Issue #173

Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted Out Cities,
by Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D. New Village Press, 2013, 333pp. $19.95 (paper).

Edge of Albany: A Warren Crow Mystery,
by Kirby White. Fox Creek Press, 2012. 218pp. $20 (paper).

Those charged with redeveloping one of New Orleans’s Big 4 public housing developments faced an extreme version of nearly every challenge that public housing redevelopment struggles with. and while it wasn’t perfect, they took their responsibilities to work with the residents seriously, and learned some lessons to share with others.

Institution-based community organizations tackle the challenges of the new millennium at the local, state, and national level

CLTs can and should include their renters, not just their homeowners, in governance and wealth-building.

It’s time to take factory-built homes seriously as affordable housing.

Despite some new reforms, low-income households buying homes outside the traditional mortgage market are still at tremendous risk—and often legal limbo.

As afforable housing developments age, managing and preserving them, both physically and financially, while neighborhoods change and energy costs rise is becoming a key concern for community developers. Here’s how one group in Philly is taking that on.

Connecticut experiments with a “megacommunity strategic simulation” to move the needle on residential energy efficiency—providing a look at a tool that could also apply to other community development challenges.

Partnerships between utility companies and affordable rental housing owners are ripe for development, when the right switch is flipped.

Across the water from Manhattan, this once working class city has experienced dramatic economic growth—but the rising tide did not lift all boats.

A legacy of racial strife hangs over Little Rock, Arkansas, the city internationally known for the 1957 Central High School Crisis, in which an angry mob threatened the Little Rock […]

Low-income residents transform their complex into a community of choice through ownership—without importing higher-income neighbors

Memphis has knocked down all but one of its public housing complexes — and the housing authority assumed that a Choice Neighborhoods grant would be license to demolish the last one. But the community had a different idea.

If you work in any field for a substantial amount of time, you will hear certain story lines and beliefs repeated over and over. For example: public housing towers are […]