Governing Magazine/May 2008

CHRISTOPHER SWOPE'S URBAN NOTEBOOK

FALSE DREAMS

Several years ago, I interviewed the director of a nonprofit housing
agency in Baltimore. At the time, the feds were making a push to use
low-income housing vouchers for homeownership. The nonprofit director
was skeptical of the idea. Lots of perfectly responsible renters, he
said, simply aren't ready to be responsible homeowners.
 That memory flashes through my head every time the foreclosure crisis
loops another spiral downward. There are lots of people to fault for
this mess--greedy bankers, sleazy lenders and weak regulators get most
of it--but let's lay some of the blame on a sacred slice of American
culture: our national obsession with homeownership itself.
 Since the GI Bill backed mortgages for veterans returning from World
War II, the dream of owning a home has circled the American conscience
like a white-picket fence. The feds subsidize this dream, to the tune
of $80 billion a year, via the mortgage-interest tax deduction. Local
governments are vested in homeownership through their reliance on real
estate taxes and, especially in newer suburbs, zoning policies that
blatantly discourage construction of rental housing. Let's be honest
about it: Renters in this country get second-class treatment.
 So it's not surprising that when some housing markets got frenzied
and credit got loose, so many renters leapt beyond their means to buy
a home. Renting, they'd heard a thousand times, is tantamount to
"throwing money down a rat hole." Unfortunately, as many recent
renters-turned-homebuyers are finding out now, foreclosure--or selling
a house into a backsliding market--can be an even bigger rat hole.
 I'm not saying homeownership isn't a viable path to building wealth.
For many Americans, even in today's weak housing market, a home
remains their most valuable asset. That will never be true for
everybody, though. To rig all of our rhetoric and public policies
around the ideal of homeownership isn't just discriminatory. It's
dangerous.


A MERGER REEMERGES

In 1929, voters in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, went to the polls
to vote on consolidating municipal operations into a Greater City of
Pittsburgh. The plan, which was billed not as a merger but as a
"federation" of local governments, was hailed at the time as a
national model of metropolitan governance. It won the support of a
majority of voters. But it failed, owing to an electoral quirk that
required super-majority support in more than half of Pittsburgh's
suburbs.
 The idea has been a subject of periodic discussion ever since. It's
never gone anywhere. But once again, the talk around Pittsburgh these
days is of a city-county merger. A study commission headed by Mark
Nordenberg, the University of Pittsburgh's chancellor, last month
recommended a series of steps toward that outcome. First, the city and
county should simply partner with each other more where their missions
overlap. Second, the city and county should sign a formal "cooperation
compact," putting those partnerships into writing. Finally, voters
should get another crack at consolidating the city and county into one
government.
 The effort has two champions in Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and
Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato. Both are selling the
merger idea in a big way, putting aside parochial questions such as
which of them would emerge as the top dog should the plan ever pass.
The question now is whether members of the city and county councils
will be as magnanimous. Many suburban leaders also are skeptical, even
though the suburban jurisdictions themselves would be exempted from
the merger.

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