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Shelter Shorts: Community Development News

Supreme Court Family Values If you live in public housing and a member of your family is using drugs – whether you know about it...

Target: Problem Properties

Photo Courtesy of HANDS, Inc. For 12 years the building at 151 Chapman Street (above) stood vacant on a prominent corner, a menacing landmark that...

Affordable Forever: Community Land Trusts

Communities across the country have taken up the CLT model to confront challenges from gentrification and sprawl to pollution and abandoned housing.

So You Want to Be a Developer: Community Organizing Groups Consider...

The second week of October 2001 was a busy one for Nobel Neighbors, a community organizing group in Chicago’s West Humboldt Park neighborhood. It...

Ten Things to Consider Before Getting into Real Estate Development

1. Check the fit: Values. Have a frank discussion about the values and practices that are most important to your group. Which of those...

Going the Other Way: Adding Organizing to Development

Some groups move in the opposite direction from Nobel Neighbors, starting out with a development focus and adding in organizing for the same reasons...

The Spirit of Rural Community Development, by Nelda K. Pearson

Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia everyone knows the saying, “You can tell when times are hard. The gardens get bigger.” Although...

Over My Dead Body

In the weeks after September 11, there was much talk of a revival of popular respect for government, of a renewed sense of public...

Shelter Shorts: Community Development News

Big Victory in L.A. Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn has unveiled a plan calling for the creation of a $100 million trust fund to...

Fundraising: Federal Funding for Community Economic Development

Seeking federal funds for community economic development involves dealing with constantly changing sources, new programs and the need to think creatively. Office of Community Services Some...

Place Matters (Dreier, Mollenkopf, Swanstrom)

Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, by Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 2001. 334 pp. This...

Housing Needs a Champion

HUD budget woes are nothing new. Federal budget authority for low-income housing assistance took a deep plunge in the early 1980s, and ever since,...

Organizing with the State on Your Side

In California, municipalities are required by law to plan for their fair share of affordable housing. Has this put housing advocates out of a...