Seattle Takes Ownership of Its Displacement Challenge
Seattle is tackling displacement by aiming to reduce the systemic and structural barriers in connecting marginalized populations to opportunity.
What Is the Future of the Black Urban Middle Neighborhood?
What does the future hold for urban Black middle and working class neighborhoods in cities, and is there any way to shape it?
How to Fight Vacancy? Do It All
The fight against vacancy in Youngstown, Ohio, shows us that we shouldn’t rely on a single strategy—everything is needed at once.
Shelter Shorts, The Week in Community Development—Aug. 24
Philly's Fight for Affordable Housing | HUD Targets Facebook In Complaint| An Eviction App | A "Massive" Multifamily Housing Fraud
The Tenacity of Dysfunction
The word resilience has different meanings in different fields. In the field of material science, it refers to the ability of a material to regain its shape after it has been stressed. A rubber...
Tenant Power: Organizing for Rent Strikes and Landlord Negotiations
In the face of high rent increases and substandard housing, many tenants are realizing they are not alone in their landlord troubles and are joining together to push for building-level wins, and policy change.
The Two Vacancy Crises in America’s Cities
Vacant properties are a serious problem in two kinds of neighborhoods. To address them, we need to know which kind we’re looking at.
Why Do Low-Income Residents Oppose Development Even When Displacement Risk Is Low?
There’s more than one way to be excluded from your community.
A Continued Sense of Place in the South Bronx
Last year, Shelterforce featured an article about preserving a sense of history in the South Bronx amid years of demolition and redevelopment. The article, written by Nancy Biberman, director of the Women’s Housing &...
Gentrification Is More Widespread Than We Think
In Miriam Axel-Lute’s recent post here, “Place Matters But Place Changes,” she references “a study done by Governing magazine that found a 20 percent gentrification rate for census tracts in the past decade in...
Can We Curb Crime by Cleaning the Corner?
As communities discuss reeling in their police departments, Flint, Michigan and Binghamton, New York have turned to another tool to reduce crime.
Do Developers Know They’ll Get Old, Too?
Mid-July marked the 20th anniversary of more than 700 Chicagoans dying in a heat wave. When the temperature peaked at 106 degrees on July 13, 1995, it was mostly the poor and the elderly...
Detroit as a Test Site of the Green Future
Recently a group of planners, including long-time NHI researcher Alan Mallach, visited Detroit to survey the city’s vast vacant spaces and make recommendations on how to re-organize the city for...
Two Paths to Density: Profit vs People
As communities across the country begin promoting density to address the affordable housing crisis, they must grapple with how that housing will be built, and for whom.
Interview with George McCarthy, President of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
After 14 years at the Ford Foundation, George "Mac" McCarthy became the fifth president of the 41-year-old Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Sustainable for Whom? Large-Scale Sustainable Urban Development Projects and “Environmental Gentrification”
Absent a fundamentally new approach to redevelopment planning that places housing affordability at the center of the process, large-scale sustainable development projects are likely to become engines of what has been termed “environmental gentrification.”
Where Community Is at Work Making Itself
Creating and proctecting third places in low-income communities. A conversation with May Louie, Neeraj Mehta, Ken Reardon, and Chuck Wolfe.
The Dangers of Being an “Armchair” Anything
The East Side Commercial Historic District is an enclave of historic structures representing a fascinating cross-section of Milwaukee’s eastern commercial development history. The district comprises three city blocks filled with roughly 40...
Gentrification and the “Slums of Beverly Hills”
In 1998, when Slums of Beverly Hills was released, I lived in West Los Angeles, relatively near (in LA terms, at least) Beverly Hills. I never saw the movie...
Heard and Not Forgotten
What started out as a "weird art project" in Toronto is
providing aural illustrations into a northern New Jersey community's past, and, organizers hope, laying the groundwork for the future.