid growth of giving circles—most were founded since 2000—may be due to the fact that they allow different combinations of cultures, institutions, and motivations to complement each other. In many instances, giving circles are one of many charitable investment tools offered by a local community foundation. Charitable foundations take their cues from nineteenth-century industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, who was among the first to found one: They have a board of directors and manage large sums of money, which they distribute in the form of grants. Private foundations do not solicit funds themselves; instead, they distribute money on behalf of a person, family, or corporation. Community foundations are trusted with the cash and assets, donated within a person’s lifetime or as part of the estate, of multiple donors to fund projects within a particular geographic area.
Such circles raise thousands, not millions, of dollars, but they can target that money in a wonderfully efficient manner. Moreover, they bring people together who might not otherwise interact, which strengthens the social fabric of the city and keeps people involved in the long-term issues that concern everyone.
Baltimore’s strong tradition of philanthropy is 150 years young, and it has evolved as the city’s inhabitants and their challenges have evolved. Though the image of Baltimore has been tarnished by drugs and crime (real and as relayed by shows like “The Wire”) over the last generation or so, the foundations for regeneration are strong and the renaissance of the city is being driven by activists with deep and not-so-deep pockets. But they all seem to share a first heart-and-soul desire to keep it Charm City.
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, Community, Grants and Funding, Greening, Local/Maryland, Nonprofit, Revitalization | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
George Soros Enjoys Close Ties With Charm City
George Soros has made billions – yes Billions- of charitable donations over the years, and he has most recently given over $100 million to Human Rights Watch (HRW) in an effort to encourage its autonomous status. His wealth comes mostly from his work as a co-founder of the Quantum [Hedge] Fund through the 1980s, but he is perhaps best known for “breaking the Bank of England” in mid-September 1997, when his fund saw the overvaluation of the British Pound when the government was wavering about how to integrate with the forthcoming Euro.
His rise came after a horrific childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary, where his family masked their Jewish heritage well enough that he even became a ‘runner’ for the Nazi-backed government as it rounded up Jewish leaders (Soros states in his biographies that he delivered the government’s affidavits and warned the recipients of what awaited them). The then emigrated to Britain and the US, where he was quick to see key investments and even key weaknesses in the economy. He has lived in the Chesapeake Bay region since the mid-1970s, and many of his philanthropic endeavors have been based in the Baltimore-Washington DC region. How have those billions been put to use in the area?
| Category Banking & Finance, Community, Local/Maryland, News and Current Affairs, Politics, Sustainability | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Crowdsourcing Platforms Designed For The Mission-Based Community (Part II)
We continue our introduction into some of the ‘crowdsourcing’ websites and applications that have been developed to links not-for-profits and mission-based organizations with their ever-connected constituents and benefactors. The list presented here yesterday and today is hardly exhaustive, but we believe we have touched upon some of the significant types of websites for various sectors of the philanthropic community. We encourage you and your organization to use any information we can provide as a starting point of your research. And feel free to reach out to us if we can provide further guidance or suggestions.
The arrival of the iPhone, then the iPad (and their immitators), have shifted the opportunities to share information away from the stationary desk toward the moving person. Crowdsourcing is a way that the mission-based community can leverage that mobile communication to engage participants on and benefactors of projects in almost real time (for a negative view of crowdsourcing as a means for private/for-profit communications to avoid investment, click here). What the software and website developers are doing is making that exchange as simple and as scalable as possible.
| Category Banking & Finance, Community, Grants and Funding, Greening, Media Review, Nonprofit, Sustainability, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Fundraising: Crowdsourcing Platforms Designed For The Mission-Based Community (Part I)
“Crowdsourcing” is the buzzword of the moment (though coined in the ancient world of technology back in 2006) and pertains to making an open appeal or project to a community and having those connected to that community take on the appeal or project and running it amongst themselves. It assumes the existence of a community in close communication (think Twitter, simple messaging services, Google Talk!, etc.), who is also ready to share information among their own micro-communities or constituencies. The challenge is to build one’s community and keep it engaged and ready to receive your organization’s various appeals and requests. Meeting that challenge is what a number of online services and platforms have established themselves to do. We shall review a few of them today.
| Category Banking & Finance, Community, Grants and Funding, Marketing, Nonprofit, Software Review, Sustainability, Urban Farming, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
The Debate About Interest Rates And Opportunities For Growth
Economists are not known as a gregarious bunch (save Paul Krugman, perhaps). So it might not be much of a surprise to learn that the reports (eight per year) from the Federal Reserve are known as “The Beige Book(s).” The report takes on information from the twelve district Reserve Banks concerning the previous few months and how they are to be contextualized over the previous year. The report released in early August for the summer of 2010 argues that most sectors at least held their own, and that many have shown overall growth over the past year, despite some month-to-month downturns. The key term is “modest,” which is used at least once in each of the six sections of the summary of the July Report. But though the twelve presidents of the twelve district banks might agree on the modesty of the growth, they are sharply debating amongst themselves what to do about it (if anything).
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Double-Dip Recession Fears Continue To Mute Enthusiasms
The Unemployed Await Free Coffee (1934)
We don’t really want to brag about this. We wish we were wrong. But the MKCREATIVE blog was worrying about a double-dip recession before the three-foot-deep snows melted from the double-whammy of Nor’easters born by the eastern seaboard this past winter. The housing market, upon which so much of the US economy depends upon, was considered through the worst of the overextended subprime mortgage fiascoes that had flooded the market. Once the housing market stopped its freefall (leaving aside the political debates about government stimuli helping and/or not being big enough/too big…), the argument went, we could regroup and pick up pieces. Unemployment would also stop ballooning once people quit panicking about the housing market. And now that we are in the dog-days of summer?
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Giving By Billionaires Getting Some Reflective/Reflexive Pushback
Gates & Buffett pledge half their wealth to charity
The pledge of William Buffett, Bill Gates, and a growing number of multi-million and billionaires has received a great deal of press in the last couple of weeks, as Mr. Buffett has made efforts to enlist the super-wealthy from around the world. According to a report in The Washington Post by Donna Gordon Blankinship (5 August, 2010), the giving of the American wealthy could mean some $600 billion in giving. That is double the $300 million given to US charities in 2009. The reception among a number of online established media of such philanthropy has been quite positive, but some considered voices are starting to raise questions about the structural problems that such über-donations might create. Are the challenges valid?
| Category Banking & Finance, Grants and Funding, News and Current Affairs, Nonprofit, Politics, Revitalization | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Recent Reports of Administration’s Efforts To End Foreclosure: “Extend And Pretend”
The program has been having to redefine success
With midterm elections coming in November, and with the Democrats generally sailing against the political winds, reports about the difficulties and inadequacies of the Obama Administrations project “Making Home Affordable” (MHA) are likely to slacken further the party’s sails. The MHA program was set up in February 2009 as offering “opportunities to modify or refinance your mortgage to make your monthly payments more affordable. It also includes the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives Program for homeowners who are interested in a short sale or deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.” Signs of challenges for it are evident on the website’s front page: a drive in July 2010 – 17 months into the program – “to raise awareness of the Making Home Affordable Program.” Given the high foreclosure rates of the first half of 2009, advertising such a program might hardly seem necessary. Unfortunately, recent reports show that even for those who signed up for the flagship Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), rebounding mortgage payments and/or foreclosure loom over them on a month-to-month basis.
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, National/International, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Housing Market Remains Soft As Banks Shy Away From Loans
The bubble in the housing market (and the attendant mortgage-backed securities, etc. that pumped up the bubble) is largely blamed for the rise in debt among American consumers. The fear of, and calling in, of that debt led to the collapse in credit in the early fall of 2008 that sparked the recession. Though economists generally agree that technically the US has been out of a recession since the winter of 2009, the fact remains that what we call ‘economic growth’ is really a stagnation: we are only replacing economic consumption with economic production. Better than a recession, perhaps, but not by much.
The problems in the housing market remain, though. Overproduction of housing has led to a glut of living space that no one can afford. At least not without a loan to get started. Which many people can not get because they do not have jobs that could sustain paying back the loan. A new report from The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development in New York argues that banks have been unwilling to engage the lower-income housing market for some time, which only exacerbates the larger problem.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Elizabeth Warren Still Fighting For Consumer Protection
Almost a year ago, Elizabeth Warren began a focused campaign to bring consumer protections to the discussion about financial and credit reform. She is Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University, and (yet?) chose to introduce her position on such protections via the following YouTube video:
That was a year ago. Where is she now and how is she reaching out with her ideas? More importantly, how goes the move to create such an agency?
| Category Banking & Finance, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Opinion, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
NeighborWorks Week Draws To Successful Close
The NeighborWorks Week (June 5-12) that just finished (and that we promoted a couple of weeks ago) focused on educating homeowners to the danger signs of mortgage-assistance scams and predatory loan practices. According to the NeighborWorks website, “NeighborWorks America and local NeighborWorks organizations held more than 320 community revitalization and 150 loan modification scam awareness events nationwide.” Not surprisingly, one of the bigger shows of force was in New York City, where the issue was put up in lights. Literally.
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, Community, Nonprofit, Revitalization | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Jobs Report Suggests Slight Or Slighter Growth Depending on Source
The release of the government’s jobs report this past week was cause for about as much speculation as Apple Inc.’s World Wide Developers’ Conference is this week. And just as people pretty much knew about Apple’s fourth-generation iPhone weeks ago, so people were pretty sure what the jobs report would look like before it was made official. The jobs report needed contextualization within the economic disasters we have endured for the last three years. We will leave contextualization of Apple’s WWDC and new iPhone for another post.
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Opinion, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
End-of-Week/Quarter Economic News: Glass Half Full Or…?
Don’t call us stupid. We know it’s the economy. It is of central importance to our political, philanthropic, aesthetic, and working decisions. So for the end of this week MKCREATIVE tapped into the bright minds at The Atlantic Magazine as some of its economists commented on the recent numbers released for Q1 2010. The numbers beg for the rhetorical question of whether the glass is half full or half empty, for some of the numbers are wonderful, though, as Derek Thompson also points out, we are still dragging a ‘heavy anchor,’ namely, the housing sector.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Recent Developments in MA Show Economic Opportunities and Pressures on Community Housing
The Neighborhood Housing Service of Springfield Massachusetts has recently sponsored the building of low-income modular homes in their Old Hill neighborhood. The project is notable for at least two great reasons: First, the Springfield NHS built the homes on what had been ‘trash strewn vacant lots,’ so the entire community enjoys aesthetic and economic boosts. Second, the modular buildings used for the homes have inspired the NHS board to “work strictly in modular … we’re very pleased with the quality of the work.” Thus even low-cost housing will include bamboo-wood floors (bamboo being easily sustainable/replaceable) and central heating and air. A growing market in such modular housing could help keep prices down, even as further improvements are made.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Homeowners Getting Federal Help
- Image via Wikipedia
The mortgage bubble that Wall Street players were puffing up and were betting would break has, of course, brought down almost everything else with it (save investor bonuses). The fallout was one of the many catalysts for the sweeping political change of the elections of 2008. One of the loudest political debates was over whether federal recovery and stimulus money should go to banks and investment houses who could not expect repayment on their loans or to homeowners whose hastily purchased and heavily leveraged houses were suddenly underwater. Though the debate continues, many of us seem already to have accepted the inevitable: banks and investment houses have lobbyists, home owners have bills. But some efforts to improve the situation on the ground can be found.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Banks Back to Profitability (& Bonuses) But Homeowners Still Drowning
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) likely kept the banking industry afloat, and few doubt the necessity to keep the banking industry solvent for the sake of functioning markets and businesses. The bailout began under the president who encouraged the housing bubble in the first place, and was accepted by the Obama Administration as a necessity, albeit an unpleasant one. But over the past couple of months, the present administration has spent much of its ‘political capital’ trying to explain the value of the $700+ billion dollar program while trying to move toward direct help to the very people the TARP was originally claiming to support: homeowners whose houses were mortgaged beyond the (falling) market value (thus, ‘troubled assets’). What issues confront the homeowner at this time?
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, Community, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Politics | | 1 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
The Social Costs of the Housing Crash: Hispanic Communities in NYC
A foreclosed home in Jamaica Plains, NY
84% of all homes in area in similar danger
Last week we posted a couple of reports pointing to the relative stability in the housing market that Baltimore has ‘enjoyed’ and how the faltering economy seems to have spurred growth in the non-profit sector. Today we are reminded of how important the qualifier ‘relative’ is. Optimists and bank executives largely believe the economy has bottomed out, but the social ramifications (and, likely more of the economic ramifications in the commercial real estate sector) are still to be dealt with. Many of the social tensions that the economic crisis has wound up do their worst damage on those communities already strained by marginalization: recent immigrants and the working poor.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#PublicPolicy: Baltimore’s Crisis – Is a Sustainable Resurgence Possible in 2010?
The community/public-service website LiveBaltimore.com recently announced a free workshop entitled “Is Now The Right Time to Buy a Home?” The website then had to announce that the tsnownamis of 2010 have forced postponement. Keep an eye on the site, as LiveBaltimore will soon post the rescheduled event. Which begs the question, IS now the right time?
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
AWOL mortgage payers – strategy or selfish?
A follow up to our entry about mortgage modifications: Roger Lowenstein’s report in the NYTimes has caused a great stir in the blogosphere and among radio pundits. We (rightly) have a moral expectation of those who borrow wealth (be it money, our cars, or our favorite tool in the shed). Yet many folks are simply walking away from their underwater homes, even though they have the means to pay. (more…)
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD