Learning from the past: the asset disposition experiences of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, The Resolution Trust Corporation, and the Asset Control Area Program

Foreclosure

Building equity : the evolution and efficacy of Montgomery County's moderately priced dwelling unit legislation

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2004.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-103).This thesis describes the history of Montgomery County, Maryland's Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit (MPDU) law. Passed in 1973, it is the oldest inclusionary zoning legislation in the country. The law emerged out of three policy streams-land use and density, fair housing and desegregation, and workforce housing and economic development-that coalesced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Advocates for affordable housing appealed to widely held values in their effort to pass the MPDU legislation. The law stipulated that 15 percent of all units constructed in subdivisions of 50 units or more must meet the county's definition of affordability. Among the county's goals was the equal distribution of units across the county. Because the county left provision of the affordable units to the private sector, the county had little control of where units got built. In addition, a sewer moratorium limited growth in the county for most of the 1970s. As a result, housing prices appreciated rapidly, further increasing demand for affordable units. The 1980s saw many MPDUs delivered, and the county made several important changes to the law to keep the implementation in line with the original policy goals. The 1990s saw a decrease in units delivered as the areas of the county.where units were required became built out and the size of planned subdivisions fell. As units' control periods expired during the 1990s, fewer new units were coming on line to replace them. Today, only about 1,900 units are controlled. The county is currently considering additional changes to the law to ensure the delivery of future MPDUs.by Andrew Jakabovics.M.C.P

Who Owns America? A Methodology for Identifying Landlords’ Ownership Scale and the Implications for Targeted Code Enforcement

Scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding who owns real estate in communities and resultant implications for targeted planning approaches. Yet, practitioners lack an efficient and comprehensive methodology to assess landlords’ ownership scale, namely, how many properties they own in each geographic area. The existence of variegated ownership, multiple legal entities, siloed databases within government bureaucracies, and inconsistencies in spelling and documentation across data entries make it time-consuming and costly to determine the extent of real estate ownership by the same landlords. To address these challenges, we have created a data-driven natural language processing solution. Using OpenRefine, an open-source software, we present a step-by-step, practice-oriented methodology for amassing data, cleaning textual inconsistencies, and clustering properties to uncover the truer ownership scale in local housing markets. Applied to a large U.S. urban county—Fulton, home to Atlanta (GA)—our proposed methodology demonstrated its superior efficiency, comprehensiveness, and accuracy compared with traditional approaches. Using code enforcement as a study frame, we then empirically examined a linkage between landlords’ ownership scale and their code violation patterns. With the proposed methodology in place, the analysis consistently showed that the ownership scale was related to both the likelihood and number of code violations. In contrast, the analysis missed this critical linkage without applying the methodology. Our methodology can yield practical implications regarding targeted code enforcement. Our methodology can serve as a useful toolbox for both practitioners and fellow researchers to unravel real estate ownership and its concentrations in housing markets. Using the methodology presented here, they can uncover all types and scales of landlords and monitor their code violation frequencies for targeted outreach and resource allocation in enforcement</p