Issue #171

Using vacancies to create neighborhood-based third spaces could change our urban landscape for the better.

Housing first, yes, but then services, recreation, education: These are all pillars to building strong communities, and most importantly, strong people.

New revisions to HOME regulations would require CHDOs to have someone with housing development experience on staff.

How Non-Minority Students Also Benefit from Racially Diverse Schools, by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley.National Coalition of School Diversity Research Brief #8, October 2012.

Nashville holds—and supports—a diverse, creative community that adds as much value to our city as the musicians and songwriters for which we are better known.

When Oakland residents raised hell about trashed foreclosed houses harming their neighborhoods, the city got on board and changed the way it handles code violations on bank-owned properties.

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 row houses in Waterbury, Connecticut (the […]

In our Winter 2010 issue, we published a series of articles about the Atlanta Beltline, a rail loop surrounded by multiuse trails that is the country’s largest public transit infrastructure […]

America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy, by Gar Alperovitz. 2nd edition, Democracy Collaborative, 2011, 372 pp. $11.53 (paper).

Creating and proctecting third places in low-income communities. A conversation with May Louie, Neeraj Mehta, Ken Reardon, and Chuck Wolfe.

What looks to a public housing authority like “unused development rights” often looks to public housing residents like important gathering places.

How two CDCs added school reform to their agendas.

The documentary Ballin’ at the Graveyard looks at the hardball culture and strong supportive ties between players that have brought two generations of men out to the same Albany, N.Y., […]

Several years ago, the family-owned florist two buildings down from my house closed. There was great consternation in the neighborhood about what would happen to the building, which turned out […]

All across our communities are wonderful parks, fields, and playgrounds … behind locked fences, or marked with big warning signs that they are only for use by supervised school children […]

Community-driven art projects are helping to define and reshape neighborhood spaces in Philadelphia.

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?

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.

When a small U.K. village’s pub closed, a group that had formed to create affordable housing found itself launching a campaign to form a community-owned business and save a community gathering space as well.

To create a great third place, one of the most important principles is to let users make it their own.

Like so many of its counterparts across the country, Brick’s is more than just a barbershop in Albany, N.Y. It’s a haven in a troubled neighborhood.