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Miriam Axel-Lute

503 Posts

Miriam Axel-Lute is CEO/editor-in-chief of Shelterforce. She lives in Albany, New York, and is a proud small-city aficionado.
Community Development Field

Land Trust Conference Models Better Ways to Get People’s Attention

Folks who present on and moderate panels: We can no longer claim that a meaningful presentation can’t be done in three minutes and that
you need longer.

Housing

The Best Thing I Didn’t Hear All Week

I’m in Lexington, Ky., this week for the National Community Land Trust Network conference, hosted by the Lexington Community Land Trust. The Lexington CLT had an unusual start—it was created […]

Editor’s Note

On Beyond Anniversaries

When I visited New Orleans last June for the NeighborWorks Comeback Cities event, many of the people I spoke with were ambivalent about the approaching 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina […]

Reported Article

Organizing and the Community Land Trust Model

What happens when organizers win a campaign for community control of land? That depends a lot on the choices they make about how to exercise that control.

Review

Dispatches from Whose City?

City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb. N + 1. 2015, 496pp, $18 (paper). Purchase here.

Neighborhood Change

Community Development and School Reform: Odd Bedfellows?

In my couple decades hanging around the community development field, I can’t count the number of times conversations about what’s needed to really bring back a struggling neighborhood or move […]

Housing

Leveling the Information Playing Field Between Advocates and Developers

Inclusionary housing has been around for decades. It encompasses a range of policies that call on developers to contribute toward creating affordable homes, either within their new developments, offsite, or […]

Policy

Unfriend Your Neighbor to Get a Loan?

Want to be that one person who bootstraps themselves out of poverty and makes it, against all odds? Not if Facebook has anything to do with it. Now, we already […]

Housing

Suing the Suburbs

Fights against the displacement caused by rapid gentrification tend to focus on the gentrifying neighborhoods themselves. But some housing advocates in the Bay Area are wondering if the idea of […]

Organizing

Can’t Be in the Gulf for the Katrina Anniversary? Watch These Films Instead

Tomorrow is the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, leading to all sorts of reflections on how far the city has come, what recovery means, and what lessons there are to […]

Housing

Segregation Conversation Goes National

The conversation about balancing placed-based revitalization and expanding access to high-opportunity areas has been edging onto the national radar recently, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on disparate […]

Review

It’s Not Actually About Ownership

Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia,
by Debbie Becher. Oxford University Press, 2014. 334pp. $30.50 (paper)
Purchase here.