affordable housing

As people move back into the cities, and rental housing demand goes up, it's been an interesting time for people wrestling with the problems of highly unaffordable areas to live. Some people are arguing that limits on development—whether it's density restrictions like Washington, D.C.'s height limits, or the kinds of geographical, historical, or quality of […]

It is an article of faith among advocates for residents of manufactured housing that one of the most important things we can do to get over the stigma that this form of housing carries is to stop using the term “mobile homes” (they aren't really mobile) or “trailers/trailer parks” (ditto). Shelterforce has used “manufactured housing” […]

Public housing tenants are celebrating the Seattle Housing Authority’s (SHA) decision to retract a controversial plan to raise rents by more than 400 percent in the coming years. The “Stepping Forward” plan, announced last September, was immediately met with stiff resistance from tenants mostly organized through the Tenants Union of Washington State (TUWS). In November, […]

Iberville Offsites—the collective name of the 46 historic homes throughout New Orleans’ Treme neighborhood, restored and preserved as low-income affordable housing—received the 2014 National Trust/HUD Secretary’s Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation earlier this week. “This project is proof that eliminating blight, providing affordable housing and maintaining the historic fabric of our neighborhoods are not […]

Earler this month, we published an op-ed from HUD in which the authors declared the Rental Assistance Demonstration project a success, calling for a lifting of the cap on the number of units that could go through the process. The idea behind RAD is to address the massive backlog in capital improvements in public housing by […]

The NHI family is very pleased to share the news that our op-ed, “Faith in land trusts: Time to consider the middle ground of housing,” appears in The Boston Globe today. Publication of the article by National Housing Institute executive director Harold Simon, with Lincoln Institute of Land Policy president and CEO George McCarthy, is a […]

[Editor's note: Over the past several years, Shelterforce has covered HUD's plans to address the capital funding backlog in public housing through allowing PHAs to take on private debt here, here, and here, when it was announced in its first form, PETRA, or the Preservation, Enhancement, and Transformation of Rental Assistance initiative. This op-ed by […]

Inclusionary housing policies can help with a lot of the issues that many cities and towns struggle with these days, from the dwindling supply of affordable rental options in hot housing markets to the need for a fairer housing market that includes real location choices for lower-income households. These policies, which ask developers to include […]

So folks, we need to have a chat about this whole “workforce housing” thing. It’s a problem. Or rather, the way it is often being used these days is a problem, which is as shorthand for housing for people who aren’t really low-income, but are still having trouble affording housing in a hot market.

HUD has recently made some important changes to the rules for its Project-Based Voucher (PBV) program, which helps families live in affordable rental housing. The PBV program combines two standard […]

In 2008, the U.S. economy fell off a cliff. Depending on your perspective, it either slipped or was pushed from that precipice by the housing market. In 2009 and 2010, […]

Probably no one in the country is in a better position than Tony Pickett to talk about efforts to include long-term affordable housing in two of the nation’s largest Transit Oriented Development (TOD) ventures: Denver’s FasTracks plan, and Atlanta’s Beltline project.