The Community Land Trust Movement Imagines Its Future
The 50th anniversary of New Communities was an opportunity for celebration and reflection—some of it critical—about the CLT movement.
Small Numbers, Great Expectations: A Case for Rural Investment
“Drop dead” wasn’t an acceptable answer to urban decay in the 1970s. And it isn’t the right answer for struggling rural areas today.
New Communities Inc. at 50: Thoughts on Identity and A Different Way Forward
The story of the nation's very first land trust shows that sometimes it takes people who have been repeatedly left out of systems to shake us into remembering to aim big, consider new strategies, and leave no one behind.
To Address Displacement in Your Community, Start by Asking, “Who’s Financing It?”
While developers, tech companies, and greedy landlords are often cited as the usual suspects driving the housing crisis, one group is often overlooked: the banks that finance the deals.
Creative Ways to Finance Agriculture
In Montana, small family farms are disappearing at an alarming rate, and farmers and ranchers are unable to compete with giant agriculture mergers. But there are several ways to help improve the farmland accessibility issue.
Evaluating a Program’s Health Outcomes
The Health Outcomes Demonstration Project, a partnership between Success Measures at NeighborWorks America and Enterprise Community Partners, helped organizations measure their programs’ impact on residents’ health.
How Successful is Your County in Accessing Community Development Funding?
some communities in the United States seem much better than others at attracting grants and financing for community development—even after adjusting for their relative needs. Here are some of the surprising trends:
Are We Diluting the Mission of Community Land Trusts?
CLTs’ dependence on external grant funding to acquire land and maintain their operations make them particularly susceptible to mission drift. Coming in with this knowledge, organizers may still be able to use the tool adequately or opt for other collective land ownership strategy.
Is Success Making CDFIs Too Risk-Averse?
Shelterforce's Miriam Axel-Lute in conversation with Ed Gorman of NCRC on whether community development financial institutions (CDFIs) are taking enough risk, and therefore, falling short of their mission.
Getting to the Heart of the Opioid Crisis
In some ways, dealing with the opioid epidemic is a natural fit for community development groups. At the heart, it’s often a problem of poverty: a lack of jobs and opportunities. Here's how CDCs are using their skills to address the crisis.
A Health Insurer and a CDC Collaborate to Move the Needle on Housing and...
David Adame of Chicanos Por La Causa, and Joe Guadio of UnitedHealthcare talk about the value of addressing social determinants and lessons they’ve learned.
How to Temper the Influence of Private Equity in Manufactured Housing
The risk of onerous lot rent increases and the fear of eviction are more threatening than ever as private equity enters the manufactured housing market.
It Doesn’t Matter if Your Neighborhood Is Going to Eventually Gentrify
“We could use some gentrification here.” Let's never say this—we must refrain from debating the long-term likelihood of gentrification in distressed places.
Nonprofit Centers: Hubs for Connection and Collaboration
To understand nonprofit centers and how they achieve their impact, it’s helpful to think of them in layers: the building as an asset, the building as a program, and the building as a platform for collaboration.
Prioritizing Inclusion and Equity in the Next Generation of Mixed-Income Communities
An introduction to a new series of essays on mixed income communities that will comprise the fifth volume in the San Francisco Fed's 'What Works' series.
Investment Without Displacement: From Slogan to Strategy
How investments can be leveraged to ensure residents get to stay in their communities and reap the benefits of new amenities and increased accessibility.
Using Theater to Envision Racial Equity Solutions
Techniques from the arts world can help us envision and re-envision relationships and systems to spot stress points and opportunities within communities.
Can Using a Racial Equity Lens Increase Capital in Communities of Color?
If CDFIs adopted traditional appraisal standards to determine loan amounts, they'd make very few loans in the communities they were founded to serve.
“So, what do you do?” How to Have Conversations about Homelessness
Conversations about homelessness with those outside the field’s bubble can be exhausting, but there are several strategies and techniques that can help steer the conversation in a productive way.
The Rural Difference in Natural Disasters
There are distinct differences between natural disaster response and recovery in rural and urban communities. How can community-based organizations better respond to disasters and help rural communities prepare before disaster strikes?