Shelterforce Staff

It’s no secret that the federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, has produced lackluster results

The federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program is a welcome source of funds in struggling communities, and it has had a massive effect on the nature of the response to the problem of vacant foreclosed property. As NSP3 gets underway and the NSP1 obligation period comes to a close, Shelterforce looks back at NSP so far.

Things may be changing for 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx, a deteriorating building that’s sometimes credited as being the birthplace of hip-hop.

Film director Michael Moore is launching the State Theatre/Michigan Downtowns Project, which aims to promote nonprofit movie theaters as vehicles for revitalizing Michigan towns.

The Chicago City Council is considering legislation to hold lenders more responsible for properties they have foreclosed upon.

the Florida State Legislature was launching a $9.6 million effort intended to unclog the court system by establishing foreclosures-only courts across the state

Editors of sat down recently with John Atlas, NHI board president and author of Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group, to discuss the organization itself, as well as organizing on a national level, tensions between organizing and development, and lessons learned from the downfall of the once-powerful antipoverty organization.

PETRA, the Obama administration’s $350 million effort to reform public housing, first proposed in February 2010, has many in the housing field skeptical.

After 23 years, the Chicago housing authority is no longer in receivership. The court-ordered receivership had placed administrative duties in the hands of a private company, Habitat Co. Now U.S. […]

In written testimony submitted to the House Committee on Financial Services in May, excerpted here, a group of urban affairs academics argue that PETRA is nothing less than a formal divestment from public housing, worse than anything previous administrations have proposed.

First it was New York City’s Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, and now, another enclave built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for veterans and middle-class families has run into […]

Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan has filed a lawsuit against Countrywide, alleging it steered African-American and Latino borrowers into subprime mortgages and charged them more for them. Madigan’s office conducted […]