HUD should turn to homeownership vouchers

Nearly all federal Housing Choice Vouchers are used for rentals. Families pay about 30 percent of their household income toward rent, and the voucher covers the rest, up to a fair market rent price that the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates for each area. …

While HUD allows housing authorities to use vouchers for homeownership, less than half of 1 percent are used for this purpose. Still, according to a 2006 study, homeownership vouchers have shown positive results, with homeowners moving to lower-poverty areas and experiencing low delinquency, default and foreclosures. …

Baltimore shows how homeownership vouchers can increase coverage and reduce housing cost burdens. The fair market rent for a two-bedroom Baltimore apartment is $1,376 a month. A family earning $1,000 a month would pay $300, and the voucher would cover the remaining $1,076 a month.

A Baltimore home valued at the 30th percentile is about $85,000. Assuming no down payment, the combination of interest, taxes, insurance and escrow for repairs amounts to about $460 a month. Again, the owner contributes $300 a month, but the government cost is only about $160 a month. Even when adding the principal repayment to the carrying costs, the net government cost would still be less than $300 a month.

Using this example, the homeownership voucher would cost the government $776 a month less than the rental voucher.

It’s nap time in America

Doug Irving for the RAND Corporation: Our coffee-pounding, cellphone-buzzing, stay-up-late-and-get-up-early culture costs the U.S. economy as much as $411 billion in lost productivity every year, a recent RAND study found. Those baggy eyes and foggy minds that corporate America so often treats like a badge of honor add up to about 1.2 million annual working days lost.

Poor sleep has been linked to seven of the leading causes of death in the United States, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. A recent study by the AAA auto club found that drivers who sleep just four or five hours a night have a crash rate more than five times higher than those who get seven hours. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has even named shift work, with its irregular overnight hours, a probable carcinogen.

“How we sleep affects everything we do,” said Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral and social scientist at RAND and a national authority on the social science of sleep. “When we don’t sleep well, it affects every aspect of our health and our relationships.”

Troxel worked with a team of researchers from RAND Europe to show just how valuable a little more sleep can be. Their recent study demonstrated that quality sleep can predict workplace productivity — and our chronic lack of it acts as a drag on the entire economy. They also surveyed thousands of British workers to show how everyday life in our hurried, hassled, 9-to-5 world eats away at our bed time.

People struggling with financial problems, for example, got 10 minutes less sleep on average every night. Those facing unrealistic time pressures at work lost another eight minutes. A bad commute? More than 16 minutes. And, for comparison, having children: around four minutes.

That may not sound like much, but the toll adds up fast. The researchers estimated that the United States loses between $280 billion and $411 billion every year to the absenteeism, presenteeism and outright mortality caused by sleep deprivation.

Time to get supersonic

Samuel Hammond for the Niskanen Center: Imagine flying from New York City to Los Angeles in two hours for the price of a normal business-class ticket. It should be possible with today’s technology, and yet a 1973 ban on civil supersonic flight overland has prevented it from becoming a reality.

To understand the importance of the overland market to supersonic transport, we have to take a step back and relearn some lessons from history. The conventional wisdom, ever since the Concorde’s retirement in 2003, has been that supersonic transport simply isn’t commercially viable. After all, the Concorde sustained enormous losses over its 27 years in service and required constant injections of subsidies by the French and British governments just to break even. …

Who could be surprised? The Concorde was designed by government committees, with little to no attention paid to what we would today call “product-market fit.” Its 100-person capacity was chosen due to laudable but arbitrary democratic aspirations, and with such a high ticket price (up to $20,000 in today’s dollars) it struggled to fill half the cabin on many routes. Coming to market amid the 1973 oil crisis certainly certainly didn’t help, either. …

According to an analysis by Gulfstream, ending the prohibition on supersonic overland is “required” for the success of supersonic business jets given that only 25 percent of small aircraft operations occur over water. The 2001 National Research Council Committee on Commercial Supersonic Technology agrees, stating that “supersonic flight over land is essential for [business jets].”

It makes sense. Roughly half of all passenger flights in the world occur over the continental United States. Banning supersonic overland thus imposes a severe cap on supersonic transport’s potential market size.

But what about noise? Wouldn’t a fleet of supersonic aircraft overland create intolerable sonic booms that would rattle windows and scare livestock?

This would plausibly be a problem for the Concorde, but that was 1960s technology. Today, thanks to modern aircraft engines, lightweight carbon fiber materials and powerful computer simulation techniques, aircraft designers have created a whole new class of “low-boom” supersonic aircraft designs. A lower mass and optimized shape can make the boom from supersonic jets sound less like an explosion in the sky and more like a quick thump.

Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.