Tag: ohio

During the pandemic, community development organizations had to work double-time to adapt to residents' needs. For some, that work yielded important lessons about better helping their communities, permanently.

A SCOTUS ruling that protects a homeowner’s equity may end up benefiting speculators and hurting land banks.

An Ohio land bank adds to its developing power through a nonprofit land trust.

Strict zoning policies keep housing unaffordable. But there are strategies governments can implement to change exclusionary housing policies and promote the construction of more affordable housing.

Housing may not be on the list of solutions for the maternal and infant mortality crisis. But research—and successful programs—shows that it should be.

From the macro scale to the micro scale, there are many ways in which the housing market playing field is tilted toward financial firms—and many ways being proposed to start to tilt it back.

There’s a reason land ownership is a matter of public record—but at the moment the records we have aren’t actually doing the job.

Two years after the pandemic began, community development organizations reflect on what’s changed and how they’re moving forward. Some are still in crisis mode; others are refocusing their work.

Solutions to address racial wealth inequality have often focused on behavioral changes and individual choices, minimizing efforts to dismantle structural barriers to wealth accumulation for Black Americans.

Neighborhoods B.U.I.L.D. Dayton is a community lawyering project of Legal Aid of Western Ohio Inc. and Advocates for Basic Legal Equality Inc. (B.U.I.L.D. stands...

A review of the 2020 documentary, The Place That Makes Us, directed by Karla Murthy. 70 minutes.

For health care institutions and community development organizations that focus on low-income communities’ social determinants of health, this year has been a doozy. The...

Making inclusion and equity a reality in more American metropolitan areas is possible. Doing so requires innovations in local, regional, and state policies related to mixed-income communities.

The fight against vacancy in Youngstown, Ohio, shows us that we shouldn’t rely on a single strategy—everything is needed at once.

Vacant land activities can be low cost and high impact; the price of failure is not steep, but the return on investment can be high.

More than a decade after several groups came together to improve substandard housing in the South Side of Columbus, signs of gentrification and forced displacement are beginning to emerge. Can something be done so current residents can afford to stay in their neighborhoods for years to come? The short answer is yes.

Even the most sophisticated private and nonprofit partnerships for dealing with vacant property will end up with some properties that don’t pencil out. Land banks can step in to keep those properties from dragging down revitalization efforts.

How do community developers whose goals include neighborhood revitalization identify which businesses or other non-residential tenants (library, healthcare center) are likely to create the most positive momentum in a given area? It’s certainly more art than science. We asked a few long-time community developers for their thoughts.

The success of a Cleveland-based community organizing group in the face of massive foreclosures suggests that the city (and the nation) should have held on to a more diverse set of community organizations.