Healthy Housing

What makes a home habitable? What makes habitability laws successful? In this webinar, an organizer in New Orleans and a representative from a nonprofit working with communities across the country affected by vacancy and abandonment share their perspectives.

A Massachusetts initiative uncovers how fragmented programs make healthy homes harder to achieve—and helps local leaders reduce the friction.

A program started in Roswell, New Mexico, has gone statewide. Here’s how Rehab-2-Rental works, and what’s to come.

An architect’s guide to affordable housing design that goes beyond the baseline.

The Healthy Homes Ordinance is supposed to help fix New Orleans’s deteriorating rental housing stock. But three years in, many “certified habitable” apartments still have leaking roofs, black mold, and dangerous heat. What went wrong?

Whether your home is safe and suitable for healthy living depends on a variety of factors. Shelterforce puts habitability under the lens to show how problems like inadequate heating, water damage, and pest infestations negatively affect your health and further exacerbate the housing crisis.

In New York state, tenants can now take landlords to court to force repairs and get damages, without withholding rent first. Here’s how one of the first tests of the new law worked.

A hub for health care, social services, and community, the Mino-Bimaadiziwin apartments meet the unique needs of urban Native Americans while enriching the surrounding community.

Adding more credits and making tweaks do not actually address some of the major weaknesses of the program. We should be bolder.

Researchers found that older homeowners in St. Louis averaged $13,000 in unmet home repairs. Here’s how advocates can measure home repair need in their own cities, and why repairs make a difference.

Landlord-tenant relations are governed by a mix of laws at all levels of government and can vary a lot.

Shelterforce recently hosted a conversation about how to fight, and win, against corporate landlords and their extractive business models. Watch the video or read the transcript.