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.
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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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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.
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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 MoreHousing 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
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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 MoreBased on the previous DRIM analysis and updated 2017 DRIM analysis, three Wards have been analyzed and found to be Displacement-Risk Neighborhoods: The Central Ward, the South Ward, & the East Ward.
To better understand the trend of displacement that has occurred between years 2000, 2015, & 2017, we conduct a baseline study to analyze the specific displacement risk indicators for one Ward: The Central Ward.
Read MoreWith the increased use of public land for the sake of economic development, cities across the U.S. are facing an urban construction boom. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Newark’s construction boom focused on land-use policies, especially the tax abatement strategies for bringing about capital-intensive projects. Simultaneously, Newark’s shift to a more neo-liberal solution led to a decline in public housing and section 8 vouchers.
As Newark experiences unprecedented growth potential, Newarkers express more and more anxiety about the prospects of housing displacement brought on by the processes of gentrification that have transformed urban neighborhoods across the United States.
Read MoreBased on the previous DRIM analysis and updated 2017 DRIM analysis, three Wards have been analyzed to be considered as Displacement-Risk Neighborhoods.
To better understand the trend of displacement that has occurred between years 2000 and 2017, we conduct a baseline study to analyze the specific displacement risk indicators.
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.
Read MoreFrom the perspective of many low-income families, gentrification is the ultimate social injustice; where “wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for "improving" a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.”
A social injustice promulgated by local government action, gentrification is no longer confined to our big cities and is increasingly impacting smaller cities and towns as municipalities seek to increase their tax base by luring wealthy residents in search of urban amenities and replace low income residents in the process.
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In Tiny Houses in the City of Newark, Rutgers doctoral candidate Lenore Pearson studies innovative tiny house programs underway in Detroit, Michigan and analyzes their prospective application in Newark in a fascinating memorandum about unique urban housing solutions.
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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.
Read MoreABSTRACT: Tax increment financing (TIF) has exploded in popularity on the municipal finance landscape as cities compete for scarce public resources to fund economic development. Previous studies evaluate TIF’s efficacy and ability to spark economic growth.
This research expands the evaluation of TIF by questioning the widespread understanding of TIF as a “self-financing” tool through an analysis of its risks and costs to taxpayers. We present a case study of the Hudson Yards redevelopment project in New York City, the country’s largest TIF-type project.
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