View Research by Author - Martin D. Abravanel

More about Martin D. Abravanel's areas of expertise can be found on this Urban Institute expert's page.

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/MartinDAbravanel

HOPE VI supports demolishing large, dilapidated public housing and replacing it with smaller-scale, more appealing properties. What makes this feasible (mixed financing; private-sector entities; and mixed-income, mixed-tenure complexes) also creates conditions that challenge and can undermine long-term sustainability. Sustainability has not yet been assessed and whether it should or can be assessed has been questioned. With input from housing practitioners and insight from a trial exploration of two HOPE VI redevelopments, this report demonstrates the need for, and feasibility of, conducting an assessment that can assist both private owners and public agencies in sustaining this valuable resource.

Recipients of housing assistance under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Public Housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs can keep their benefits as long as they remain income eligible and abide by program requirements. Under HUD's MTW demonstration, however, a small number of housing agencies that administer these programs chose to impose time limits on various program benefits, including housing assistance. This report documents their rationale for doing so, companion policy and programmatic changes they made in conjunction with time limits, their design decisions and implementation experiences and, to the extent knowable, effects on recipients and housing agencies.

A 2007 proposal to reauthorize HUD’s HOPE VI public housing revitalization program requires local housing agencies to establish partnerships with school superintendents. The purpose is to devise comprehensive educational reform and achievement strategies for improving schools serving HOPE VI neighborhoods. Five situations where HOPE VI revitalization and school improvement have already occurred, however, suggest wide variation; each was context-sensitive and tended to be an opportunistic experiment cut from different cloth. Absent a uniform model, there is a need to know more about what incentives, which local stakeholders, and what kinds of partnerships produce improved educational outcomes before establishing uniform requirements.

This report "What Happens to Victims? A Research Guide for Disaster-Response Studies" provides a starting point for research and evaluation studies. It provides a series of "checklists" of outcome and service quality indicators, and related information, considered pertinent to studying emergency services responses for a range of critical service areas and covering a wide array of conditions likely to be important to disaster victims. The intent is to establish starting points for assessments of the extent to which victim services needs are met during and following disasters.

The Urban Institute's Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities has just released two major reviews of research on the HOPE VI experience to date that offer five fundamental lessons for the next generation of public housing revitalization. The research record strongly supports continuing a flexible investment initiative like HOPE VI. But HOPE VI (or a successor) can and should be substantially strengthened based on lessons learned to date. In addition, the HOPE VI experience has broader applicability to the public housing program as a whole.

The Moving to Work (MTW) demonstration was launched by HUD in the late 1990s to permit a small number of local and state housing agencies (HAs) to experiment with limited deregulation. This demonstration was not designed with the rigorous controls or monitoring that would be required to definitively measure impacts, but it does provide valuable insights on the types of changes HAs make in response to regulatory flexibility, the implementation challenges they face, and implications for ongoing policy discussions about federal housing policy.

Building on lessons learned from the Moving to Work (MTW) demonstration, the author reviews "Freedom to House," a proposal to reform and partially deregulate the nation's Public Housing Authorities (PHAs), submitted in the 2005 budget to Congress. The author discusses the climate of mutual cynicism and distrust between the federal regulatory agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the public housing industry that burdened the MTW demonstration, and argues for all parties approaching Freedom to House as a genuine experiment whose purpose is to demonstrate both the benefits of deregulation as well as any negative consequences.

Surveying clients on a routine basis is one very important method that nonprofit organizations can use to assess service outcomes. Nonprofits do not have to become survey experts, as technical expertise and support are available, but they must understand what surveys involve, recognize good survey practice, and make decisions about the roles played by staff members versus those by survey technicians. The goal is to help ensure that useful data of high quality are collected. This guide provides information on what nonprofits need to know and consider when client surveys are used to track performance.

This research examines the results and performance of loans to private businesses made by state and local governments through their own lending programs using HUD program funding. Relying on examination of nearly 1,000 loan files in 51 communities, researchers found that although default rates are somewhat higher than those of private-sector lenders, substantial amounts of new economic development money could be raised on a secondary market without undermining the policy goals of the federal programs that supply the funds. HUD could help arrange secondary market sales by accumulating and disseminating information and setting standards for loan underwriting, servicing, and documentation.

This report and data book summarizes the responses to a survey of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) key program implementation partners -- intermediaries who work with HUD to deliver services and benefits. In the survey, a national sample of 2,244 mayors, directors of community development, public housing, and fair housing agencies, and owners of multifamily housing properties were asked to assess their relationship with HUD and evaluate HUD performance in working with them to serve the Department's ultimate customers. The survey is responsive to the mandate of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA), which requires Federal agencies to establish performance standards and measure progress against those standards over time. Most of HUD's partners express satisfaction with various aspects of the Department's performance, yet there are those who are dissatisfied -- in some instances, to the point of alienation.

Return to list of authors