As foreclosures continue to rise across the country, all eyes have turned to North Carolina’s new foreclosure reduction policy.

Under the new law, lenders must provide homeowners and the state banking commissioner 45 days’ notice before a foreclosure action is filed. The law also allows the banking commissioner to extend any foreclosure-filing notice period by 30 days.

During this period, state officials work with homeowners and mortgage lenders to negotiate rates and find creative ways to keep people in their homes. They have partnered with the banking industry in the state to reduce monthly mortgage payments for at-risk homeowners. This proposal would cap mortgage payments at 34 percent of gross income by reducing interest rates, lengthening loan amortization or reducing the principal.

For more information on the North Carolina plan, check out this backgrounder by Stephanie Casey Pierce at the National Governors Association.

While the nation turns its attention to the campaign trail, Congress opened back up for business this week. Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has outlined an agenda to keep his chamber busy between now and the November elections. We can expect to see movement on the defense authorization, an energy speculation bill, and potentially a new economic stimulus package and equal pay legislation.

One item that has gotten less coverage, but is vitally important, is the PROTECT Act, (Providing Resources Officers and Technology to Eradicate Cyber Threats to our children Act). This bill would create a special council within the Department of Justice to focus solely on exploitation of children and would build on the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force making sure each state has at least one cyber unit dedicated to these cases.

Specifically, the legislation will authorize $1.05 billion over the next eight years for:

• ICAC Grant Program to ensure that local agencies have the additional resources necessary to create robust cyber units with highly trained investigators;
• More federal agents dedicated solely to child exploitation cases; and
• Increased forensic capacity for child exploitation cases at the Regional Computer Forensic Labs (RCFL).

Last fall, under the leadership of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), the House passed the companion legislation with only two members voting against it.

Now it’s the Senate’s turn.  Sen. Joe Biden who has a strong record on crime policy is one of the sponsors of bill. Watch to see if he makes a campaign detour to D.C. to shepherd the bill through the Senate.

Today, Barack Obama addressed voters about one of the most important social mobility issues: education. In outlining his “New Vision for a 21^st Century Education,” Obama pledged to give parents “real choices about where to send their kids to school” by doubling federal funding for responsible charter schools to $400 million annually.

Increasing parental choice through charter schools is good policy. Public charter schools are independent public schools that are tuition-free, open to all children, and publicly financed. Because, these schools don’t have to answer to traditional bureaucracies, they have greater flexibility to govern from within, and try flexible and creative methods to educate their students.

Since their inception in the early 1990’s, many charter schools have shown tremendous results.  But others have not been as successful.  Charter schools must be accountable for producing real progress in educating children.  If they don’t succeed, in theory, charter authorizes should close their doors. However, this has not always been the case.  Too many have produced no better results than other public schools, yet have remained open.

That is why Obama was right to not only pledge to increase funding, but to couple that with holding all charter schools accountable for producing results:

I’ll work with all our nation’s governors to hold all our charter schools accountable.

President Clinton first brought the concept of charter schools to the national stage when he made them a centerpiece of his education reform agenda. During his speech Obama, sounded like one of President Clinton’s “New Democrat” protégés:

If we’re going to make a real and lasting difference for our future, we have to be willing to move beyond the old arguments of left and right and take meaningful, practical steps to build an education system worthy of our children and our future.

The way to the White House is through the middle, a group that we has been particularly volatile in recent weeks. Speaking directly to these moderate and independent voters about solutions that couple choice with accountability is not only good policy, but it is also good politics. It gives these voters a concrete idea of the sensible changes Obama would bring to the White House.

Update: Check out the post by Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk about the significance of Obama making this particular speech in Ohio.

One of the key tenets of our social mobility project centers on creating safe neighborhoods. Poverty and crime are inextricably linked. Residents of high-crime neighborhoods find it difficult and sometimes impossible to create better lives for their families. Children who grow up in poverty are more likely to engage in criminal activity later in life, and ex-offenders often return to lives of crime because they lack access to legitimate economic opportunities.

Severe poverty is not the only condition that may increase crime. Dips in the economy and thus a coinciding lack of opportunity also make some communities ripe for increased criminal behavior. A survey released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors this week, highlights this link between the current economic downturn and an increase of criminal activity in their cities. The survey of mayors and police chiefs from 124 cities and 36 states finds that:

• 42 percent of cities surveyed said the crime in their cities is a direct result of current economic conditions.

• Almost 30 percent of cities surveyed noted crime was caused by the mortgage foreclosure and the increased number of vacant and abandoned properties.

• Nearly half surveyed believed that the increased cost of gas has caused significant hindrances on their police department, and 46 percent said it has had a moderate effect.

Cities around the country desperately need more attention from the federal level to help address crime. However as elected officials from federal, state, and local governments outline crime prevention strategies, they must not forget that good economic policy is good crime prevention policy. A thriving economy leads to safer neighborhoods.

This week HUD announced that homelessness in the United States decreased by 30 percent between 2005 and 2007, leaving many (see here and here) in the progressive blogosphere stunned - and justifiably so. This president promised to usher in compassionate conservatism, which would “actively help our fellow citizens in need.” Instead most low-income Americans have been left behind.

So just how did the Bush Administration get this one right? For starters, they moved away from the old holistic approach that placed homeless people in shelters and gave them services to help with addiction, job training and counseling, to one called Housing First. According the National Alliance to End Homelessness:

Housing First is an approach to ending homelessness that centers on providing homeless people with housing quickly and then providing services as needed. What differentiates a Housing First approach from traditional emergency shelter or transitional housing approaches is that it is “housing-based,” with an immediate and primary focus on helping individuals and families quickly access and sustain permanent housing. This approach has the benefit of being consistent with what most people experiencing homelessness want and seek help to achieve.

Some have pointed to the leadership of Philip Mangano, the director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness. In an interview with the American Prospect, Douglas McGray, a journalist and fellow at the New America Foundation said that Mangano is “not an ideological warrior. He’s not a political warrior.” Instead this is a guy who is genuinely committed to ending homelessness using means-tested, data-driven, and results-focused programs.

In fact, it could be this goal-oriented approach with clearly set targets that led to the dramatic decline in the number of homeless Americans. The Interagency Council on Homelessness has set a goal of “ending chronic homelessness” and has encouraged localities to create comprehensive plans with specific targets:

Cities and Counties across the country are being encouraged by the Council to create business-like, results-oriented 10-Year Plans that incorporate cost benefit analysis and prevention, housing, and services innovations and best practices.

As of May 2006, more than 200 cities and counties were engaged in 10-year planning initiatives in their communities.

Setting a goal gives everyone something to work toward, a benchmark to achieve. According to CLASP, “targets create both an explicit goal and a timeline to give this vision a shared urgency and priority.” Thankfully, many of the new anti-poverty crusades such as the Half in Ten Campaign have made targets central to their mission. This renewed focus on specific targets and goals has shown results in decreasing homelessness and we should keep this in mind as we look at all the other hard-to-solve challenges.

This post was written by Jason Newman, State and Local Policy Director for the Democratic Leadership Council.

We all know the alarming statistics about the rapidly growing U.S. corrections system. Today, more than 2.2 million Americans are behind bars — one out of every 100 adults. In addition, more than 5 million Americans are on probation or parole and living in our communities, giving us a grand total of 7.2 million people in our corrections system compared to just 1.8 million in 1980.

Not surprisingly, this growth has had significant costs for our society, both in dollars spent on housing and supervising all these offenders, but also in the rising incidence of crime among individuals who cycle into and out of our criminal justice system.

Our “get tough” policies over the last few decades have quadrupled the number of offenders in the system, but haven’t led to a corresponding drop in crime among people who leave prison. In fact, two-thirds of former prisoners are rearrested for a new offense within three years of being released from prison, creating a vicious cycle of offenders through the revolving door of justice.

How do we end this cycle? Last week, PPI released a report arguing that to truly reduce crime we must refocus the entire corrections system on preventing crime as well as punishing it after the fact. Congress passed the Second Chance Act earlier this year, which will provide more funding for rehabilitation and reentry programs. This is important, but funding alone will not solve the problem. We need to couple increased funding with systemic changes that hold everyone involved in the corrections system - wardens, sheriffs, parole officers and probation supervisors - accountable for reducing recidivism rates. We recommend that the federal, state and local governments work in tandem to:

• Develop and implement a CompStat-like system that measures and publicizes recidivism rates of inmates and those on probation and parole.

• Create an Office of Community Supervision (OCS) within the DOJ that gives grants to states and cities in order to double the number of parole and probation officers and move them from behind their desks and into the communities.

• Give parole and probation officers the power to impose swift and consistent consequences for violators of parole and probation.

Right now, our corrections system fails to meet our ultimate objective of reducing crime. Additional funding for rehabilitation and reentry programs offered in the Second Chance Act will ensure that we have the money to help offenders make a successful transition from prison. But it is time that we begin making those responsible for supervising criminal populations accountable for, and more effective at, making our communities safer.

A group of the nation’s most well-known housing policy experts released a response yesterday criticizing The Atlantic article, “American Murder Mystery.” They go through Rosin’s assertions and debunk the ones based on incorrect data. For example:

Rosin links the reduction of crime in New York City to its rising rents, forcing poor families, using Section 8 vouchers, to move to New Jersey’s cities and suburbs, where crime is growing. In fact, fewer than 240 families have used vouchers to move from New York City to New Jersey.

Furthermore, they argue that Rosin missed the bigger point:

The questions that Rosin fails to ask her in her article are the most fundamental ones. Why does the U.S. have the highest poverty rate among the world’s affluent nations, and why is it far more segregated by race and income?

Despite America’s vast wealth, no other major industrial nation has allowed the level of sheer destitution that exists in the U.S. Americans accept as “normal” levels of poverty and inequality-as well as homelessness, hunger, malnutrition and diseases, and geographic concentrations of same-that would cause national alarm in Canada, Western Europe, or other wealthy regions.

Like I mentioned in the post on The Atlantic article, there are no silver-bullet anti-poverty policies. Instead, to truly increase opportunity for all low-income Americans, we must weave together a web of policies that “make work pay” and offer safety nets to fill in the gaps for people experiencing extreme hardship. The authors seem to agree, arguing that housing vouchers have been effective in meeting its main goal: “making housing affordable for very low-income people.” And that, “housing policy is a vital piece of the agenda…but now more than ever, we understand why it can’t lift people out of poverty on its own.”

They also note that there are real challenges that we must examine as we move forward with low-income housing policy including, linking voucher recipients with other social services, increasing the supply of low-income housing especially in tight markets, and helping low-income families move to more middle-class areas.

Finally, in addition to filling in the holes from the Rosin article, these experts remind us one thing that those of us who work in the public policy field should keep at the forefront of our work:

Basic statistics textbooks tell us: correlation is not causality. Such guilt by association is suggestive but irresponsible without better evidence.

Check out this article, “American Murder Mystery” by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. Rosin takes a detailed look at the spike of violent crime in smaller American cities, specifically Memphis, Tennessee. Based on her interviews and analysis, she cites housing vouchers as the cause for increased criminal activity in the previously sleepy cities. The voucher program, which worked in tandem with the demolition of dangerous, crime-infested, high-rise housing projects, helped to successfully de-concentrated poverty and moved people to more decent and humane living environments. But Rosin believes we may now be witnessing some unintended consequences of the policy:

While fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40 percent. This pattern is not necessarily better, either for poor people trying to break away from bad neighborhoods or for cities, Galster explains. His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.

The voucher program has created many social benefits that Rosin fails to cite. However, she lays out a sobering reminder that there are no silver bullet anti-poverty proposals. These new potential realities do not mean vouchers are bad policy, but it does introduce a new series of challenges. In policy making too often we sweep these types of unintended consequences under the rug and declare success. But to truly help those who live on the margins and want to escape poverty, we must admit the existence of new challenges and tackle them head on.