michael.johnson’s blog

Michael P. Johnson, Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts Boston

The recent housing foreclosure crisis has had devastating impacts on individuals, communities, organizations and government. Detailed data on characteristics of the foreclosure crisis, and its impacts on communities, is available from www.foreclosure-respoonse.org, especially here. My current research addresses the activities of community-based organizations which acquire foreclosed properties to support neighborhood stabilization and revitalization. These actions have the potential to minimize blight, reduce unanticipated housing mobility, and provide affordable housing opportunities.

However, the cost of pursuing any or all of these strategies to their fullest extent far exceeds the resources available to typical community-based organizations. I believe that decision science, or ‘analytics’ can help practitioners and researchers address the following difficult problem: what subset of a large number of available foreclosed properties should be acquired for neighborhood stabilization and revitalization? What activities should be pursued with which properties? When should these activities be pursued, and to what degree?

I’ve recently received funding from the National Science Foundation to address this problem. This project draws on a recently-published paper that on developing portfolios of alternative development strategies that reflect different emphases put on multiple social objectives, such as minimizing costs, maximizing the quality of neighborhoods chosen for new housing development, and minimizing the perception of inequality. My colleagues on this project (Jeff Keisler of the UMass Boston College of Management, Senay Solak of the UMass Amherst School of Management, and David Turcotte of the UMass Lowell Economic & Social Development of Regions Program) reflect complementary disciplinary perspectives. We’ll learn best practices of Boston-area community-based organizations; identify requirements for decision models to improve organization operations and strategy; design and implement decision models in collaboration with community partners, and evaluate the impact of these models on partner organizations and their communities.

The policy/decision models we develop will yield acquisition policies that are, relative to current operations and procedures: (1) more efficient, i.e. they make better use of organization resources and social subsidies, (2) more effective, i.e. they help organizations make more rapid progress towards social goals related to affordable housing and community development, and (3) more equitable, i.e. they ensure that stakeholder groups and the communities see the foreclosure acquisition process as more transparent, consistent and fair.

Do you have experiences in foreclosed housing redevelopment? What role do you think analytics and quantitative methods could play in helping community organizations leverage their expertise and resources to fight the foreclosure problem, house by house and block by block? I’d like to learn about your perspectives on this difficult problem.