Housing

Four disability activists tell us what they needed to make their homes accessible, and how difficult it can be to find accessible housing.

Facing 25 to 50 percent rent increases, tenants at two apartment towers fought to get the city to enforce its longstanding rent control ordinance. A year later, they earned a win that could result in millions being paid back to them in rent overpayments.

Last year, we reported on tenants in Northern Virginia LIHTC properties whose rents were raised in the middle of their leases. Here’s how other states have banned the practice.

Three years after our initial story, aggressive investors are still suing LIHTC general partners to profit off of what should be affordable housing. But one legal decision, along with proposed legislation, could help protect the right of first refusal.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is famously complex. We can’t exactly make it simple, but we’ve broken down the basics, especially those that residents of a LIHTC property might want to know, as clearly as possible.

Housing and policy experts agree that LIHTC has successfully increased the supply of affordable housing. But they also believe there’s room for improvement.

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.

Memphis is struggling with a dwindling population, driven in part by a high crime rate and disinvestment in low-income areas of the city. What are local organizations doing to turn this around?

LIHTC developers must follow strict affordability rules—and fulfill other promises—for at least 30 years. While industry insiders insist compliance rates are high, tenant advocates say noncompliance is a real problem.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit was created in a moment when other real estate tax preferences were going away—but at the time, no one expected it to grow into the main source of affordable housing finance in the country.

Dawn Kelly, founder of the New York-based healthy food and beverage restaurant The Nourish Spot, chats with Shelterforce’s Schlonn Hawkins about the connection between entrepreneurship, housing, building communities, and more.

Neighborhoods on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro face a multitude of challenges, including social and racial inequity, and a lack of public services. This organization is hoping to prove that solar energy can benefit neighborhoods, lower electric bills, and provide jobs.