Matthew Brian Hersh

326 Posts

Matthew Brian Hersh served as senior editor at Shelterforce from March 2008 to October 2012. He studied English at Rutgers University and has spent his professional career in journalism, policy, and politics.
Housing

FHA Expands Disposition Program

HUD announced today that it will make 3,500 distressed loans available through its Distressed Asset Stabilization Program—part of an expansion to the FHA disposition program that sells pools of defaulted mortgages headed […]

Community Development Field

What Are the Goals of Community Planning?

What are our priorities when it comes to neighborhood planning? According to the results of a public opinion poll conducted by the American Planning Association, “Americans want planners to focus […]

Housing

Is Demo a Good Use of AG Settlement Funds?

While the $25 billion national mortgage settlement is widely viewed as a “first step” toward fixing a larger system that resulted widespread foreclosures and $700 billion lost in home value […]

Community Development Field

Peoria LISC

What does it mean when the country's largest community development intermediary opens its first new office in 15 years in a middling city like Peoria, Ill?  In May, the Peoria-based […]

Housing Advocacy

Preserving and Improving Affordable 2- to 4-unit Properties

In a Shelterforce–hosted roundtable discussion of leading research and policy experts to looking at what makes housing affordable and how the nationwide housing crisis changed the affordable housing landscape, NHI […]

Housing

The Challenge of Scattered-Site Rental Management

In the winter 2011 issue of Shelterforce we looked at the difficult challenge behind managing scatttered-site rental housing by nonprofits, and the related costs—from trash removal, to travel time and gas […]

Going Upstream, Bulk Note Purchase Programs Look to Keep Families in Their Homes

The latest issue of Shelterforce examines a handful of short sale and bulk note purchase programs—Second Opportunity of Arizona, the Mortgage Resolution Fund, Oregon’s Loan Refinancing Assistance Pilot Project—that are all […]

Policy

Housing the Political Agenda

It's official, at least it is to you. In order to get housing on the agenda this election cycle, we have to demand our candidates to take a stand. It's […]

Housing

How Should AG Settlement Funds Be Used?

If money from the national mortgage settlement is not used for principal reduction, how should it be spent? We posed that question to readers last week offering a few options […]

Housing

Should FHFA’s REO-to-Rental Pilot Program Address Affordability?

Recently the National Low Income Housing Coaltion, as part of a blog series looking at discrimination in the marketing and maintenance of bank-owned properties, suggested that FHFA's REO-to-rental pilot program could […]

How Would Ending the Census Survey Affect Our Work?

The U.S. House of Representatives last week voted to eliminate the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, in the latest move by this Congress to make ineffective government a self-fulling prophecy. […]

Community Development Field

What’s the CDC Model?

No one expects that a one-size-fits-all definition for community development or a blueprint model for effective CD is attainable—it must be tailored to the needs of individual communities. But are […]