RCAC Home Page >
News and Publications >
RCAC's Network News June 2012
Volume XXX, Number 3
In this issue:
Groundbreaking for the new Mohouli Heights senior neighborhood was yesterday
By Damon Tucker, Hawaii News and Island Information, March 30, 2012 Mohouli Heights Senior Neighborhood, a new 60-unit affordable senior rental housing project in Hilo had its groundbreaking ceremony on Thursday, March 29. Mohouli Heights Senior Neighborhood Phase 1 is the result of a public-private collaboration between State of Hawaii’s Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corporation (HHFDC), U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), County of Hawaii, Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC) and the Hawaii Island Community Development Corporation (HICDC).
Assets and Opportunity Scorecard
For the past 10 years the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) has taken a comprehensive look at wealth, poverty and the financial security of families in the United States through the research and release for Assets & Opportunity Scorecard. Click on the link to see how your state stacks up>>
Environmental News
Neglect, health concerns envelope poor county areas in California
The California Watch, The Sacramento Bee
Nearly every day, Modesto Junior College student Arleen Hernandez battles an aging septic tank that backs up into her toilet and shower, bringing with it "bits of paper and chunks of mold." Hernandez has learned to take quick showers and work swiftly with a mop. When Hernandez's parents moved to Parklawn in 1986, they didn't realize the extent to which their new neighborhood, an island of county land within the city of Modesto, lacks basic public services. Read more about Parklawn here>>
EPA to work with drinking water systems to monitor unregulated contaminants
By Cathy Milbourn, EPA.gov
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a list of 28 chemicals and two viruses that approximately 6,000 public water systems will monitor from 2013 to 2015 as part of the agency’s unregulated contaminant monitoring program, which collects data for contaminants suspected to be present in drinking water, but that do not have health-based standards set under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Read more about the monitoring here>>
Taking the waste out of wastewater
By Jessica Yu, The New York Times
The United States faces a water crisis. Read Jessica Yu’s opinion piece here and watch a short video about America’s water crisis>>
Housing News
Budget crisis takes toll on community for California farmworkers
By Jennifer Medina, The New York Times
Duroville is a collection of more than 200 trailers that serve as homes for farmworkers. There is no sewerage: a patchwork of plastic pipes repaired with duct tape winds underground to a swampy pond. By now, residents were supposed to be getting ready to move out, but that plan has suddenly been delayed by bureaucratic regulations that stem from California’s financial struggles. Read more about how the loss of redevelopment funding affected this community here>>
Bank of America starts mortgage reduction effort
By Natasha Singer, The New York Times
Bank of America has started sending letters to thousands of homeowners in the United States, offering to forgive a portion of the principal balance on their mortgages by an average of $150,000 each. The principal reduction offers from Bank of America Home Loans are the result of a $25 billion settlement agreement earlier this year with 49 state attorneys general as well as federal authorities who had been investigating allegations of abuses over the handling of foreclosures.
Read more>>
HUD studies show housing counseling helps families prepare for homeownership and keep the homes they have
By Lemar Wooley, HUD.gov
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released two reports on the impact of HUD-approved housing counseling has for those families who purchase their first homes and those struggling to prevent foreclosure. In both studies, HUD found housing counseling significantly improved the likelihood homeowners remained in their homes. Both the pre-purchase counseling and foreclosure counseling studies enrolled clients in the fall of 2009 and early 2010. HUD found that 35 percent of participants became homeowners within 18 months of pre-purchase counseling and only one of those buyers subsequently fell behind in their mortgage payments. The foreclosure counseling study reveals that with a counselor’s help, nearly 70 percent of those counseled obtained a mortgage remedy to retain their home, and 56 percent cured their defaults and became current on their mortgages.
Mortgage delinquencies drop to 4-year low
By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com
The percentage of borrowers who have dropped behind on their mortgage payments fell to a four-year low in the first three months of 2012, a bankers' group said The Mortgage Bankers Association. The percentage of loans delinquent or already in the foreclosure process during the first quarter was 11.33%, the lowest level since 2008. That was a decrease of 1.2 percentage points from a quarter earlier and 0.98 percentage points below the rate 12 months earlier. "Delinquencies are clearly continuing to improve," said Michael Fratantoni, the MBA's vice president for research and economics. Read more>>
Unfinished zombie housing developments haunt the rural West
By Allen Best, High Country News
Matt Hail grew up in sweltering metropolitan Phoenix and spent 11 years selling women's clothing, mostly wholesaling to department stores on the West Coast and across the Southwest. The job was boring, but he enjoyed vacationing at ski resorts, including Colorado's Vail and Breckenridge. Like many other people, he imagined changing his life by moving to some mountain valley surrounded by snow-crested peaks. Read the whole story that originally appeared in the March 5, 2012 issue of High Country News (hcn.org) here>>
Loan Fund News
RCAC Loan Fund provides vital environmental infrastructure loans
Most of us take clean drinking water for granted, but for many low-income communities in the rural west providing such a basic necessity is a challenge. Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC) is helping to make safe drinking water available and affordable to hundreds of these communities. Information on RCAC’s second quarter loans is here>>
RCAC Loan Fund scores high performance rating, CARS™ AAA+2
RCAC recently received an AAA+2 performance rating, placing it in select group of high achieving Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). Read the press release here>>
General News
The IRS starting its 403(b) plan audits
The Nonprofit Times
When the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently announced that it was going to start auditing 403(b) plans for the 2009 tax year, the notification received scant attention. After all, it’s pretty common for the IRS to start up a new audit cycle several years after the close of a particular tax year. This time, however, things might be a bit different. That’s because the IRS gave nonprofits until December 31, 2009 to comply with the new regulations on plan documentation that it issued in 2007. At the time, some nonprofit managers took a close look at their plans, others just assumed they were in compliance, even if they purchased a packaged plan and didn’t hear anything from the plan provider. Read more>>
Housing Assistance Council new report
Housing Assistance Council
The Housing Assistance Council’s April 2012 Rural Research Note focuses on Race & Ethnicity in Rural America. From 2000 to 2010, Hispanics became a higher proportion of the nationwide rural and small town population than African Americans, with variations among localities. A new HAC Rural Research Note presents these facts and other current data. Read the research note here>>
Postal service holds back on closings
By Ron Nixon and John Cushman Jr., The New York Times
The United States Postal Service said that it would keep hundreds of small post offices open by reducing business hours or offering stamps and packaging in grocery stores, whittling down its ambitious plan to streamline its services and balance its books by closing thousands of post offices. Giving Congress more time to pass legislation to overhaul the financially struggling agency, the service held back from the wholesale closings of mostly rural post offices that it had proposed last year. The Postal Service’s hope is that Congress, given more time, will come up with a plan to overhaul the agency. Read more>>
Eye on Policy
Senate proposes FY13 rural housing funding levels
National Low Income Housing Coalition
The Senate Committee on Appropriations marked up its FY13 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies spending bill on April 26. The Senate Agriculture bill, S. 2375, would provide $20.785 billion for FY13, an increase over the FY12 level of $19.565 billion. The Rural Development title of the bill would receive $2.276 billion, to “effectively maintain loans and grants essential to small and remote rural communities,” according to the Committee press release. Read more here>>
Oddz and Ends
Conference and workshop calendar