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Proposed Federal Rule Would Undercut Fannie and Freddie’s Duty to Serve Underserved Markets
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is proposing to significantly change how it enforces Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s duty to serve underserved mortgage markets. Comments from the public are due July 24.
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CDFIs: Bridging the Poverty Gap
Each year, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday prompts people to reflect on Dr. King’s life and legacy. By achieving passage of civil rights and voting rights legislation, the actions of King and others compelled a sharp decline in the blatant discrimination and wanton violence that had permeated the nation for generations. However, today, five […]
“Workforce Housing” Is an Insulting Term
So folks, we need to have a chat about this whole “workforce housing” thing. It’s a problem. Or rather, the way it is often being used these days is a problem, which is as shorthand for housing for people who aren’t really low-income, but are still having trouble affording housing in a hot market.
The Dangerous Rhetoric of Escaping to Opportunity
There’s a danger, and a disrespect, in assuming the fair housing/mobility cause must rely on portraits of “war zones” to win.
The False Choice Between Mobility and Community Development
What is it about community development that it constantly seems to be posited in a binary set of choices that aren’t really and don’t have to be choices, and that […]
7 Policies That Could Prevent Gentrification
The following are seven policy initiatives that could be part of a community stabilization agenda using smart growth and equitable investments to prevent or mitigate gentrification in Roxbury and other at-risk neighborhoods in Boston.
Better Business, Better Food…Better Community?
At a grand opening for a new retail market operated by a farm family, celebrants posed for a group photo on the sidewalk and cheered as the farmer remarked on […]
It’s Our Race Relations, Not the Economy, that Need Healing
Last Thursday, I was listening to Bruce Katz on NPR talk about Detroit’s recent bankruptcy and the set of metropolitan-oriented strategies/practices that he thinks represents the way forward for the […]
Collective Empowerment or an Invitation to Vigilantes?
Jeremy Liu’s post on combining “proactive” and “protective” services to both give people a greater sense of agency and help control costs for municipal budgets was an opening to discuss […]
Can Community Development Solve the Municipal Budget Crisis?
Oakland, Calif., like many cities, is beginning an annual or biennial budget process and coming to terms with the stark realities of structural problems with its municipal budget. An overwhelming […]
How Do You Respond? Section 8 and Crime
In 2008, a sensationalistic article in The Atlantic tried to draw a causal connection between tenants with housing assistance vouchers being dispersed from demolished public housing in Memphis and increased […]
Defending Progressive State Housing and Land Use Policies
The fates of three venerable policies on fair share housing and sustainable land use can point the way for how to support similar efforts in other states.
Learning From Mount Laurel
In the suburb whose exclusive zoning led to New Jersey’s fair share affordable housing law, new research explores what the affordable housing finally built there has meant to the town, and to the people who have gotten to move there.