Shelter Shorts—The Week in Community Development, April 20
NIMBYs, YIMBYs, PHIMBYs-Oh My! | Can Algorithms Make Equitable Cities? | Retail Segregation Takes a Toll | E.R. Visits and "Tough" Neighborhoods | Enough Innovation Already | More...
Civil Rights Organizations on Hurricane Relief Efforts
Throughout what we know will be a long recovery over the coming weeks, months, and years, Shelterforce hopes to share the stories of the...
Time to Move On: Families Facing Foreclosure Need Better Solutions than HAMP
More than one million Latino families have either lost or will soon lose their homes. In California, Hispanic-owned homes account for nearly half of...
Kelo v. Sotomayor
Kelo v. New London remains a sticky subject. (Ongoing debate in Shelterforce and Rooflines is proof of that.) The 2005 Supreme Court case that...
Stop the Foreclosures. Save the Economy
It is true that the economic well-being of our nation is in jeopardy and that consumer confidence and liquidity is badly needed in order...
Integration as a Means of Combating Inequality
A review of books that delve into the harmful and far-reaching effects of racial segregation and solutions that integration measures can provide.
Shiller’s “Continuous-Workout Mortgages” Won’t Address the Crux of the Problem
Robert Shiller in an article in The New York Times
proposed a more flexible home mortgage that he argues would help prevent crises...
The Financial Stability Plan
This morning, Treasury Secy. Timothy Geithner announced the Financial Stability Plan, geared to revive the banking system by way “attack our credit crisis on...
The Russert Factor
How important was Tim Russert to presidential politics? Certainly he was a central figure in the news coverage in the 2008 cycle, and let’s...
California’s New Environmental Movement
How communities of color, using health and jobs as rallying cries, took on Big Oil -- and won!
What the Fight for Universal Rent Control in New York Can Learn from Prop...
Voters have set up an unprecedented fight between progressive housing groups and real estate interests. It will be a brutal fight. For proof of this, housing advocates in New York need only to look at California.
CHA Back in Charge
After 23 years, the Chicago housing authority is no longer in receivership. The court-ordered receivership had placed administrative duties in the hands of a...
You Don’t Support Our Transit, But We Should Support Your Highway?
Overcoming pleas that such a measure will destroy small businesses – just as similar measures apparently have destroyed all small businesses in...
Candidate (and Tenant) Perry’s Housing Record
In June, Rooflines published a piece by Kevin Jewell, a consultant for the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service outlining Texas Governor Rick Perry’s...
Occupied Owner
For decades, the United States government, pushed by its business partners in the financial and real estate world, "marched the nation into a delusion." The fantasy is that we can create wealth for millions of homeowners by enriching investors, brokerage and mortgage companies and Wall Street bankers "to the fullest extent possible with few boundaries."
Senator Kennedy’s Awful Diagnosis
Oof—Bad sucker punch from the cosmos on Tuesday.
We all saw the worrisome weekend news about Senator Edward Kennedy’s seizure, but it was followed by...
Philanthropy Needs to Step Up and Fund Democracy
Ascertaining how much foundation money supports civic engagement, voter registration and mobilization, and related community organizing activities is damn near...
Interview with Mayor Ivy Taylor, San Antonio, Texas
The first African-American mayor of the largely Latino and Anglo city, and strongly identified as an urban planner, Taylor casts herself as someone interested more in getting work done than leaving a political legacy. However, she has not shied away from controversial positions, and her initial position that she would not be running for re-election fell by the wayside as she announced her candidacy on February 16, less than two weeks after this interview.
How CRA Can Promote Integration in Gentrifying Neighborhoods
Gentrification—the process of neighborhood demographic and economic change in which middle- and upper-income people move into lower-income neighborhoods, increasing...
Interview: Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity John Trasviña
The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is dealing with an evolving set of discrimination challenges facing families, changes in the very definition of "family," and the political realities of the 112th Congress. Trasviña is no stranger to this balancing act.