Neighborhood Change
As community demographics shift and there’s neighborhood change, what are the issues affecting longstanding and new residents alike? When is change desirable, and when is it undesirable? How can it be turned to the benefit of those who need it most?
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Clybourne Park on Stage, Housing Inequity in Real Life—A Post-Show Reflection
Clybourne Park—a play exploring race, real estate, and community tensions—can set the stage for discussion on the lasting impacts of housing discrimination, gentrification, and the fight for affordability. What lessons can we take from the past to shape a more just housing future?
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Will Columbia Take Manhattanville?
Balancing an Ivy League university’s expansion plan with a Harlem neighborhood’s needs is a tricky business, especially when eminent domain is in the mix.
Small is Beautiful – Again
The shrinking cities movement imagines revitalization without growth – and housing advocates take a hard look at what that means for the poor.
From Eyesores to Assets: CDC Abandoned Property Strategies
To save a neighborhood that’s in danger of going down, you can’t simply add new homes. You have to put the process of decline in reverse
Crossing Muddy Waters
Rose Johnson stands nervously in a crowded room in Gulfport, Mississippi, surrounded by out-of-towners. With $1,000 in her pocket, she competes in the local tax sale to buy property in […]
Gentrification and Resistance in New York City
For low-income tenants, the experience of gentrification is not a boost. It is the daily threat of displacement – for themselves, their families and their communities.
Be It Ever So Humble
In the American idiom of good things, the importance of “home” and “community” cannot be challenged. The associated images – mom, apple pie and the picket fence – serve as […]
Blocking Crime: How Block Clubs are Saving Chicago’s Neighborhoods
Several agencies came together in 1996 to clear drug dealers from the corners and vacant lots in the 800 block of North Harding Avenue. The effort, dubbed the “Super Block Project,” involved the city of Chicago, police officers from the 11th District, the West Humboldt Park Family and Community Development Council and Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, a nonprofit agency that helps poor families with home ownership.
So Fresh and So Clean
Poor people must not like Starbucks. I wonder about that each time I drive my borrowed hooptie through and around Cincinnati’s West End neighborhood. Development is nigh. It’s in the […]
Tales of Three Cities
Even after neighboring Hoboken turned from working-class enclave to exclusive high-cost outpost, some think that will never happen to Newark…
Arts Build Community
CDCs now recognize that art and cultural activities can be useful tools toward building a community’s identity, meaning, and spirit. But bank regulators have not yet reached a sufficient level of comfort with this new strategy.
Seattle Neighborhood Planning
At first glance, the Neighborhood Planning Program in Seattle, Washington, sounds like a remarkably progressive idea. Begun in 1995, the program is one of many across the country that have […]
Defensible Space
In the Five Oaks community of Dayton, Ohio, during 1991, violent crimes increased by 77 percent, robberies by 77 percent, vandalism by 38 percent, and overall crime by 16 percent. […]