The post-ACORN world of organizing.
The 2008 presidential campaign showed us another side of volunteering. It drew literally millions of people, many for the first time, into the electoral process. But beyond political campaigns, can volunteerism provide increased capacity for communities and community organizations?
In the November 1999 issue of Shelterforce, Ralph Nader wrote: A study released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) last month found that consolidation in the banking industry just between the years of 1990 and 1997 had “increased the risk of insurance fund insolvency by 50 percent.” The report warned that the risk had […]
The Community Land Trust Reader, edited by John Emmeus Davis. Lincoln Institute, 2010, 616 pp. $35 (paper).
London CITIZENS fights for permanently affordable housing in the shadow of the Olympics.
After a brief, shining moment following the 2008 Republican National Convention, when it seemed community organizers would rule the country, they are now back on the defensive.
Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the house Financial Services Committee, sits down with Shelterforce to discuss consumer protection, the future of Fannie and Freddie, the role of FHA, and rental housing and offers a challenge to advocates looking to effect change on the federal level.
A controversial, 17-acre expansion of Columbia University’s Harlem campus received a nod from the New York Court of Appeals, which overturned a lower court decision, tentatively allowing the university to pursue a $6.3 billion development in facilities for science and health-care research, along with housing and amenities. The ruling allows the state to deem the […]
Facing financial difficulties as new technology takes customers away, the United States Postal Service reviewed 3,300 branches to find those that could be deemed disposable. In low-income communities, just how disposable are the final 162?
We expect the “solutions” to social problems to be found within the community, and yet community groups, more often than not, work beyond their communities’ boundaries. Why? Because they see the reality that if social and economic justice are to be realized in a community, then changes that are larger than the community must take place.
As housing advocates, policy analysts, and tenant organizers have examined PETRA, they have found concerns that need to be aired.
Organizing has been under attack for years, but this time around, the media has been directly complicit in severely damaging one of most influential advocates for low- and moderate-income families in the country. How did the media miss the real story behind the assault on ACORN?
Pressure has been building for a long time against the red tape and inflexibility of the agency that implements New Jersey’s landmark fair share housing policy. Can the spirit of Mount Laurel survive the backlash against the details?
First it was the Office of Urban Policy. Then, at the time of its launch in 2009, it quietly turned into the Office of Urban Affairs: a small, but interesting name change. Its director, Adolfo Carrion, the former Bronx borough president once rumored to be in the running for HUD secretary before President Obama tapped […]
The success of a Cleveland-based community organizing group in the face of massive foreclosures suggests that the city (and the nation) should have held on to a more diverse set of community organizations.
A few years ago, we warned that lenders, particularly GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would take punitive measures on people who made strategic defaults on their homes, and it looks like that’s where things are heading. Fannie Mae has announced that borrowers who default despite ability to pay and don’t seek modifications will […]
Homeowners in community land trusts (CLTs) across the nation continue to have substantially lower delinquency and foreclosure rates than owners of market-rate homes, according to survey results released recently by an independent researcher at Vanderbilt University working in partnership with the National Community Land Trust Network. Results from the survey found that conventional homeowners were […]
Talk about an educated community. Newark, New Jersey, has given the green light to a “teachers village” that will comprise three charter schools, 1,000 students, and 221 units of workforce housing that will be marketed to educators. The hope is to bring into the city some of the estimated 15,000 people who teach in Newark-based […]
