Archives

Joyful Journey

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

Who’s After the Park?

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

Excerpt: The Long Road from C.J. Peete to Harmony Oaks

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.

A Decade of Growth

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

Community Land Trusts Have Renters Too

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

Manufacturing Affordable Homeownership Solutions

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

Homeownership Without a Net

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

Maintaining a Bastion of Quality—and Affordability

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.

Role-Playing for Energy Efficiency

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.

Lighting a Spark Between Energy Advocates and Community Development

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

Jersey City: Lessons from Unequal Development

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

The Whole City’s Watching

A legacy of racial strife hangs over Little Rock, Arkansas, the city internationally known for the 1957 Central High School Crisis, in which an...

Revitalization: Not Despite Us, But Because of Us

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

Pushing Back Against the Demolition Juggernaut

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.

Don’t Assume

If you work in any field for a substantial amount of time, you will hear certain story lines and beliefs repeated over and over....

Q: Why doesn’t the market produce enough affordable housing where people...

A: The market is supposed to meet demand, but the importance of location, location, location, plus other factors, keep this from working for affordable housing.