Miriam Axel-Lute
Miriam Axel-Lute is CEO/editor-in-chief of Shelterforce. She lives in Albany, New York, and is a proud small-city aficionado.
The Just City
Yesterday was the second of three, day-long symposia being held this year by the Ford Foundation to celebrate its 75h anniversary. This one, subtitled...
Mortgage Resolution Fund Approved
In expected, but still very exciting, good news, Treasury has approved the Illinois Housing Development Authority’s application to apply Hardest Hit Funds to the...
Homeownership Today and Tomorrow: Building Assets While Preserving Affordability
Can low-income families build enough equity in them to transform their circumstances? New research says yes.
New York State Gets on the Land Bank Train
Three years ago, New York state passed land banking legislation, but it went down to veto by Gov. David Paterson, who said he supported...
“Housing Gets People’s Interest Today”: State of the Nation’s Housing Press Conference
Yesterday, the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard released its 2011 State of the Nation’s Housing report in an event at the Ford...
Quit the HAMP Bashing!
Joe Kriesberg, director of the Massachusetts Association of CDCs, is tired of hearing people bash HAMP. He wrote this piece about it last December,...
Drexel to Follow in Penn’s Community-University Footsteps
The University of Pennsylvania is well-known as a leader in community-university partnerships, and especially the kind that actually try to build community wealth. Under...
Single Point of Contact Won
Having a “single point of contact” for borrowers has been a repeated theme among those advocating for reform of HAMP, such as Sen. Jeff...
Reverse Redlining Suits Proceed
Last year, Ray Brescia wrote in Shelterforce about the potential for lawsuits against banks that engaged in predatory lending or reverse redlining, based on...
Arkansas Passes Foreclosure Info Law
While housing counseling funding is being slashed, it’s worth noting that Arkansas has enacted a modest yet important law (hat-tip Naked Capitalism) requiring that...
Is the Mortgage Interest Deduction Vulnerable?
Shelterforce and the National Housing Institute have been outspoken about the need to change the mortgage interest deduction — the country’s largest housing subsidy,...
Sustainable Homeownership vs QRMs
One of the many themes running through the interactive session “The Future of Mortgage Finance in America,” this morning at NCRC’s annual conference was...
Community-Labor: A Coalition Whose Time Has Come
Ed Gorman of the NCRC board introduced Mark Ayers, president of the building trades department of the AFL-CIO, as “the man who is opening...
Nonprofit Chamber of Commerce?
When you see a conference plenary session described as “positioning your organization for growth,” you probably expect some descriptions of grant writing strategies or...
Housing Counseling in Danger: They Say Cut Backs, We Say ??
Housing counseling works. Counselors form a critical bridge between servicers and homeowners in distress, advocating for them in the face of perverse servicer incentives,...
Rent Regulation in the Great Recession
Over at the Gotham Gazette, David King walks us through the latest round of politics over New York City’s rent regulation laws, which have...
No One Left Behind
By 2050, possibly sooner, people of color will be a majority in our nation. There is no way we can build a strong, stable...
No More Crumbs
When I attended a housing-focused conference right after Election Day last year, there was an understandable pall cast over any...
Can We Stay, Can We Go? A Discussion on Displacement, Mobility, and Concentration of...
As part of a research project funded by the Open Society Institute, one of the sessions Monday at the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s...
Homeownership Is a Bad Investment?
This chart from Visualizing Economics calls into question the bedrock assertion that housing is a good investment, showing that its real value doesn’t actually...