Cuyahoga County screwed in foreclosure cleanup fund allocation
Yesterday the Department of Housing and Urban Development released its allocations of the $3.9 billion in Housing and Economic Recovery Act funds approved by Congress in July to help states and communities tear down or rehabilitate vacant foreclosed houses. Ohio will get $258 million, of which about $30 million will come to Cuyahoga County: $16.1 million to the City of Cleveland, $2.6 million to the City of Euclid, and $11.2 million to the County itself.
Details of Ohio’s allocation are in this press release from Senator Sherrod Brown.
Do these sound like big numbers? They’re far less than it will cost to make any significant headway in cleaning up the mess we already have on our hands, let alone the thousands of additional foreclosure vacancies that will keep piling up here for the next couple of years.
Tearing down a single vacant house in Cleveland can cost $10,000, including asbestos removal. The City could easily spend its entire $16 million getting rid of fewer than 2,000 dangerous eyesores, out of the 8,000 or more now in its backlog (and more arriving daily). This would hardly dent Cleveland’s demolition need, while contributing nothing to any positive rebuilding strategy.
The PD quotes Cleveland development chief Chris Warren complaining that the amount provided so far by Congress is far too little, and this is true, of course. What Chris doesn’t say in the article is that HUD’s reported allocation of funds within Ohio is another twist of the Federal knife in this community’s back.
Over the past four years (2004 through 2007), there have been 287,000 foreclosure filings in Ohio, according to Policy Matters research. Just under 50,000 of these foreclosures have happened in Cuyahoga County — 17.3% of the state’s total. Yet this county’s total share of Ohio’s Federal cleanup funds will be less than 12%.
The difference between the two percentages is about $15 million.
Columbus and Franklin County, with 10.6% of the state’s 2004-07 foreclosures, are slated to get 11% of the cleanup money. Cincinnati and Hamilton County, which have accounted for 7.6% of Ohio’s foreclosures, will get 6.3%; Akron/Summit, with 5.9% of the foreclosures, will get 4.8%; Toledo/Lucas, with 4.6% of the foreclosures, will also get 4.8%. The seven other urbanized counties with earmarked allocations will mostly get 1% to 2% less of the Federal funds than their shares of Ohio’s reported foreclosures would suggest.
Only Cuyahoga County — which has suffered worst and longest from the subprime shock –Â is getting shorted so dramatically.
Meanwhile, HUD allocated 45% of Ohio’s total to the State, presumably to be doled out to the seventy-six other counties (as happens with Community Development Block Grant funds for “non-entitlement” communities). But in the last four years, all these counties together reported only 32% of the state’s foreclosure filings.
According to the PD, HUD says its allocation formula “included foreclosure rates, the number of subprime mortgages in a market, and data used by the Postal Service to track abandoned addresses.” It’s hard to see how any of those factors would have reduced the share coming to Cuyahoga County — let alone the city of Cleveland, which has suffered almost 10% of Ohio’s foreclosures all by itself, but will get barely 6% of the state’s Federal cleanup money.
A paranoid person might wonder if another factor went into HUD’s calculation… something a little more, um, political.