Fit to Live In: Fixing Our Housing Stock

Across the country, tenants and lawmakers are pushing for better standards around mold, cooling, and more. How did we get here?

The Healthy Homes Ordinance is supposed to help fix New Orleans’s deteriorating rental housing stock. But three years in, many “certified habitable” apartments still have leaking roofs, black mold, and dangerous heat. What went wrong?

An architect’s guide to affordable housing design that goes beyond the baseline.

A program started in Roswell, New Mexico, has gone statewide. Here’s how Rehab-2-Rental works, and what’s to come.

A Massachusetts initiative uncovers how fragmented programs make healthy homes harder to achieve—and helps local leaders reduce the friction.

In Cambridge, Mass., residents speak positively of the renovations to their public housing stock. The housing authority attributes its success to an innovative mix of RAD with other funding sources.

Almost every state in the U.S. requires that landlords maintain safe and livable residential units. This is often called a “warranty of habitability.” In some places, there are laws that specify exactly what those requirements are; in others, the standards are less defined.

We can upkeep homes without punishing low-income residents. Here are some lessons for change, and cities already doing that work on the ground.

What makes a home habitable? What makes habitability laws successful? In this webinar, an organizer in New Orleans and a representative from a nonprofit working with communities across the country affected by vacancy and abandonment share their perspectives.