She says it far better than I can. We shot this interview with a woman whose home suffered major damage…
Category: National issues
National issues encompasses housing topics we are seeing on the federal level. This includes focusing on agencies and topics like HUD, U.S. Congress, civil rights, fair housing advocacy, and work from other states and our national partners.
National housing advocates pleased with new HUD Secretary
President-elect Obama’s announcement of his selection of Shaun Donovan, New York City’s commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development, to be…
Names for next HUD secretary emerge – yawn
Politico is out with a story about potential Obama HUD Secretaries. The story notes that, “In the recent past, the…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 12/9/2008
The axe continues to drop on home buyers who bought more than they could afford. Federal and private bank efforts…
Galveston public housing conditions illustrate results of HUD’s failure to give a damn
I toured the three devastated public housing developments in Galveston this week and what I saw sickened, depressed and angered…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 12/2/2008
Eight years of mismanagement and corruption have left the nation’s top agencies gutted: the bright and ethical left early as…
Mortgage crisis imperils new affordable housing developments
The mortgage crisis is really beginning to bite into affordable housing production programs. I just learned of a community development…
Is federal disaster assistance an entitlement?
The back-and-forth between the Texas governor and the US Secretary of Homeland Security over who will pay for the removal…
Reforming FEMA alone won’t fix the problem
There are hopes that a structural reform and management reorganization of FEMA under the Obama Administration will solve the problems…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 11/25/2008
Among the many daunting tasks for the Obama Administration is the revamping of HUD that has languished under poor leadership…
President Bush considers pardoning former Texas housing agency board member
ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, is reporting that President Bush is considering…
Stories of eleven Texas families document FEMA’s illegal and systemic discrimination against the poor
It has become abundantly clear that FEMA does not treat low-income disaster survivors right. Consider the stories included in a…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 11/19/2008
Foreclosures continue to soar across the nation as housing starts dwindle. Cities are laced with vacant, unaffordable houses as the…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 11/12/2008
As the general economy sinks, foreclosures continue to soar and new housing starts dwindle. In California, foreclosures devastate whole towns.…
Texas State officials and FEMA in open war over Ike recovery
It sounds increasingly like open warfare has broken out between Texas officials and FEMA over the Hurricane Ike recovery efforts.…
My hopes for the Obama administration’s housing policy
I fancy myself a political realist. A person who spends their life working on social justice issues in Texans either…
Louisiana extends its sympathies to Texas regarding FEMA
Our neighbors from Louisiana have offered some sympathy to Texas in the problems we have been experiencing with FEMA. Here…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 11/5/2008
The consequences of an unregulated housing finance industry continue to hammer the American middle class: soon a quarter of the…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compilation – 10/29/2008
Administration of the $700 billion bailout has already taken new and questionable turns. While the “Main Street versus Wall Street”…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compliation – 10/22/2008
This week we learned how Freddie Mac administrators thwarted a bill that would have provided the oversight to possibly avoid…
It should be about more than just helping the middle class
Let’s remember there once was a time when a US President enjoyed popularity for rallying our country to end poverty.
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compliation – 10/15/2008
For a pdf version of the full stories and other contextual articles in social, economic and political areas, contact Bo…
National Housing Trust Fund becomes subject of political distortions
Housing for the poor has been caught up in the partisan distortions of the political mudslinging season. This speaks poorly…
Bo McCarver’s weekly housing news compliation – 10/7/2008
An autopsy of Fannie Mae is offered this week by the New York Times, which asserts conflicting pressures to back…
Another voice against the attack on the Community Reinvestment Act
On October 3 Bill Moyers interviewed Emma Coleman Jordan about the mortgage meltdown and the latest cries that the Community…
The big lie about the role of affordable lending goals in the collapse of Fannie Mae
The Big Lie: Fannie Mae collapsed because of Congressional affordable housing goals and this, in turn, was the cause of…
LBJ speech recalls struggle to bring low-income housing to Austin
In 1968, at the end of his political career, with barely one month left in his term as president, LBJ…
LBJ’s struggle to get Austin to accept public housing offers lessons for today
Seventy years ago here, in Austin Texas, Lyndon Johnson a young, first-term congressman took up the cause of housing the…
Bill O’Reilly vs Barney Frank shoutdown over Fannie Mae
This video perfectly illustrates the deterioration in the quality of the policy discussion in the country today. Issues surrounding the…
Shifting the blame from subprime lenders and Wall Street to the victims
It’s to be expected. Anti-government pundits and apologists for predatory lenders are spinning hard, trying to shift the blame for…