New Jersey

PATERSON, New Jersey — It’s early February and the air temperature hovers in the low teens — never mind the windchill that could only be tolerable to a Midwesterner. But […]

Urban Essex County, New Jersey, one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the ongoing foreclosure crisis, could be the laboratory for an ostensible reinvention of community development, as a local CDC there announced today the successful acquisition of 47 mortgages on troubled properties with an eye toward stabilizing neighborhoods in some of the oldest suburban communities in New Jersey.

As New Jersey’s Council on Affordable Housing, or COAH, continues to defend its plan to use a growth-share model to encourage towns to build working class and affordable housing, we’re […]

Youth violence scars lives, turning America’s streets into war zones. How do we transform killing fields into training grounds for stronger communities?

It’s an old joke, but in the development sense, the term “smart growth” is an oxymoron in many cases. There’s a reason we celebrate things like adaptive reuse, transit villages, […]

So where does the money come from for all these grandiose plans and their implementation? In a number of major U.S. cities, such as Seattle, Minneapolis, and Rochester, New York, […]

As analysts probe the causes of the subprime foreclosure debacle, a couple of things seem clear about the solutions. First, few people will be helped by the current crop of […]

Photo Courtesy of HANDS Inc. For 12 years the building at 151 Chapman Street (above) stood vacant on a prominent corner, a menacing landmark that attracted squatters and generated no […]

Even after neighboring Hoboken turned from working-class enclave to exclusive high-cost outpost, some think that will never happen to Newark…

When the Sjoblom family realized they might soon lose their home in Matawan, New Jersey, Diane Sjoblom found the National Coalition for the Homeless. Through email, letters, and telephone conversations, NCH reconstructed their journey into homelessness and ensuing efforts to find living wage employment to improve their situation.