Interviews

We heard about Ed Nakawatase and Tamio Wakayama's experiences as volunteers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the American civil rights movement, and the extraordinariness of their witness to the history happening at the time compelled us to pursue a conversation.

An interview with Mona Mangat, vice president of safety and justice initiatives at LISC. We talked with Mona Mangat, vice president of safety and justice initiatives at LISC,

Editors of sat down recently with John Atlas, NHI board president and author of Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group, to discuss the organization itself, as well as organizing on a national level, tensions between organizing and development, and lessons learned from the downfall of the once-powerful antipoverty organization.

A pilot study on housing vulnerability has identified over 50 different housing tenures, each with different degrees of legal protection, political and advocacy support, and with very different types of risk.

Six regional and state housing advocates discuss the connections between uprisings over racial injustice, the pandemic, and the need for housing security.

The data on the relationship between new development, affordability, and displacement is not nearly as clear-cut as advocates (of all persuasions) often imply.

In those exhausting and frightening days right after the election in November, I had the good fortune to catch Rinku Sen for a few minutes at the end of a long day of her organization’s biannual Facing Race conference. Though she must have been running on next to no sleep by that point, Sen was insightful, earnest, and eager to talk about the road ahead.

Shelterforce got a chance to speak with Secretary Julian Castro about some of the current ways in which he’s working to make HUD a force for good in people’s lives, and what steps there are left to be taken.

As home prices continue to fall, the notion that the real estate market will allow for lower-income families to secure affordable housing increases. But it's not so cut and dried. How much a home costs is only one of many factors when determining affordability. In March 2012, Shelterforce hosted a roundtable discussion featuring leading research and policy experts to explore those various components of affordability looking at just how the housing crisis changed the affordable housing landscape in the United States.

The Regional Affordable & Fair Housing Roundtable pulled off something that has often been elusive—building enough trust between fair housing advocates and place-based community developers to lead to their signing on to a joint agenda.

Crowley has led the organization through dramatic times, keeping a focus on those with the most pressing housing need when many wanted to just talk homeownership.

Several national organizations in the community development field have experienced transitions from white leadership to people of color.

A conversation with an NCRC senior research analyst about the organization's report on gentrification, what its findings show and don’t show, and what the policy implications might be.

An Interview with Chokwe Lumumba, mayor of Jackson, Mississippi

Emily Benfer talks about what needs to change in our housing and eviction systems—not just now, but once the pandemic is past, the connections between health and housing, and how she came to be a go-to voice on the eviction crisis.

Wendy R. Sherman was recently appointed President and CEO of the Fannie Mae Foundation, as part of a significant expansion and restructuring that will...

The question of integrating affordable housing units required by inclusionary zoning on-site versus allowing developers to pay a fee to locate them off-site has long been a contentious one.

Perhaps the most well-known secretary since HUD's inception, Secretary Cuomo has made much of his efforts to rebuild HUD and restore Congressional and public faith in the department. A year into Cuomo's term, Congress and the media are slowly beginning to show signs of acknowledging that housing and urban development issues are worth at least a small degree of attention.

Xavier de Souza Briggs, Associate Director for General Government Programs at the White House Office of Management and Budget has a portfolio that includes HUD, Treasury, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, and Homeland Security departments, as well as the U.S. Postal Service and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All of these make a direct and profound impact in the community development world.

Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the house Financial Services Committee, sits down with Shelterforce to discuss consumer protection, the future of Fannie and Freddie, the role of FHA, and rental housing and offers a challenge to advocates looking to effect change on the federal level.