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Links: Job training, college madness, bizarre RFP, writing, the culture that is France, giving things away, and more!

* “Why China won’t own next-generation manufacturing.” Maybe. Useful for those of you who provide job training services.

* A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt, on the madness infecting college campuses (and other topics; his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is essential reading).

* My favorite recent RFP: “Promoting Integrated Pest Management in Affordable Housing.” This RFP makes me think of Isaac’s famous rat story. And, seriously, this is a real RFP. Isaac also notes that the adjective “Integrated” could be fraught with confusion in this context.

* “The Insidious Imps of Writing,” maybe.

* “French PM suggests naked breasts represent France better than a headscarf;” I laughed.

* “Architecture for the Internet: A look inside a carrier hotel in Manhattan — a building where different ISPs and network companies check in with one another.”

* “Economists Profit by Giving Things Away:” In short, economists publish their work freely online and that work isn’t hidden behind pay gates. So that means anyone can get ahold of it, which isn’t true in many other fields. This gives economists outsized influence. I find the publishing practices of academics in English lit bizarre (and revealing) in this respect.

* “Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun;” important, under-appreciated news.

* “People in Los Angeles are getting rid of their cars.” As Fox Mulder says, “I want to believe.”

* “Electricians, roofers and plumbers have their pick of jobs, and demand is expected to grow.” A point that you will have to leave out of Department of Education proposals, since the DOE is obsessed with conventional four-year degrees, but that you can and even should put this in Department of Labor proposals.

* Is This the Tipping Point For Electric Cars? Charging stations are proliferating.

* Despite SpaceX setback, future of private space exploration is bright.

* “If drivers expect to be prosecuted for committing offenses [against cyclists] they suddenly stop committing them,” a totally unsurprising yet still important point.

* “How the careless errors of credit reporting agencies are ruining people’s lives.” Many of your participants will likely suffer from credit reporting errors, and getting rid of them can be brutal.

* “‘An aggressive proposal that touched a lot of nerves’: Why Gov. Brown’s plan to stem the housing crisis failed.” And why California is going to continue to be ludicrously expensive to live in for a long time to come.

* “Can U.S. Cities Compensate for Curbing Sprawl by Growing Denser?” So far, no; we are choosing sprawl instead.

* “Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail.’” Seems obvious, but when notable people say it it becomes news again. After four decades of the War on Drugs, heroin is cheaper, more potent, and more available now than then.

* “Fancy Dorms Aren’t The Main Reason Tuition Is Skyrocketing:” in public schools, it’s state-level cuts. In private schools, it’s tuition discounting: All those $40K – $60K prices are used to soak the rich families, while most students get discounts in some form.

* “Addressing Peak Energy Demand with the Tesla Powerpack,” or, consider the more direct headline: “Tesla Wins Massive Contract to Help Power the California Grid.”

* “Video killed the radio star: How games, phones, and other tech innovations are changing the labor force,” important for anyone involved in job training.

* “To the four policemen who beat me for checking the health of a sick man in their custody,” it is distressing that my first instinct is to add, “More of the usual” to this story (hat tip Chris Blattman).

* “American against itself: does the future belong to authoritarians, left and right?”

* “Trumpism Is the Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution: No matter what happens in November, the sickness may be terminal.” In other words, we may be reaching the limits of non-parliamentary political systems, though there is no good way to get from where we are now to where we might like to be. Still, it is possible to imagine another constitutional convention in my lifetime.

* “Sticker shock in Los Angeles Housing:” or, why you should’d live in California. Granted I am writing this from NYC, which faces similar NIMBY and cost challenges. But I am also planning to move, in part because of the effects of NIMBY and cost challenges.

* “‘Do Not Resist’: A look at the normalization of warrior cops.”

* “Anti-globalists: Why they’re wrong.”

* A real-life Project NUTRIA: “Laundromat with a classroom: Charleston’s outreach to underserved kids.” Some of this article’s sentences could be ripped from our proposals.

* Prosecutors who withhold or tamper with evidence now face felony charges.

* “In Rural Bangladesh, Solar Power Dents Poverty.”

* “To end the affordable housing crisis, Washington needs to legalize Main Street.” Local NIMBYs are impeding housing growth and enabling soaring housing prices.

* “House of Cards: How the Chicago Police Department Covered Up for a Gang of Criminal Cops.” A timely reminder of the challenges your participants may face.

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Links: Claims about program participants, nonprofit life cycles, building better cities, power production, electric cars, and more!

* The title is awful, but: “Tell the truth about benefit claimants and the left shuts you down: How neuro­biologist Dr Adam Perkins became a victim of the new McCarthyism.” Example: “Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients.” Key word: “Claims.” Don’t cite his work in proposals.

* “The Nonprofit’s Grant Writing Life Cycle: No Matter Where You’re Going, There You Are.”

* “The poor are better off when we build more housing for the rich,” an under-appreciated point—but when most people talk about affordable housing, they’re actually trying to signal how much they care, rather than understanding and then solving the problem. See also my (policy wonk) post, “Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?

* An incredible comment from someone who read “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school.”

* NASA: “Coal and Gas are Far More Harmful than Nuclear Power.” But, nuclear remains a pretty complicated way to boil water to make steam.

* Why clean energy is now expanding even when fossil fuels are cheap.

* Why online mattress companies proliferate; the title is mind because the title of the original is too stupid to repeat.

* “He taught me that it’s much better to face harsh reality than to close your eyes to it. Once you are aware of the dangers, your chances of survival are much better if you take some risks than if you meekly follow the crowd. That is why I trained myself to look at the dark side.” That’s from a fascinating interview on Europe with George Soros.

* “Seattle Transit Tunneling Is Going Great, and The People Want More.” Headlines like this are rarely seen! Not every large-scale construction project is a total boondoggle.

* “A Tesla in Every Garage? Not So Fast.” Note that this is from an engineering professional association and is written by a historian. The headline is slightly deceptive (“battery electric vehicles represent a more thorough upsetting of the existing order of things than Musk and his acolytes might like to admit” appears in the body) but the discussion is good.

* “From liquid air to supercapacitors, energy storage is finally poised for a breakthrough.” An important story. Also: “Welsh home installs UK’s first Tesla Powerwall storage battery. And: Solar + Storage, another key piece in the energy infrastructure puzzle.

* If you lease a car today, Tesla will allegedly have an autonomous car by the time that lease expires. Isaac, however, likes to say that he doesn’t see the point of an autonomous car unless you can have a cocktail and read the Sunday NYT while being in the “driver’s seat.”

* How GM Beat Tesla to the First True Mass-Market Electric Car.

* William Gibson: How I Wrote Neuromancer.

* “The Sexual Misery of the Arab World,” also an under-appreciated point.

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Links: Housing politics, bikes, murder, Vanhawks Valour Smartbikes, teen birthrates, high school graduation rates, marriage patterns, love, and more!

* “Home is where the cartel is,” on the politics of housing, inequality, and many other topics of interest; perhaps I’ve been doing it all wrong for quite some time. This is likely the most important thing you can read and understand today if you’re working on income, poverty, job training, or education, all of which are tremendously affected by land-use issues. Yet this problem is largely under the radar of nonprofits, public agencies, and policy makers. It shouldn’t be.

* “The Financial Benefits of Buying What You Love,” a perhaps underrated point, but how often do you know what you’ll really love before you buy it?

* Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’. It’s worse than you think.

* “Steve Radelet has a new book, The Great Surge, about why so many countries have risen out of poverty in the past half century. There are many good things about it, but most of all, it’s the best introduction to development I’ve seen for a lay audience, including students.” Expect a review shortly.

* A video review of the Vanhawks Valour smartbike.

* Teen birthrates drop precipitously. Finally: Some good news!

* “The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality,” which is, along with land-use controls, an incredibly underreported part of contemporary society and income distribution. Incidentally I contribute to the the power-couple problem while am part of the solution to the land-use-control problem.

* As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short. Let’s see… grad rates go up but grads can’t read or do math. Hmmm. Wonder what that means? Paging Bryan Caplan. See also “Almost No One Knows What Education Really Means, and Implications for the Department of Education’s Talent Search Program.”

* Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance.” Are you there to serve the individuals in government, or is government there to serve you?

* What’s happening in coffee, a fascinating and usually detailed three-part post.

* Why bother drug testing workers when doing so accomplishes nothing?

* “Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are.”

* The refragmentation, by Paul Graham, and by definition any essay he writes is worth reading.

* “Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals.”

* “East Germany thrived on snitching lovers, fickle friends and envious schoolkids.” Read properly, this is also a plea for privacy in the information age.

* Unions may no longer be able to forcibly raid their members’ pockets, though the framing in the article itself is quite different.

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February Links: Writing, NIMBYs, Nonprofits-as-startups, Affordable Housing, Baltimore, Washington DC, Washington Monument Syndrome, Porn Star Study and more!

* In Writing, First Do No Harm.

* “The emergence of “YIMBY” [Yes In My Backyard] organizations in American cities would be a welcome counterpoint to the prevailing tides of NIMBYism that often dominate local government. But it is worth saying that broader institutional reforms are what’s really needed.”

* Nonprofit Startups Are Just Like Their Counterparts, according to Paul Graham. We’ve never seen a nonprofit really behave like a startup. Maybe Watsi, the nonprofit featured in the article, will be different.

* Who pays for healthcare also explains why prices are so high. In my view we also spend too much time debating insurance coverage and too little time discussing access to care and how that can be improved.

* “Home craft project: replacing broken laptop screen.” Why haven’t we seen job-skills training programs focused on computer and electronic repair? This may be more viable than Project NUTRIA, but it doesn’t involve small animals.

* From Shlomo Angel’s Planet of Cities:

Like many other observers, such as John Turner (1967) in Latin America, I found that wherever the urban poor could obtain affordable access to minimally serviced land, they could build their own homes and create vibrant communities with little if any support from the government. When free of government harassment and the threat of eviction, their houses would quickly improve over time with their investment of their savings and sweat equity. People could house themselves at the required scale and create many millions of decent homes, while leaving very few people homeless, something that all governments (save that of modern-day Singapore, an outlier on every possible scale) have consistently failed to do. Admitted, the expanding settlements of the poor did not conform to building codes, land subdivision regulations, land use and zoning requirements, or even property rights regimes. (52)

In many jurisdictions, governments nominally devoted to affordable housing prevent its creation. Key words in the above paragraph—”could obtain affordable access to minimally serviced land”—aren’t going to apply to downtown Seattle, or even the downtown Seattle periphery—but the basic idea is an important one. So is the recognition that land use controls in places like New York, Boston, and San Francisco decrease affordability more than any set of programs could increase it. And then there’s Detroit, but that’s another story.

* Baltimore is headed toward bankruptcy. Maybe they need an Outer Harbor to go with the Inner Harbor. Sort of an inni-outti approach to economic development.

* How Washington works: “Many 2011 federal budget cuts had little real-world effect,” and many of the nominal cuts turned out not to be real, by reasonable definitions of “real.”

* “The Dissertation Can No Longer Be Defended,” which makes points that should be obvious to damn near everybody involved in the humanities section of academia.

* “A warning to college profs from a high school teacher,” which is actually about the stakes of student testing.

* New York Times “journalist” John Broder lies in Tesla Motors Model S review, gets called out for it.

Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars;” highly data-driven and should be safe for work.

* “In early childhood education, ‘Quality really matters;’” that’s one reason Head Start doesn’t work particularly well as education right now. But it works okay as day care and pretty well as a jobs program.

* New York real estate: a study in price escalation.

* The Deadly Opposition to Genetically Modified Food;” this is reminiscent of vaccine scares: people have to die before pseudoscience is really attacked.

* “Taking Apprenticeships Seriously,” which we should have started doing a long time ago. College is not the magic answer to every social and economic quandary, as anyone who has taught at a non-elite college should know.

* Government, illustrated: “the cutback is in accord with what Charles Peters of The Washington Monthly used to call the “fireman first” principle. That is, if bureaucrats are told to take $x million out of their budget, they’ll fight back by making cuts where an $x million loss will be most instantly obvious to the public. Like closing the local firehouse — or canceling an air show.” This is also sometimes referred to as the Washington Monument Syndrome. Isaac has seen this in action personally when he was a redevelopment bureaucrat for cities in Southern California.

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HUD’s Confusing Continuum of Care (CoC) Program Explained

HUD just released the FY ’13 Continuum of Care (CoC) Program NOFA, with $1.6 billion available for an array of housing and related services for the homeless. But the process of trying to access that money is deliberately confusing. We’re going to explain how it works in this post, mostly for our own amusement but also in an attempt to educate readers.

“CoC” is the acronym for the federal Continuum of Care program. But “CoC” is also the acronym used for local Continuum of Care programs, as well as local or regional Continuum of Care bodies. To access federal CoC grant funds to help implement the local CoC program, potential applicants—like garden-variety nonprofits—have to go through the local CoC body, which is usually a joint powers authority set up to access federal CoC dollars by local governments, or, in some cases, the state itself. That’s a lot of CoCs, any way you look at it.

Since there is no shortage of acronyms, it would have been nice if the GS-15s at HUD had done a little CoC differentiation to reduce the confusion. Regardless of the nomenclature confusion, most nonprofit or public agencies (which are eligible CoC grantees) cannot apply directly to HUD. Rather, the CoC application has to be first submitted to the local CoC and approved for inclusion in the master CoC application sent in by the CoC.*

Astute readers who know anything about bureaucratic processes are now thinking that the CoC local body system created by HUD sounds like a recipe for confusion and potential collusion, at best.

Those readers are correct. The CoC system has become, in effect, a cartel, with each local CoC able to encourage local providers it likes and discourage ones it doesn’t like, or discourage ones that are not part of the current service delivery system. HUD has in effect created a class of self-perpetuating apparatchiks. This is the flip-side of mandating collaboration: your putative collaborators can easily take you out at the kneecaps, and it’s an example of the problems we’ve written about in “What Exactly Is the Point of Collaboration in Grant Proposals?” and “Following up on Collaboration in Proposals and How to Respond to RFPs Demanding It.”

The fundamental problem here is that the local CoC can stifle subsidiary organizations, and that stifling is mandated by the CoC NOFA itself:

24 CFR 578.9 requires CoCs to design, operate, and follow a collaborative process for the development of an application in response to a NOFA issued by HUD. As part of this collaborative process, CoCs should implement internal competition deadlines to ensure transparency and fairness at the local level.

If you, a potential applicant, didn’t hear about the “internal competition deadline,” you can’t apply. And those deadlines aren’t published in any regularized way or forum, like, say, the Federal Register. Because you have to do the local submission to be part of the CoC’s HUD submission, it makes it more complicated for a garden variety nonprofit to get a CoC grant. Though we’d definitely be interested in working for some malcontent organization that wants to submit a local proposal at the risk of rejection, then appeal to HUD with a claim that the local organization is failing to perform its duties, no one has called us with this proposition yet, though the situation is probably common in the CoC / homeless services world. These are the kinds of stories that, if we had any real reporters left in America, would be covered in the media.

We have some history with CoC, which was originally part of the Reagan era McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.” Congress passed it in 1987. The original CoC program consisted of three separate grant programs: the Supportive Housing Program, the Shelter Plus Care Program, and the Single Room Occupancy Program. When Seliger + Associates was getting started, one of the first funded proposals we wrote was a $3,000,000 Supportive Housing grant for a nonprofit in Northern California. This was a direct HUD submission, as it was before the local CoC body infrastructure was created.

For reasons that are not clear to us, during the tenure of Andrew Cuomo, or Frankenstein as we used to refer to him around the office because of his uncanny resemblance to our bolt-necked friend, these programs were pumped up as part of Clinton-era response to the “homeless problem” of that time and the CoC system was birthed. As a result, a new layer of bureaucracy began to be consolidated, running parallel to the city, county or state level (in this respect, CoCs are a bit like Community Action Agencies).

We’ve interacted with this new layer of bureaucracy. Although we have written CoC applications in many states, we are most familiar with Los Angeles’s CoC—the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). This bureaucratic gem sprung forth fully grown from LA City and County at the behest of HUD about 15 years ago like Athena from the head of Zeus. It now has a $73,000,000 budget and over 100 steely-eyed bureaucrats, but LAHSA is virtually unknown outside of the homeless services provider community.

When HUD changed the rules, there had to be a Continuum of Care Plan for a local area in order for an applicant to be eligible (LAHSA is in charge of the plan in most of L.A. County). And the applicant had to fit into the Plan. Isaac actually wrote a nominal statewide Continuum of Care Plan for Arkansas around 1997 for a housing authority applicant, because Arkansas didn’t want to do one, but our client couldn’t apply without one. So, we just wrote a CoC Plan to enable our client to apply.

Eventually, the local-level CoCs got consolidated in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, if you weren’t part of the Continuum of Care syndicate in the mid-90s, you might still not be. But almost no one understands this, and the only people who do are the people working for the local CoCs. In the case of LAHSA, only three of of the 88 municipalities in Los Angeles County—Long Beach, Glendale, and Pasadena—have opted out of LHASA and have their own CoC bodies. In Pasadena, it’s the Pasadena Housing and Homeless Network. We assume an interest in the administrative overhead that is gleaned from being designated as a CoC has something to do with the three LAHSA outliers in the LA County CoC ecosystem.

By now, CoC operates somewhat like passthrough funds, except that it isn’t part of the two other federal Block Grant systems: Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) from HUD and the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) from the Office of Community Services (OCS).

This raises the obvious question: Why isn’t the CoC grant program part of either CDBG or CSBG? For example, every jurisdiction that receives a CDBG Block Grant must prepare a Consolidated Plan every five years, with annual Action Plan updates. If you browse through any Consolidated Plan, you’ll notice an emphasis on homelessness and homeless programs. But, instead of using the existing system, a parallel system has been legislated into existence, with the usual set of costs and confusions. This post is designed to dispel some of the confusions. But we don’t have the power to dispel the costs.


* I wrote this sentence to see how many times I could work “CoC” into it.

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Thoughts on the DOL YouthBuild 2012 SGA: Quirks, Lessons, and, as Always, Changes

YouthBuild season recently ended, at least for those of us lucky enough to be writing the proposals and preparing the application packages.

1. I’ve warned against the “Perils of Perfectionism” for grant writers, but it appears that RFP writers have also heeded this advice—too well. Page 23 of the original YouthBuild RFP* says, “These attachments will not count against the 15-page limitation for the Technical Proposal.” Page 26 says, “The chart and staffing plan should be included as Technical Proposal Attachments and do not count against the 15-page limitation of the Technical Proposal.” Yet the RFP says, in many other places, that the page limit for previous YouthBuild grantees is 20 pages and for new grantees it’s 25 pages. I sent an e-mail to Kia Mason, the contact person, and she (or he?) said, “Those are errors, the page limitation for previous YouthBuild applicants is 20 pages.”

Sweet!

There was another change that made sense: the original RFP requested that only county data be used in the needs assessment. A revision, however, allowed applicants to use city or other data. I imagine that the DOL got a lot of organizations saying things like, “We’re in L.A. county” or “We’re in Harris County,” along with 10 other organizations that will be forced to use the same data. And L.A. county contains everything from Beverly Hills to Compton to the city of Los Angeles itself.

2. I must give credit where it’s due: instead of playing hide-the-salami with data, as so many RFPs do,** YouthBuild this year simply told applicants where to find data and had applicants report uninterpreted data from a single source. This makes a huge, shocking amount of sense. I also suspect that the DOL got tired of the weird hodgepodge of data that they probably get from most applicants.

3. As long as we’re talking about data, I can also surmise that the DOL is implicitly encouraging applicants to massage data. For example, existing applicants have to report on the reports they’ve previously submitted to the DOL, and they get points for hitting various kinds of targets. In the “Placement in Education or Employment” target, “Applicants with placement rates of 89.51% or higher will receive 8 points for this subsection,” and for “Retention in Education or Employment,” Applicants with retention rates of 89.51% or higher will receive 8 points for this subsection.” Attaining these rates with a very difficult-to-reach population is, well, highly improbable.

That means a lot of previously funded applicants have also been. . . rather optimistic with their self-reported data. Still, those previously funded applicants’ haven’t necessarily been lying, per se. To understand why, let’s say that an organization is tracking a YouthBuild graduate and the organization finds that the graduate is working at McDonald’s. But she also worked on her Uncle’s deck for $30 last weekend. Is she employed? Is she employed in the construction industry? Or let’s say that a graduate reports that he’s enrolled in a community college. Do you call the community college and get the graduate to release his records, or do you take him at his word? Do you subtly encourage him to tell you he’s in school?

The cumulative weight of these micro decisions can have an enormous impact on the numbers that get submitted to the DOL. Some organizations are no doubt more diligent than others. We would never tell organizations to falsify data. But we do point out that not everyone interprets data claims the same way. The DOL implicitly rewards one kind of interpretation. Everyone knows there’s gambling at Rick’s in Casablanca. The official position is not always the right one, and it’s worth reading between the lines.

If you’re funded this year, you may want to remember this section when you’re filing your reports next year.

4. The RFP is structured in a strange way: the “Program Design” wants applicants to describe the training they’ll provide before the outreach, recruitment, and selection process. It would make more sense to structure the RFP in the order that participants will actually move through. Perhaps this is also symptomatic of the problems whoever wrote this RFP experienced in chopping up last year’s RFP to make this year’s.

5. The existence of YouthBuild is a testament to the power of zombie programs;*** graphs like the one in this post have proliferated and demonstrate that, not only is construction employment down, but it’s so far down that it’s at 1994’s level. This may be why the DOL will now let previously funded applicants offer alternative career paths. Still, training people in the construction industry right now doesn’t make a lot of sense, even by federal standards.

We also have pretty severe housing imbalances—there are too many housing units in places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and the Inland Empire, and too few in places like Manhattan, Seattle, and San Francisco. The problem with the latter municipalities isn’t a matter of construction workers—it’s mostly a problem of municipal regulation, especially regarding height, density, and parking requirements. For more on this, see Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias’s The Rent Is Too Damn High, Ryan Avent’s The Gated City, and Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic. None of them will particularly help you write a YouthBuild proposal, but they will help you understand what’s going on.

6. Don’t be afraid of tautologies. You were warned against tautologies by your logic and writing teachers for a good reason, but you should disregard those warnings for a program like YouthBuild. There were a depressing number of questions like this one: “The applicant has an effective strategy to integrate all program elements, including the integration of community service and leadership activities supporting career exploration and occupational skill training.” The obvious answer—the program elements will be integrated by providing them together, rather than “in pieces”—is basically another way of saying, “Program elements will be integrated by being integrated.” Again: this doesn’t make a lot of sense, even by federal standards. The proposal can only be 20 or 25 pages, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for the repetition that DOL implicitly wants.

7. In keeping with the above, as usual, it was impossible to fully answer all the questions in 20 or 25 pages.

8. Page three of the RFP says: “Cost-Per-Participant: Cost-per-participant must fall in the range of $15,000 – 18,000 and the applicant must indicate the projected enrollment per year. The cost per participant should take into consideration the projected enrollment, leveraged funds and other resources supporting the program” (emphasis added). I wrote this to Kia Mason:

What does “take into consideration” mean in this context? Does that mean that YouthBuild wants a cost-per-participant that counts the entire match? For example, if an applicant requests $1,100,000 and gets the mandatory 25% of $275,000, the project total will be $1,375,000. Dividing that amount by $18,000 yields about 76, while dividing $1,100,000 by $18,000 yields 61. The SGA doesn’t offer any examples or further guidance about what this means.

He or she replied: “The cost per participant is derived from the federal amount requested only.” I imagine Kia got a ton of questions on this issue, since the phrase “should take into consideration” is so vague. I also imagine that a fair number of applicants didn’t inquire into the meaning of the phrase, and, consequently, the DOL will get half the proposals with one assumption and half with another.

9. There’s a particularly inane question under Section 1. d. Factor five: “The benefit of the participation of youth in occupational skills training within the selected industry(ies) that will be derived to the community.” The major “benefits” that the community might derive are at best nebulous. And they’re about the same for all communities: having people in jobs instead of jails, creating nominal tax payers, providing nominal low-income housing, and so forth. These benefits don’t change much from California to Connecticut.


* The Department of Labor prefers the term “SGA,” or “Solicitation for Grant Applications,” rather than RFP; we generally use RFP on this blog, rather than further confusing matters by applying the alphabet soup of acronyms that various federal and non-federal agencies use to describe the various ways they emit documents that will ultimately lead to the distribution of money.

My favorite recent example of acronym fever comes from the ACF’s Transitional Living Program and Maternity Group Homes: “The Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) is accepting applications for the Transitional Living Program (TLP) and for Maternity Group Homes (MGH) funding opportunity announcement (FOA). TLPs provide an alternative to involving RHY in the law enforcement, child welfare, mental health, and juvenile justice systems.” I wonder if ACF also wants BBQ ASAP.

** See “RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions” for still more discussion on this issue.

*** Our post “Déjà vu All Over Again—Vacant Houses and What Not to Do About Them” also discusses elements of housing policy and how governments respond to housing issues.

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April Links: Education and Jobs, The Rent is Too Damn High, Health Care in Its Many Forms, Food Deserts, and More

* Chicago’s plan to match education with jobs; this is long over-due.

* Is charity a major source of deadweight loss? Notice the linked column: “Increasing evidence shows that donors [to charity] often tolerate high administrative costs, fail to monitor charities and do not insist on measurable results — the opposite of how they act when they invest in the stock market.”

* What an awesome office! Uncomfortable chairs, though.

* Affordable housing and hilarious cognitive dissonance.

* Good legal news: Fifth Amendment Right Against Self Incrimination Protects Against Being Forced to Decrypt Hard Drive Contents.

* “Shame Is Not the Solution” for improving teachers. On the other hand, I suspect some of the districts who want to make teaching evaluations and test scores public are doing so out of desperation, or because they can’t build the kind of sophisticated evaluation systems Gates mentions. (For another discussion of this issue, see LA Times Ranks Teachers from Marginal Revolution.)

* The Rent Is Too Damn High Now Available for Preorder.

* The Social Conservative Subterranean Fantasy World Is Exposed, and It’s Frightening.

* The real reason health insurers won’t cover people with pre-existing conditions.

* The Secret to Seattle’s Booming Downtown.

* Let’s hope the MPAA ratings board dies; sample: “[. . .] while the MPAA board pretends to be a source of neutral and non-ideological advice to parents, it all too often reveals itself to be a velvet-glove censorship agency, seemingly devoted to reactionary and defensive cultural standards.”

* Sounds like fun: “With its sex-obsessed young heroine, ‘Turn Me On, Dammit!’ goes where few movies have gone,” and like the rare movie that actually goes where other movies haven’t.

* Why Don’t You Do Something Other Than Sit at Your Computer? (Side question: “Is your computer depressing you?”)

* The idea of the “food desert” is fading. I’m not sure it was ever real, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it in your proposals.

* $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners. Wow.

* A short, accurate description of the long-term problems in Europe. This is also, on some level, about how people form groups and act in those groups. (“Americans in Massachusetts and Americans in Mississippi do feel themselves part of the same country, sharing language and culture. Germans and Spaniards do not feel the same.”) See further Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind.

* “Most men won’t be allowed to admit this, but the new HBO show [Girls] is a disastrous celebration of entitlement and helplessness.”

* Why you should read Before the Lights Go Out.

* Testing the Teachers, and how do we know what we’re actually getting out of college?

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HUD’s Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Program (LBPHC) Program Explained

HUD’s FY 2010 NOFA for the Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Program (LBPHC) confuses many applicants. We’ve written at least six funded LBPHC grants, so we’re familiar with it. The program is actually simple: it funds the remediation (not necessarily removal) of lead-based paint in privately owned housing occupied by low-income folks.

Applicants, however, often have trouble figuring out how to efficiently spend the grant funds. Lead-based paint remediation usually costs about $15,000 per unit remediated. To make a LBPHC program work, applicants should propose using the LBPHC funds in conjunction with their housing rehabilitation program.

That’s the real secret of the program. Virtually every city has had some form of housing rehab program since the Nixon administration, using a combination of HUD HOME formula grants, CDBG entitlements, state funds, or who knows what. The rehab programs usually entice homeowners and landlords to fix up the housing units by offering small grants for the very low-income (below 50% of area median income or “AMI”) and subsidized loans for low-income and moderate-income (50% to 120% of AMI, depending on the jurisdiction).

The real problem for lead-based paint programs is invariably that the City of Owatonna wants Mrs. Smith the homeowner to fix code violations, remediate lead paint, etc., while Mrs. Jones wants granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and maybe faster Internet access. The city has trouble spending its rehab funds because Mrs. Smith doesn’t want to borrow money to do things that won’t impress her friends and neighbors.

What to do? The City (or other applicant) gets a LBPHC grant and bungie cords it to their existing rehab program. Now Mrs. Smith can get $15,000 or so in LBPHC sub-grant funds to remediate the lead hazards that the city inspector wants her to do and can use the rehab loan to buy her granite countertops.

The lead remediation grant can be used to entice Mrs. Smith to take the rehab loan. Now everyone is happy, including the local contractors who have some work while waiting around for the economy to improve. As long as a city doesn’t try to run LBPHC as a standalone program, but instead combines it with their rehab effort, HUD will love it. So will everyone in town. It’s remarkable to me how many calls I’ve had over the years from city officials who do not get this idea until I explain it. The ones who follow our direction usually get funded and have great success with the program.

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Grants.gov and the GAO, Volunteer Broadband Reviewers for BTOP and BIP, Job Retraining, Grant Writers, and More

* More news on Grants.gov and the Government Accountability Office: Grants.gov Has Systemic Weaknesses That Require Attention. Glad someone in Washington is finally paying attention; Stanley J. Czerwinski is the contact person, so I sent him an e-mail pointing out our earlier posts on the subject, but he hasn’t responded.

Part of the report’s introductory sentence is particularly amusing: “Grants.gov has made it easier for applicants to find grant opportunities and grantors to process applications faster, applicants continue to describe difficulties registering with and using Grants.gov, which sometimes result in late submissions.” It’s true, but I’d note regarding the first part that while it’s easier to find grant opportunities, it’s still often not easy; for example, searching using Google’s restricted site feature is often faster and better than using Grants.gov’s built-in search function.

* Speaking of which, I like this headline: Contract to Upgrade Recovery.gov Stimulates Criticism.

* William Easterly explains Sachs Ironies: Why Critics are Better for Foreign Aid than Apologists:

Official foreign aid agencies delivering aid to Africa are used to operating with nobody holding them accountable for aid dollars actually reaching poor people. Now that establishment is running scared with the emergence of independent African voices critical of aid, such as that of Dambisa Moyo.

* The Dept. of Commerce and USDA must be really desperate if they’re requesting volunteers to review applications. We’re writing a Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) application, which makes this announcement salient to us.

* The Services for Victims of Human Trafficking program (warning: .pdf) has an unusual deadline feature: it gives 7/13/2009 as the deadline for “Online Registration,” and 7/16/09 for the application itself. But smart applicants should move both those back by at least two days to avoid the inevitable rush.

* Now here’s a great idea for a government requirement: New bill wants fiber conduit built into every road project:

The bill would require new federal road projects to include plastic conduits buried along the side of the roadway, and enough of them to “accommodate multiple broadband providers.” Conduits must meet industry best practices for size and depth, and road builders must include hand holes and manholes along the route to gain access to the conduit. Each conduit will also include a pull tape for fishing new fiber through the line.

Most of the cost to deploy new fiber is the digging and repaving work, so putting in conduit when the ground is already torn up has a certain logic to it. It’s a relatively cheap idea, but one that Eshoo hopes will help US broadband.

Given the lousy shape of U.S. broadband deployment, which Ars Technica has covered in depth, that help would be much appreciated.

* Job Retraining May Fall Short of High Hopes, says the New York Times. This is the kind of article you would never cite in a job training proposal, unless it’s to knock it down, in which case you shouldn’t cite it in the first place. Nonetheless, those of you running job training programs ought to read it.

* Uber-geek publisher and all star Tim O’Reilly (I own a few of his technical books) on The Benefits of a Classical Education.

* Ars Technica reports that GE is throwing its weight behind smart grids. That’s probably good news for Smart Grid Investment Grant Program (SGIG) applicants.

* Ed Glaeser encourages us to put trains where the people are. That this isn’t self-evident is indicative of federal involvement.

* I hadn’t realized it till now, but two years ago the Wall Street Journal published “A Passion for the Keys: Particular About What You Type On? Relax — You’re Not Alone” regarding the fanaticism certain people feel for their keyboards. As writing a review of the Model M-inspired Unicomp Customizer taught me, I am very much note alone. Anyone who spends a lot of time typing should read both articles; even better, they might like this review of the Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard.

* According to “Tax Breaks Under the Microscope” in Slate, nonprofit hospitals are much like their regular counterparts:

But research shows that nonprofit hospitals behave no differently from for-profit ones. And in some cases, nonprofits have been caught mistreating the poor for the sake of financial gains. One example: A nonprofit academic hospital in Connecticut aggressively pursued “deadbeat” elderly patients by placing liens on their homes. More recently, several nonprofit Chicago hospitals were reportedly transferring uninsured patients to the county emergency room.

* State governments are behaving with even less foresight than usual; according to a Salon post quoting the San Jose Mercury News, “In 1980, 17 percent of the state budget went to higher education. By 2007, that had fallen to 10 percent — the same as prisons and parole.” And 2007 predated the current crisis, showing that the trend away from higher education funding is accelerating.

* In one of many bizarre twists surrounding stimulus funding, California’s El Dorado County has rejected $1.6 million in stimulus funding:

The Board of Supervisors last week twice rejected what staff members described as no-strings-attached funding.

“It’s as close to a no-brainer as I’ve ever seen come before this board,” Richard Meagher of the Affordable Housing Coalition of El Dorado said of a grant application that could have put local contractors to work rehabilitating foreclosed houses and made the dwellings available to moderate and low-income homebuyers.

But Supervisor Jack Sweeney characterized himself as a “free-market person” and argued that many current economic ills are a result of government’s intrusion into society.

This seems bizarre even by the standards of local government. I’d bet that Sacramento Bee reporter Cathy Locke either knows something she couldn’t write about or that there’s otherwise something deeper beneath this story.

* Fascinating: Japan and Korea’s hidden protectionist measures prevented U.S. companies from competing in their home markets, and the English-language press largely ignored the story. Compare this to the story told in David Halberstam’s The Reckoning.

* Gas and the suburbs.

* New York remains rich in the ultimate resource: human capital. But the high cost of housing and high taxation levels remain threats. This is by one of my favorite economists, Edward Glaeser.

* Self-esteem has gone up in the United States; achievement has not.

* If The Onion wrote stories about grant titles, I wouldn’t know whether to believe Grants to Manufacturers of Certain Worsted Wool Fabrics is a real program or something dreamt up by satire writers.

* More porn means less rape? Maybe, and the writer cites some experiments that exploit natural variations, a lá Freakonomics, to get there. Expect to hear more on this subject in the coming years.

* I found Developing And Writing Grant Proposals while searching the other day, and love the sometimes-comical advice they give. It starts in the second paragraph, which says “Individuals without prior grant proposal writing experience may find it useful to attend a grantsmanship workshop,” a topic Isaac has dealt with, as have I.

* Megan McArdle writes about When Blogs Were Young. Compare that to my post, “You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You,” which is by far the most visited of any we’ve published.

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November Links: Myths, Housing, and More

* The New Republic has an article based on a Brookings Institute piece that deconstructs the small-town USA mythology regularly propagated in proposals:

But the idea that we are a nation of small towns is fundamentally incorrect. The real America isn’t found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropolitan areas or “metros” that bring all these places into economic and social union.

Think of this as a prelude to an eventual post on the subject of grantwriter as mythmaker. And if you’re interested in myth as a broader subject, see Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By. He’s the same guy who wrote Hero With a Thousand Faces, the book that, most famously, provided the outline for Star Wars.

* The New Yorker asks, “Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?” Like some of the data discussed in our post on the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program, the article has problems of its own, including drawing conclusions that might be based on faulty data, but it nonetheless illustrates many of the issues at stake.

* The reason we can’t build affordable housing is chiefly structural, according to an article that also gives a recent history of industrial housing design:

What’s driving the high cost of houses today is not increased construction costs or higher profits (the Levitts made $1,000 on the sale of each house), but the cost of serviced land, which is much greater than in 1951. There are two reasons for this increase. The first is Proposition 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that required local governments to reduce property taxes and limit future increases, and sparked similar taxpayer- driven initiatives in other states. Henceforth, municipalities were unable to finance the up- front costs of infrastructure in new communities, as they had previously done, and instead required developers to pay for roads and sewers, and often for parks and other public amenities as well. These costs were passed on to home buyers, drastically increasing the selling price of a house.

The other reason that serviced lots cost more is that there are fewer of them than the market demands. This is a result of widespread resistance to growth, the infamous not-in-my-backyard phenomenon, which is strongest in the Northeast, California, and the Northwest. Communities in growing metropolitan areas contend with increased urbanization, encroachment on open space, more neighbors, more traffic, and more school- age children.

Compare this to Virginia Postrel’s A Tale of Two Town Homes.

* We’ve written before about modern problems with bureaucrats. Such problems are hardly new: in the preface to The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:

Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

The oddest thing about the novel is how modern it seems in the subjects it treats and the way it portrays the subjectivity of its characters. The writing marks it from the 19th century, but in many other ways it is not.

* Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets from the Wall Street Journal has been making the blog rounds for good reason: it’s hilarious (“Elsewhere in the West, prisoners use PowerBars or cans of tuna, says Ed Bales, a consultant who advises people who are headed to prison.”) and insightful (using the specific example of prisons to demonstrate larger truths about the necessity of currency in virtually any non-hunter-gatherer culture). And how long have there been consultants who advise future prisoners?

* Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, it also published Giving Till It Works about “capitalistic philanthropy.” We’ve mentioned the issue with regard to Creative Capitalism, discussed tangent issues in Why Do People Give? And Other Unanswerable Questions, and brought up incentive problems in Foundations and the Future.

* Why is Mt. Denali in Alaska technically named McKinley by the federal government? I never thought I would care about the answer, either, but it sheds a great deal of light on politics, bureaucrats, history, culture, randomness, and infighting, as described by the Agitator.

* The New York Times reports on school reform efforts without discussing the enormous costs of some reforms, or the inherent scaling problems most such programs have had—just because a program with a small, extremely dedicated core of individuals manages to, for example, raise student achievement, that doesn’t mean that a larger program with less dedicated and less qualified staff do. Those two persistent issues have bedeviled attempts at reform, and there is no obvious way around them. Nonetheless, it’s still a positive sign that the issues are being more seriously discussed.

* Speaking of the New York Times, schools, and language, this could have come from a proposal:

The Equity Project Charter School (TEP) will open in September 2009 in Manhattan’s Washington Heights community, and it will aim to enroll middle school students at risk of academic failure. Students with the lowest test scores will be given admissions priority. In order to recruit the country’s top teachers to work with these at-risk students, the school’s founding principal will cut administrative costs and put a higher percentage of the school’s public funding into teacher salaries.

Notice the euphemistic “at risk of academic failure,” the choice to use the “most-in-need” model rather than the “most-likely-to-be-helped” model,” and the term “at-risk students” used again in the second sentence.