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This is a project you truly have to see to believe. Artist Matthew Mazzotta, the Coleman Center for the Arts, and community in York, Alabama,...

When the conversations surrounding the Michael Brown and and Eric Garner cases were at their strongest late last year, Shelterforce conducted a survey, asking our readers how they felt about the relationship between law enforcement and the communities in which they work and live. The answers we received ran the spectrum, from “Police presence is […]

The new Congress will be enacting major new legislation, and it's vital that community development leaders retain our tenacious optimism as we move forward.

Andrew Cuomo, HUD Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development, served as founder and president of H.E.L.P., the nation's largest provider of transitional housing...

Shelterforce is graciously allowing me to weigh in on a current topic of debate within the field of “shared equity homeownership” or “permanently affordable...

If you think what's wrong with CDCs today is their failure to “go to scale,” you are looking in the fundamentally wrong direction, asking...

The conversation about gentrification continually repackages a set of debunked theories as reality and it obscures a set of real crises that need fixing.

What local government can do to support new, more inclusive economic models.

It's time for organizers to take their boxing gloves off, for developers to take their hard hats off, and for funders to come out from behind their desks, to begin a serious dialogue about how organizing can be integrated into – and, yes, drive – community development strategies.

How a Denver organization intends to create a 9-mile art-, health-, and heritage-themed bike and pedestrian trail that will feature authentic cultural expression.

The reconciliation that takes place Thursday mornings at Philadelphia City Hall is not some attempt to further prove that Philadelphia is the City of...

Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use” praises people who jump right in to whatever work needs to be done, passing buckets of water...

The 1994 elections are history. Newt is on a tight leash, the Contract on America is losing in the polls, and Clinton and Dole...

Living in substandard housing affects your mental health as well, several studies have found.

The 30 percent standard only ‘works’ in calculations where it is irrelevant. The residual-income approach, on the other hand, can turn what all too often becomes an abstract and theoretical discussion into a series of researchable questions.

What follows is a discussion of the important, parallel elements that emerged from the six successful cases in this report, from NHI's conference, from...

San Francisco Bay Area voters approved bold new investments in 2016 after housing advocates--part of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California--ignited a successful electoral strategy for the general election. Here's how it worked.

As we prepared this issue, the term "philanthropic equity" kept surfacing. What is this new concept in philanthropy, and how is it different from both traditional grantmaking and program-related investments? In December we gathered a group of people from foundations and nonprofit intermediaries to explore the concept, its promises and pitfalls.

We first met Darren Walker about 15 years ago while planning an issue on faith-based development. Darren was the chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the storied community development arm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. We asked Darren to write an article that was not simply a cheerleader’s promotion of church-based CDCs, but a realistic assessment of the benefits and challenges to an institution embarking on that path.

Darren was optimistic and enthusiastic about the work he was doing at Abyssinian creating hundreds of units of affordable housing in Harlem. But he was pragmatic and realistic also. His article encouraged organizations to temper the enthusiasm necessary to even consider this work with a realistic analysis of an organization’s capacities and a clear-eyed examination of their assumptions about the rewards of creating a CDC.

Darren approached his work enthusiastically, I think, because he had visceral understanding of the challenges low-income folks had and the opportunities that were available to them with the right help. The kind of help that the stability of an affordable home could provide. His understanding came from personal experience that would inform his work wherever it took him, from law school to international finance, from a storefront afterschool program and Abyssinian to the Rockefeller and Ford foundations.

When we sat down with Darren on March 18 to conduct this interview, we were glad to see that enthusiasm, optimism, and pragmatism were as strong as ever as he starts his leadership of one of the world’s largest foundations.

Six years after Prop HHH was passed, the fund appears to be delivering on its housing construction goals in the 10-year timeline, but the measure is being routinely criticized on all sides for delays, rising costs, and being an inadequate fix to LA’s homelessness crisis.