Whatever Happened to ...

In 2018, Shelterforce wrote about the Center for Community Progress’s recommendations for tax reform in West Virginia to address vacancy. Guided by CCP’s suggestions, the state auditor’s office has recently passed two laws to change its tax sales process and keep properties in use.

Shelterforce checks in on three communities that have passed policies giving tenants and nonprofits first dibs on purchasing property. Are these policies keeping residents in their homes?

Minneapolis voters gave their city council the power to enact rent control by ordinance. Two years later, the future of rent control is still in limbo.

The Missoula City-County Health Department is working to expand health equity through a full-time government position, five years after a health initiative brought new sidewalks to low-income neighborhoods.

Louisiana sued thousands of homeowners for not following the rules in how they spent recovery grants. After a joint news investigation, the governor announced that the state won’t try to collect the money.

Two years ago, Philadelphia officials agreed to give 59 vacant buildings to homeless advocates. The historic deal has faced several setbacks, but is still moving forward.

More affordable housing projects approved, new funding for scattered-site improvements for substandard housing, and talks about replicating the program beyond the Garden State.

In our next installment, we take a look at some positive outcomes—what happened with affordable housing on transit-owned land, cooperative agency work in Massachusetts that helped at-risk people, and the Minneapolis tenants who were facing eviction after court wins against their landlord.

The Road Home program was supposed to help thousands of families rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina. Instead, $33 million was left undistributed, and now the Louisiana Office of Community Development is suing homeowners who couldn’t rebuild.

Community land trusts, better known for permanently affordable housing, expand into commercial spaces for a wide range of reasons, and in a wide range of ways.

It was a decade ago when the Atlanta BeltLine partnership set a goal of creating almost 6,000 units of affordable housing, as well as a collaborative of land trusts. What’s happened since? Did the partnership achieve its intended goals?

More than $10 billion in private financing has been invested in public housing thanks to the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. But housing advocates say it comes at a cost, and there still isn’t enough oversight of the program.