Community Control

Organized by a pandemic-era mutual aid group, this housing cooperative is taking advantage of D.C.’s pioneering Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. But the pressure of paying back a loan with mounting interest could stymie the group’s plans to provide affordable housing.

There’s a lot of momentum toward resident-controlled housing. Do you know the three major forms it takes?

What were the biggest Shelterforce stories of the year? We count down the top 10 of 2023.

Tenant Opportunity to Purchase laws empower renters to get control when their buildings go up for sale. But in D.C., the hurdles to becoming owners are many, and often insurmountable.

Arrangements in which LIHTC tenants share in the development’s financial benefits, or become partial or full owners, are rare—but some properties have pulled them off. This scan of several examples shows the possibilities—and the conditions needed for them to succeed.

Traumatic events, and the ongoing traumas of vacancy and disinvestment, can be strongly associated with the places where they occurred. In Cleveland, several organizations are bringing new function and meaning to traumatized spaces.

Shelterforce checks in on three communities that have passed policies giving tenants and nonprofits first dibs on purchasing property. Are these policies keeping residents in their homes?

Tenants aren’t just organizing in places like California and New York—hear about tenant organizing in small and mid-sized cities from Maine, Maryland, Texas and Kentucky.

An Ohio land bank adds to its developing power through a nonprofit land trust.

Grassroots organizers have used the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule to strengthen communities in the past. These examples show what we should advocate for in a new AFFH rule. 

Tenant organizing in Baltimore today is building on a rich legacy of tenant resistance in the city where residential redlining made its debut.

City Life/Vida Urbana is known for successful tenant union organizing and anti-eviction actions, but every individual action springs from a larger vision of system and policy change.