Enterprise Community Impact Note
Enterprise Community Loan Fund created the Enterprise Community Impact Note in 2010 with the goal of raising $50 million from impact investors. By systematically...
Lessons Learned from Harmony Oaks Redevelopment
You can do good work even in a devastated city, but you have to build an alternate set of systems until the regular systems...
Who Owns That Vacant Building? Scan the Art to Find Out
In a brilliant mash up of classic protest/beautifying strategies and state-of-the-art data management, artists are painting murals on abandoned Baltimore buildings . . ....
Flowers Follow
Sometimes all a vacant lot needs to become a community hub is for someone to know who owns it and who can turn over the keys.
Hanging on to the Land
Community gardens and urban agriculture are crucial gathering places—and revitalizing forces—in neighborhoods with lots of vacancy and low values. But what happens to them when the market turns around?
Claiming Space
Community-driven art projects are helping to define and reshape neighborhood spaces in Philadelphia.
Not Just for School Kids
All across our communities are wonderful parks, fields, and playgrounds … behind locked fences, or marked with big warning signs that they are only...
Ballin’ at the graveyard
The documentary Ballin’ at the Graveyard looks at the hardball culture and strong supportive ties between players that have brought two generations of...
The Case of NYCHA’s Disappearing Open Space
What looks to a public housing authority like “unused development rights” often looks to public housing residents like important gathering places.
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.
Update: Atlanta Beltline
In our Winter 2010 issue, we published a series of articles about the Atlanta Beltline, a rail loop surrounded by multiuse trails that is...
Our World Revolved Around Our Block
From when I was 10 to when I was 16, my mother and I lived in a diverse working-class neighborhood of single-family attached brownstone...
Parking Lots to Craft Fairs
I am always surprised by how few Nashvillians actually grew up here like I did. A lot of people have moved here over the...
HUD Regs Change May Hurt Local Housing Groups
Even before the much discussed (and critiqued) Washington Post “exposé” on the federal HOME program in 2011, HUD officials were purportedly concerned that too...
Safe Havens
I grew up in a low- to moderate-income community in a single-parent-headed household. For a time my mother was working three jobs to sustain...
A Tree and a House
Abingdon, Maryland, 1988: Newly constructed townhomes nestled amidst remnant woodland created my ideal third space as a five year old: the setting for a...
596 Acres creates tools to help neighbors “Find the lot of their lives” by:
making municipal information about vacant public land available online through a searchable map and on the ground by placing signs that explain a lot’s...
Public Housing, Private Property
1070 Washington Avenue in the Morrisania section of the Bronx sounds like just another address, but it’s notable for being the home of a...
Picking Up Acorn’s Pieces
The loss of ACORN and changes in election laws could keep young people from voting in 2012. Will community-based efforts to engage young, disenfranchised voters fill the vacuum?
Who Owns Our Neighborhoods?
Outside investors are buying up foreclosed properties in Oakland, Calif., at a rate that not only has Oakland residents uneasy, but has also raised...