affordable housing

Federal funding to end veteran homelessness has had a real impact, but a nationwide shortage of affordable housing could make its success temporary.

The changes that stimulus funding made in Lane County, Oregon’s homelessness prevention will last past the funds themselves—but they could have a lot more effect, especially for veterans, if federal funding continued.

VA home loan guarantees and community land trusts are perfect partners, but not everyone knows that yet.

A look at what HUD-VASH supportive housing vouchers can do, from the perspective of one of the agencies administering them.

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 […]