impact investing

Investors have helped preserve more than 1,700 affordable housing units in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

In the face of extractive “investments,” communities are exploring creative models that let them both exert control and earn returns themselves.

A few cities in the U.S. are addressing homelessness by experimenting with different financing vehicles that are helping to preserve and construct more supportive housing.

some communities in the United States seem much better than others at attracting grants and financing for community development—even after adjusting for their relative needs. Here are some of the surprising trends:

What if the future of shared equity homeownership was not dependent on government subsidies? Vivacité – Société immobilière solidaire, a Quebec-based non-profit organization, designed a shared equity program based on a social economy model that leverages impact investors to ensure perpetual affordability and scales its impact.

If you want to explore impact investing further, here are some places to start.

New sources of mission-driven private capital could step up to support community development where traditional sources of financing are withdrawing.

Impact investing may seem like a market-based concept, but government can and does support, enable, and participate in it many ways.

It should be a natural fit; what’s in the way?

“Investor apartheid” securities rules are keeping investment artificially blocked from the businesses with the most positive impact on communities— small, local ones.

In November 2013, Morgan Stanley launched its Institute for Sustainable Investing and announced that within five years it was aiming to manage $10 billion in client assets targeted to “impact […]

In response to my earlier post about anchor institutions and community development, Andrew Frishkoff, executive director of LISC Philadelphia, commented “Too often we have seen beneficent anchor institutions acting paternalistically on […]