A new housing acquisition model is focusing on a specific criteria to increase access to opportunity for very low-income families.
The Two Vacancy Crises in America’s Cities
Vacant properties are a serious problem in two kinds of neighborhoods. To address them, we need to know which kind we’re looking at.
Seniors Cannot Age in Place Without Access to Oral Health Services
Maintaining good health—including good oral health—as long as possible is a critical component of aging in place.
Sitting on a Porch Can Be Good for Your Health
To help combat isolation and reweave the connecting fabric that had been lost, a neighborhood arts center launches an initiative that eventually became a movement.
The Jobs-Housing Hamster Wheel
A deeper dive into the cause of high housing prices reveals that it is not the price of lumber, bricks, or labor that accounts for high or low housing prices—the controlling factor most often is the price of land.
Q: Did the housing crisis prove low-income people can’t be successful...
No! Two at-scale, long-term lending programs show that if the process is done right, low-income homeowners can be as successful as prime borrowers--or more.
Preserving Affordability in San Francisco—A Look at the Housing Accelerator Fund’s...
An interview with Bob Annibale of Citi Community Development and Rebecca Foster of the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, which aims to to preserve or develop 1,500 affordable housing units in its first five years.
Public Land Should be Used for Public Good
When a vacant lot in Oakland was close to becoming the home of a 24-story, market-rate development, local activists worked together to prevent it from happening.
Measuring the Right Things: “Mobility from Poverty” Is More than Finances
How would you measure someone making progress toward escaping poverty? If you've been tuned in to the asset-building movement you might look at their accumulation of assets and preparation for a financial emergency. You might also want to look at cash flow. But can poverty-fighting be solely measured by money?
Shelter Shorts, The Week in Community Development—Nov. 16
News from—and affecting—the community development world. This week: Louisiana votes for justice, California wildfires and housing, a *new* redlining map, HUD's grading system, aging households, more.
(The Urgent Case for) Middle Neighborhoods, One of the Most Overlooked Assets in America
Middle neighborhoods are places where home prices are generally affordable to the average household. But, these neighborhoods are often on the edge between growth and decline.
A Community-Centered Perspective on Displacement
In some communities, diverse economic networks have been and remain critical to the ability of community members to survive and thrive.
There’s Opportunity in Vacancy
Thinking of abandoned properties as merely problems we wish would go away feeds into some of the less productive ways vacant properties have been handled.
State Policies Play a Central Role in the Fight Against Vacant Property
Abandoned and vacant properties seem like a quintessentially local problem. But state policies have a huge effect on how well municipalities can fight it.
Making a Pipeline for Vacant Building Rehab
Baltimore’s Vacants to Value program sparked revitalization block by block with a few key legal powers and partnerships.
How to Fight Vacancy? Do It All
The fight against vacancy in Youngstown, Ohio, shows us that we shouldn’t rely on a single strategy—everything is needed at once.
Condemning Asthma, Not Homes in North Carolina
An apartment complex in North Carolina generated 120 times as many hospital visits as would have been expected for its population, until a creative coalition forced its sale and worked with the new owner to change things.
Transforming Vacant Land Into Community Assets
Vacant land activities can be low cost and high impact; the price of failure is not steep, but the return on investment can be high.
How to Fund Land Banks
The number of land banks grew dramatically in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. So has our understanding of how to successfully fund them.