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Preventing a
Climate-Induced Housing Crash
This week brought two major climate
developments in the presidential race: a Trump administration rule
absolving
federal agencies
from having to internalize climate risk in infrastructure projects and
presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s $2
trillion plan for
a clean energy economy. A report released this week by the Great
Democracy Initiative tackles another climate problem: risk in the
housing market. In “Soaked: A Policy Agenda to Prepare for a
Climate-Triggered Housing Crash,” GDI Fellow Lindsay Owens proposes
how government can act now to rewrite the rules of the housing market,
redistribute equity, and manage coastal retreat: “The challenge that
lies ahead for policymakers is to use the regulatory apparatus (and
legislation, where required) to incorporate climate risk into
residential real estate markets to encourage adaptation and
transition, without forcing existing homeowners, particularly those in
frontline communities, to bear all of the risk.” Read
more.
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An untenable risk: As
Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes for the New York
Times Book Review, “the whole multibillion-dollar insurance
industry is predicated on risk aversion. If there were another planet
we could all move to, that would be one thing. But there isn’t. So
that means we have to be cautious. And caution is especially warranted
once we realize how bad things could get.” Read
on.
COVID-19 Relief That Works
for All
While Kanye West, Jeff Koons, and
other high-profile
Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) recipients have
garnered headlines, the real scandal is who didn’t receive help, as
Roosevelt Vice President of Research Julie Margetta Morgan and
Managing Director of Corporate Power Bharat Ramamurti argue in a CNN
Business op-ed. “We can improve upon the PPP and stop thousands of
small businesses from failing and millions more workers from being
left behind,” they write. “To do this, the government should step in
and directly take over payroll obligations for companies that have
been hard hit by our current economic crisis . . . Second, we should
provide specific, targeted grants to Black- and Latinx-owned small
businesses, which have done particularly poorly with PPP. Finally, we
should provide grants (or, at worst, low-interest loans) to small
businesses to help cover non-payroll costs, like rent, that might be
driving them out of business.”
Read
more.
- Extend unemployment insurance: With the
expanded unemployment benefits of the CARES Act set to expire this
month, experts argue that economic recovery—and the financial security
of millions—could be imperiled. “You will get into a downward spiral
as people lose their income to pay their bills, which will affect the
people who collect income on those bills as well,” Roosevelt Fellow
Darrick Hamilton tells
the Washington Post. “The way to prevent
depression and recession is to keep aggregate demand up . . . We also
need to stop people’s suffering and pain.” Next week, Bharat Ramamurti
and Lindsay Owens will detail their fair
wage guarantee proposal in a new Roosevelt issue
brief.
- Americans want a job
guarantee: Per a Hill-HarrisX poll, 79
percent of voters support—and almost half strongly
support—a federal jobs guarantee. As Roosevelt President & CEO
Felicia Wong tells
Hill.TV, “This actually says a lot about what the
presidential candidates should be doing and should be thinking about
with respect to their overall economic program.”
 What
the Nation Owes Black
People
This
week, the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, unanimously
approved a measure apologizing for the city’s participation in slavery
and calling for reparations for its Black residents. As the council
defines it, that would include funding directed at increasing home
ownership, mobility, and wealth—but not direct payments, as Roosevelt
Senior Fellow Sandy Darity has
proposed. In an email to
the New York Times, Darity wrote that he
was “deeply skeptical about local or piecemeal actions to address
various forms of racial inequality being labeled ‘reparations,’” and
that “piecemeal reparations taken singly or collectively at those
levels of government cannot meet the debt for American racial
injustice.”
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