Issue #165

In December, the Housing Opportunities Made Equal Act was introduced with moderate fanfare in an unusually active lame duck session of Congress. Unfortunately, HOME, which would amend the Fair Housing […]

The president has included $1 billion for the National Housing Trust Fund in his FY12 HUD budget, as he did in FY10 and FY11, giving the fund, which was created […]

The H+T Index should be used to site affordable housing, because it can identify which high-opportunity areas also are truly affordable in terms of transportation costs.

A Bronx-based building known as the birthplace of hip-hop has been the subject of a high-profile tug of war between gambling real-estate investors and an eclectic yet powerful group of tenants, housing advocates, city agencies, local politicians, and hip-hop artists. The building’s well-publicized plight has helped shine a light on the threat predatory equity poses to affordable multifamily housing.

Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential
of Local Organizing, by James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge. Rutgers University Press, 2010, 208 pp. $25.95 (paper).

By 2050, possibly sooner, people of color will be a majority in our nation. There is no way we can build a strong, stable economy if that majority is denied […]

Factoring in costs that tend to be lower in urban high-poverty neighborhoods, but not costs that tend to be higher there makes the H+T Index unsuitable as a tool for locating low-income housing.

As some cities begin to admit they are shrinking, CDCs in high-abandonment neighborhoods are rethinking their traditional roles, and even their missions.

When predatory equity investors take a gamble on multifamily housing, it’s the tenants who suffer — whether from harassment or crumbling buildings. Advocates and tenants in New York have won the fight to get some of these buildings into responsible hands, but many are still in limbo, and some are reentering the cycle of speculation.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition has filed complaints with HUD against dozens of lenders who have set minimum borrower credit scores as high as 640 for Federal Housing administration (FHA) […]

Last year, then-chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank told Shelterforce, regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, “the model of a private shareholder corporation with a public mission […]

Focusing on the most vulnerable communities and people and addressing racial and economic disparities is not only the right thing to do — it’s the only way we can succeed in building strong regions and a strong national economy.

The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is dealing with an evolving set of discrimination challenges facing families, changes in the very definition of “family,” and the political realities of the 112th Congress. Trasviña is no stranger to this balancing act.

It’s time to understand that shrinkage is no longer somebody else’s problem.

Inclusionary zoning and economic integration in suburban neighborhoods not only reduces concentration of poverty, it directly improves low-income children’s academic achievement. 

Despite Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, distrust for the banking industry in the United States remains palpable, and now we’re beginning to see a sustained, organized counterattack. Bank […]