Empowering Public Property: Simulating New Housing, Economic Development and Greenspace Policy with Newark’s City-Owned Property Inventory
This is a report about how cities can better organize and manage their data about the property they own in order to promote transparency and advance critical policymaking. Newark, like many legacy cities, owns hundreds of parcels through tax foreclosure and abandonment that can be put to more productive use and even generate needed revenue. Because of different inputs from different departments, its property data system contained duplication and gaps that prevented policymakers and stakeholders from getting a clear picture of these public assets. In partnership with city staff, CLiME helped to resolve the data organization problem and set property management on a new, more accurate and user-friendly course. Along the way, we learned details about the nature and amount of city-owned properties, how they’re zoned and where they’re located. We concluded that much more of this significant inventory can and should be put to work advancing long-held goals of equitable development. We built three demonstrations to simulate this usage that cover three major areas of policy: affordable housing production, commercial and industrial development and green space/environmental risk mitigation. Each of these is an area in which the Baraka administration is already active in setting aggressive policies. Some of those policies already make use of the asset of city-owned land. Until recently, it was impossible to see the scope of particular uses because the data did not readily permit it. Now the data is cleaner and clearer.
Individual break-out reports from the full report are also available:
Read More
Legal Memorandum: Equitable Redevelopment of Newark’s City-Owned Property
As the New Jersey Supreme Court recently noted in Malanga v. Township of West Orange, municipalities can sell or improve upon public property in a number of ways.¹ However, a redevelopment designation appears to be the best way for a municipality to maintain the greatest degree of control over the future of a given parcel, in terms of retaining ownership, choosing a developer and deciding the use to which the parcel will be put. Without such a designation, in order to facilitate non-publicly funded development of city-owned property, a city would have to auction property off to the highest bidder at an open public auction, a risky process over which the city could easily lose control.² Furthermore, though a municipality can impose conditions on the sale and restrictions on the use of property sold at auction,³ it cannot convey property for nominal consideration without a redevelopment designation, unless the property is conveyed to a very narrow set of noncommercial entities.⁴
Read More
What to Do: When a Loved One Has Passed
This memorandum provides useful information regarding the management of a loved one’s affairs (estate) when they have passed. Estate matters can be laborious and emotionally charged. This memorandum will explain probate and administration in New Jersey and provides information for you to begin navigating the process of managing your loved one’s estate. However, this memorandum provides general information, and is not intended to serve as legal advice. No two estates are the same and the law on the administration of estates is extensive. It is recommended that you consult with an experienced estate attorney to answer any questions related to your particular circumstances.
Read More
What to Do: When a Loved One Has Passed With a Will
The following resources are designed to help understand and navigate estate administration in New Jersey when a loved one passes with a will. A flyer is also available for when a loved one passes without a will here.
Read More
What to Write on Your College Essay
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the country’s 12th graders now applying to selective colleges face unprecedented angst—especially if they’re black.
You face an admissions process where your understanding of race and racism has been rejected, forbidden as a factor in considering you, on no less than constitutional grounds. Forget “affirmative action” that might deliberately correct for the persistent effects of longstanding racial exclusion from majority-white institutions. Forget societal discrimination—the Court already decided there is none that matters. Now, educational “diversity” is a barely lawful interest for schools to consider. Your race and all that comes with it is in unconstitutional territory.
Except on your personal essay.
Read More
What to Do: When a Loved One Has Passed Without a Will
The following resources are designed to help understand and navigate estate administration in New Jersey.
Read More
Limited-Equity Cooperatives: A Primer on Sustainable Affordability and Wealth Building
Limited-Equity Cooperatives: A Primer on Sustainable Affordability and Wealth Building is a research report on a promising alternative to traditional homeownership in a period of scarce inventory and high interest rates. Limited equity cooperatives offer communal ownership at more affordable prices—stabilty, wealth enhancement and long-term affordability. Author Elana Simon details the purpose and structure of such housing vehicles.
Read More
Beneficial Landowner Transparency Model Ordinance
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 More
Memorandum: LLC Transparency Ordinance Justification
Continuing 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.
Read More
Urban Renewal Archive
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.
Read More
Barriers and Benefits of MBE Contracting in Newark
Locally owned businesses are vital constituent members of an economic community because they provide jobs to local workers, sustain the tax base for city services, offer goods and services that grow other businesses and build wealth for equity owners. They are vital. Where they are in short supply communities struggle to grow economically. Where that growth has been stymied by factors arising from ingrained racism, growth is even more challenging. Local businesses owned by Blacks and other people of color face a disproportionate range of constraints to growth including, but not limited to, patterns of market discrimination. Given Newark’s overwhelmingly Black, Latino and working-class population, the city’s challenges with locally owned economic development are as great as anywhere in the nation. There is evidence that recent trends have not been good for minority small businesses across the country.
Read More
What to Do: Domestic Violence
Domestic violence/abuse can be an incident or pattern of behavior in any relationship used to gain or maintain power and control over someone else. If you believe you may be a victim of domestic violence, you can speak to a trusted source such as a helpline, friend, family member, counselor/therapist, and/or take legal action. Keep in mind that domestic abuse is never the victim’s fault. However, there are consequences to taking action against domestic violence. For example, speaking to someone may lead to mandatory reporting (depending on the person), and taking legal action may mean police involvement and court appearances. No one deserves abuse, so do not let these consequences stop you from seeking help.
Read More
Losing Ground: The 2020 Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix (D.R.I.M.) Update for Newark
Newark housing is too expensive for its residents.
CLiME’s Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix—or DRIM—originated in 2017 as a tool to measure the risk of Newark resident displacement as a result of gentrification. We found then and now that displacement risk continues to be a serious threat to housing stability in Newark as rents rise dramatically among a city of mostly renters. Yet the cause does not appear to be traditional gentrification, because the demographic profile of who lives in the city, their incomes, educations and poverty rates have not changed as dramatically as rents.
The DRIM is divided into three sets of variables set across the city as a whole, the five wards and, for the first time, neighborhoods: vulnerability, market dynamics and “gentrifier population.” Vulnerability variables ask about the economic stresses that households feel. Market dynamics variables ask about rental affordability and new construction. Gentrifier population variables ask whether the city is seeing an influx in the people whose race, housing wealth and educational attainment is associated with gentrifying populations in other cities.
Read More
Remedies for Environmental Injustice: Addressing the Localized Concentration of Air Pollution and Asthma among Newark’s Poor
This analysis investigates the available legal remedies for residents of Newark’s Ironbound and similarly positioned communities that could be used to halt or possibly reverse the concentrating of pollution sources in their neighborhoods. After reviewing the myriad health harms concentrated in minority urban neighborhoods and the history of Environmental Justice (EJ) litigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, this best-in-class student paper argues for alternative advocacy strategies. Through a combination of policy changes and the use of hybridized legal schemes typically unassociated with environmental law, the Ironbound may yet find relief from the asthma epidemic which has so far been unaddressed. These strategies include i) Empowering the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights, ii) Seeking State & Local Protection, iii) Claims under The Takings Clause and iv) Blending Environmental Justice and Disability Law.
Read More
Who Owns Newark? Transferring Wealth from Newark Homeowners to Corporate Buyers
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.
Read More
Investing in the Equitable State: How New Jersey’s Tax Incentive Programs Fail to Bring Equitable Growth
This report and accompanying matrix are a critical evaluation of New Jersey’s tax incentives programs through the policy lens of equitable growth. Persistent inequality between New Jersey’s communities and households hurts all of New Jersey. We assumed that the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for private economic gain should further a public interest in making weaker markets stronger—i.e., equitable growth. We identified every state tax incentive that contained some aspect of economic fairness and analyzed each for how well it contributed to producing equitable growth. As the matrix at the end of the report shows, we found few gains and many lost opportunities.
If economic development broadly represents New Jersey’s interests in promoting economic welfare, then equitable economic development refocuses state policy on the state’s interest in improving economic welfare in the places where market need is greatest. Since many of these needs converge in communities of the state that have struggled with disinvestment and undernourished markets for many years, we believe a critical public purpose is served when the state steps in to revitalize markets where no one else will. This represents a policy of equitable economic development, an expansion of growth and opportunity.
Read More
The New Jersey Housing Crisis in a COVID Era: Mapping Strategic Processes
Affordable housing is increasingly scarce within the United States, and COVID-19 has dramatically exacerbated the simmering crisis in affordable housing. In New Jersey, the risk of eviction is greater than across the country, as 393,000 households are delinquent on their rent, (22.3% of households in renter-occupied housing units in New Jersey as compared with 15.8% across the country). ¹ In New Jersey, eviction pressure is faced disproportionately by residents of color, by households with children, and in urban municipalities, where more renters and more low-income households are especially vulnerable.
The New Jersey Housing Crisis in a COVID Era: Mapping Strategic Processes was a research project funded by the New Jersey State Policy Lab to explore strategic development and organizational learning in the provision of emergency rental assistance funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research focused on five New Jersey municipalities: Camden (Camden County), Elizabeth (Union County), Jersey City, Newark, and Trenton (Mercer County).
Read More
Investor Buyers, A Brief Primer
Housing markets rebounded after the 2007-2009 housing crisis, but homeownership rates never did. Research explains this by the rapid spread of investor buyers into housing markets following the foreclosure crisis. Large investors bought significant numbers of properties that were foreclosed on, at very low prices, frequently converting single-family (1-4 units) into rental properties. They often acquire properties in low-income and moderate-income neighborhoods. ¹
Coming out of the foreclosure crisis, these investor buyers created a new industry around large-scale single-family rental, and have been increasingly active in rental markets generally. These limited liability companies (LLCs), or “corporate landlords”, have reshaped the legal landscape of rental ownership, in part because they limit investor liability. ² Research shows they are less likely to take care of the properties, causing them to fall into disrepair or remain vacant. ³ They are also associated with higher rents and higher rates of eviction. ⁴ Meanwhile, several reports document that the largest among them (e.g.; Invitation Homes, Equity Residential) are making enormous profits even as we experience a profound housing affordability and eviction crisis. ⁵
Read More
Housing Gaps in Cities of Color: Affordability Trends in Newark's Inner-Ring Suburbs of Irvington, Orange and East Orange
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.
Read More
Brutality by Design: Understanding Police Misconduct as Structural Inequality
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.
Read More
