Archives

Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement

Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement. In most cities, public...

Back From the Brink

Few cities have had as rough a time adapting to post-industrial life as Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city’s core textile and shoe factories started leaving...

Restoring Neighborhoods, Rebuilding Markets

Richmond, Virginia, is offering soft loans to “urban pioneers” willing to buy, fix up and move into a vacant house in the city’s Jackson...

Back to Court

The big fair housing news of 2005 is a new federal court ruling in Thompson v. HUD, the Baltimore public housing desegregation class action...

Challenging Ourselves

Let’s start by saying what isn’t said often enough. Affordable housing and community development practitioners and advocates have done extraordinary work for many decades....

Shelter Shorts

A Different Twist on Equal Opportunity Housing officials in Berkeley, California, were surprised recently to be told they might be favoring African-Americans over people...

A Neighborhood in Brooklyn Says “No” to Worker Exploitation

A language barrier, I believe, has muddled my conversation with Nieves Padilla. “We’re fighting to get the workers on Knickerbocker Avenue the minimum wage,”...

The Local-Global Grassroots Connection

Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital, by James DeFilippis. Routledge, 2004. 188 pp. $24.95 (paperback). Contours of Descent, by Robert Pollin....

In Memoriam: Cushing Dolbeare

Cushing N. Dolbeare, founder and chair emeritus of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, died March 17 of cancer at her home in Mitchellville,...

Advocates for Healthy Housing

As public health and housing activists recognized a century ago when they fought for stronger sanitation and health codes, poorly maintained housing causes serious...