Smart growth principles can’t be imposed from the outside.

Nicolas P. Retsinas, a senior lecturer in real estate at the Harvard Business School and director emeritus of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, talks with Shelterforce about his long service in the housing field.

Despite fears that rising prices follow smart growth projects, smart growth and affordable housing advocates need each other to realize the promise of each. 

Affordable housing already exists near transit—but without action it will be lost. 

In Virginia, a statewide incentive program has put new affordable housing projects out in front of most market-rate developers when it comes to green design.

Cleveland housing court Judge Raymond Pianka uses innovative legal tactics to achieve code compliance, but is it enough to stabilize neighborhoods?

The affordable housing movement has not only accepted green building, but is making it integral to its work.

When business leaders in St. Louis withdrew financial support for a campaign to pass a badly needed transit tax, it was a blessing in disguise.

Boston’s City Life/Vida Urbana is finding success by turning conventional wisdom on its head and entering the picture after a foreclosure has taken place.

Fighting organized money takes organized people.

Housing and homelessness are human rights issues—and that can be an organizing strength.

Wall Street’s criminal recklessness and its impact on millions of people across the country is making activists out of an unlikely selection of people.

In Delaware, a partnership with Diamond State CLT let Kent County leverage NSP money it wasn’t originally sure it had the capacity to use at all into permanently affordable housing.

We’re going to take a ride down one of the country’s storied roadways to take a look at some of the organizations that are helping to preserve history and strengthen the future. From Chicago to Santa Monica, Route 66 reflects the challenges facing American communities today. Most places along the highway have seen ups and downs, and many have extraordinary people with important stories to be told.

As credit tightens and higher and higher numbers of commercial real estate loans enter default, CDCs are stepping up to fill the financing gap in economic development deals from which conventional lenders have been retreating.

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 idea of turning the community land trust model into an economic development tool is attracting growing interest, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how it would work.

The Affordable Housing Program of the Federal Home Loan Banks is a marked success, and should be a model for expanding the system’s investment in economic development.

Rather than just developing homes for sale, City of Lakes CLT lets buyers pick houses to bring into the land trust.

A promising, billion-dollar Twin Cities light rail project almost bypassed lower-income neighborhoods on its route, but thanks to a coalition of community groups, it will now make all local stops.

We’re not the only 36-year-old in town. Here is a small sampling of other 36th birthdays taking place this year:

We’re going to take a ride down one of the country’s storied roadways to take a look at some of the organizations that are helping to preserve history and strengthen the future. From Chicago to Santa Monica, Route 66 reflects the challenges facing American communities today. Most places along the highway have seen ups and downs, and many have extraordinary people with important stories to be told.

We’ve seen and written a lot about what happens in our communities. In many cases, our writers were prescient in their analysis as they warned of the potential (and often real) community fallout from predatory lending and misguided housing policy.

Can you guess when this Shelterforce quote ran? “As hard times continue to plague most American families, the problem of mortgage foreclosures has intensified … Many families have lost their homes—victims of unscrupulous mortgage bankers, lenders, and real estate con artists.”

Can you guess which president this refers to? “The president has decided that the future of our cities depends on business and that government’s role is to sweeten the pot for private investors.”

Get deja vu—and also see how far we’ve come—-with quotes from 36 years of Shelterforce.

Shelterforce caught up with the HUD deputy secretary on the precipice of retirement, nearly two-and-a-half years after joining the agency. Sims brought to HUD not only his political savvy, but also an unshakable commitment to equity and sustainability. In this exit interview, we talk about his accomplishments at HUD, plans for the future, and what he thinks needs to be done in order to stabilize the housing market.

Despite great obstacles, nonprofit housing developers, community action agencies, community health centers, and others stepped up and solved problems on the fly to make the stimulus work. Though more stimulus is not forthcoming, there are lessons to be learned for anyone working with government funding.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

The Atlanta BeltLine brings much promise to the city of Atlanta, but will elevated housing costs be an unwelcome addition? Atlanta is looking to a community land trust to preserve affordability for the long-term near this new asset.

To ensure affordable housing around the Atlanta BeltLine, the new Atlanta Land Trust Collaborative will balance citywide scale with local control of individual land trusts by existing CDCs.

As developers struggle to find buyers for rehabbed affordable homes, many are looking to a lease-purchase model to expand the pool of potential owners. But lease-purchase is far more complicated than just an end-run around the credit crunch.

The familiar transformation from volunteer organizing effort to established nonprofit needs an overhaul, or it will keep sucking the life out of truly grass-roots organizing.

HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims doesn’t just want the 8,500 employees he oversees at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to do their jobs: he wants them to challenge themselves, even if there’s a risk of failure.

Large-scale and small-scale transit-oriented development projects are popping up everywhere around the country, and in many places advocates are working to include affordable housing and other community priorities in the mix from the start.

One Atlanta neighborhood’s experience of the housing bubble and expected transit investment leads it to invest in a land trust and a vision based in sustainability.

Permanent affordability and asset building might seem at first blush to be contradictory goals for a low-income homeownership program, but new research says in fact they can be achieved together.

A range of existing policy tools can help preserve and expand affordable housing near planned transit stations—but to have the most effect, they need to be put in place up front.

Making change is not always easy, even when “your candidate” wins. Activists in City Hall looks at two well-known progressive city administrations and the way that activists working for them did and didn’t achieve their goals.

Bostic, now in his second turn at HUD, is known for his extensive work analyzing the roles that credit markets, financing, and policy play in furthering economic access for all.

For an “emergency” measure, NSP came so loaded with ever-shifting regulations and restrictions it was hard to get any money out the door. It’s getting better, but more could be done.

The federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program has a lot of mass appeal. But banks have been slow to act and HAMP was never intended to be the sole solution to the foreclosure crisis. HAMP needs backup.

Urban agriculture projects bring hope—and food—to communities that have long suffered from a glut of empty lots.

HUD Assistant Secretary of Community Planning and Development Mercedes Márquez spoke with Shelterforce about NSP, technical assistance, and the importance of leveraging resources.

Bank reform offers a chance to address an under-the-radar form of redlining with the same sort of data disclosure HMDA requires about mortgage lending.

The federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program is a welcome source of funds in struggling communities, and it has had a massive effect on the nature of the response to the problem of vacant foreclosed property. As NSP3 gets underway and the NSP1 obligation period comes to a close, Shelterforce looks back at NSP so far.

The improved Home Mortgage Disclosure Act can be a tool for fighting predatory lending, but it could and should go further.

Despite critiques, NSP is a powerful program that, with a few years under its belt and the help of “first look” programs, can move beyond its slow start and make a major difference.

Community land trusts succeed in curing delinquencies and preventing foreclosures, and the numbers show it.

Investors have played, and will continue to play, an important role in foreclosure-ravaged communities. What can towns do to ensure investors are responsible, and what role can CDCs play?

How an organization of residents crossing age, race, and socioeconomic lines took on an unyielding City Hall known for quelling grass-roots efforts and (almost) overtook the political party machinery.

For the founders of Cleveland’s Evergreen Coops, putting a handful of people to work at minimum wage isn’t worth it. They are aiming at nothing less than a ground-up economic transformation—one owned by the very people it’s intended to help.

All across the country, local governments, CDCs, community groups, and housing counselors are coming together to address the foreclosure crisis.

Editors of sat down recently with John Atlas, NHI board president and author of Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group, to discuss the organization itself, as well as organizing on a national level, tensions between organizing and development, and lessons learned from the downfall of the once-powerful antipoverty organization.

For first-time homebuyers with good credit, stable employment, and savings for a down payment, buying a home is more affordable than it has been in decades. For everyone else, however, lower home prices have been a disaster.

From the early days of the public housing program in the 1930s to the present, vociferous opposition has resulted in a host of problems. Understanding the history can help put President Obama’s PETRA program in context.

It’s not too late to treat toxic loans as the defective product they are.

Everybody hates public housing, except the low-income people who live there and the people on the long waiting lists to get in. After years of neglect, the Obama administration wants to save public housing for future generations. Let’s let them.

HUD Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing Sandra Henriquez spoke with Shelterforce to discuss the administration’s Preservation, Enhancement, and Transformation of Rental Assistance initiative and address some of the concerns regarding PETRA’s push to allow public housing authorities to leverage private investments. 

In written testimony submitted to the House Committee on Financial Services in May, excerpted here, a group of urban affairs academics argue that PETRA is nothing less than a formal divestment from public housing, worse than anything previous administrations have proposed.

The 2008 presidential campaign showed us another side of volunteering. It drew literally millions of people, many for the first time, into the electoral process. But beyond political campaigns, can volunteerism provide increased capacity for communities and community organizations?

The Community Land Trust Reader, edited by John Emmeus Davis. Lincoln Institute, 2010, 616 pp. $35 (paper).

London CITIZENS fights for permanently affordable housing in the shadow of the Olympics.

Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the house Financial Services Committee, sits down with Shelterforce to discuss consumer protection, the future of Fannie and Freddie, the role of FHA, and rental housing and offers a challenge to advocates looking to effect change on the federal level.

We expect the “solutions” to social problems to be found within the community, and yet community groups, more often than not, work beyond their communities’ boundaries. Why? Because they see the reality that if social and economic justice are to be realized in a community, then changes that are larger than the community must take place.

Facing financial difficulties as new technology takes customers away, the United States Postal Service reviewed 3,300 branches to find those that could be deemed disposable. In low-income communities, just how disposable are the final 162?

After a brief, shining moment following the 2008 Republican National Convention, when it seemed community organizers would rule the country, they are now back on the defensive.

Organizing has been under attack for years, but this time around, the media has been directly complicit in severely damaging one of most influential advocates for low- and moderate-income families in the country. How did the media miss the real story behind the assault on ACORN?

Pressure has been building for a long time against the red tape and inflexibility of the agency that implements New Jersey’s landmark fair share housing policy. Can the spirit of Mount Laurel survive the backlash against the details?

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.

As a wave of HUD mortgages expires in the next four
years, an already dwindling supply of affordable units may nosedive with owners making windfall profits—unless the right mix of federal legislation and local organizing can
save the day.

Access

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration is equipped with an impressive list of housing experts at the top.

What started out as a “weird art project” in Toronto is
providing aural illustrations into a northern New Jersey community’s past, and, organizers hope, laying the groundwork for the future.

Plucked from New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development, Shaun Donovan is leading the effort to make the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into a relevant, powerful agency.

The story of the American foreclosure crisis begins with reckless and abusive lending that leads to a wholesale emptying out of homes. But the story is far from over.

Homeownership can often be a way for families to get good stable housing as well as an effective vehicle for them to accumulate wealth. However, owning a home is not likely to be a wise investment for families in unstable work or family situations.

In early October 2008, The Kirwan Institute hosted a national summit on subprime lending, foreclosure, and race. We didn’t know it when we were planning the event, but a series of unfolding economic events spurred by our nation’s housing crisis would have our government contemplating a $700 billion financial sector bailout on the eve of our convening.

The Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act provides much-needed relief for tenants across the country in properties undergoing foreclosure. But with one-third of Americans living as tenants, is this a sign of a protracted federal response, or is it a one-shot deal?

Over the past few years faith-based organizing networks have broken onto the national organizing scene, adding grass-roots power and issue expertise to some of the biggest problems of the day.

In the past decade, community land trusts and other shared equity housing models have gained wider acknowledgement and acceptance as a means of creating and preserving affordable housing in communities with high property values. But by cultivating the long-term success of homeowners, these models are also bringing revitalization and stability to areas with weak markets and high foreclosures.

The nonprofit housing development field has myriad intermediaries and support organizations, but no one unified voice. Should it have one?

As the Bluff City picks itself up, its CDC community faces a host of challenges that are increasingly common across the field.

Towns long in Chicagos shadow have sought creative ways
to collaborate for federal funding, while building off existing
partnerships as part of a long-term approach to neighborhood,
and regional, stabilization.

The progressive movement is seeing a resurgence of younger organizers thanks, in part, to the “Obama effect” of the 2008 campaign, and a renewed attempt to articulate values and build authentic relationships.

The Community Reinvestment Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act hold great promise for the creation of a more financially inclusive nation, but both depend on critical “moments in time” in Congress that will determine whether they become good laws or are weakened beyond recognition

In and around the Twin Cities, there is a tolerance for process and building relationships to handle the pressing challenges facing neighborhoods. 

Shelterforce interviews George Moses, chairman of the board of the National Low Income Housing Coalition

Transit advocates and CDCs in two parts of the greater Boston
region are building cross-movement coalitions that are making
equitable transit-oriented development a part of the fight for
better transit access.

Vacant land gives way to residential and commercial development is a classic urban renewal storyline, but DC’s Columbia Heights is getting more than just retail and residential: its reclaiming its history.

How can we practice effective community development and engage a community that suffers from a dwindling stock of physical historical references and is in the process of healing from the wounds of decades of urban decay? In the Bronx, community members are coming together, taking pieces of the past and making history.