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Affordable Housing

Building Solidarity Around Survival: A Seattle Example

March 8, 2025 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. , , , , ,
We are in for a long hard time in the U.S. and the world as a whole. The divisions between people have grown too deep. The concentration of power in individuals and institutions that care little about the common good, pursuing their own interests at its expense, is too great. The buildup of problems either unaddressed or insufficiently addressed has mounted to an overwhelming extent. The ascendancy of Trump and Musk has intensified the situation, but the trends were going the wrong way for a long time before. It is enough to make people throw up their hands in despair, wondering what they can do, or retreating entirely into personal life.

Community Bank’s Innovative Strategy For Affordable Homes

March 3, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. , , , ,
When the pandemic hit, Mayra Ibarra moved back into her mother’s house to get some help with rent and childcare. There, she had to share a bedroom with her youngest son. Ibarra’s mother didn’t have internet access, but they quickly installed it so her son could attend kindergarten remotely. She bought him an old classroom chair, the kind with the desk attached to it, to keep in their bedroom. The setup worked for a few years, “but it felt like this is not my home, this is my mother’s home,” Ibarra says. “I wanted my home, my own space. Same for my kid.”

Neighborhood Renewal By Germantown Residents, For Germantown Residents

March 1, 2025 Courtney Duchene, Next City. , , ,
Jordan Parisse-Ferrarini has long been entrepreneurial. He learned it from his mother, who was quick to pick up a side hustle — starting a fruit stand, selling makeup door-to-door, selling kitchen products at markets — to help support her family when he was growing up in Mt. Airy and Germantown. So, it felt natural when, together with his mother and siblings, he founded a company focused on home repairs. They called it Handyman Wizards at first, then Ferrarini Kitchens, Baths and Interiors. A skilled carpenter, he got his electrician’s license, his realtor’s license, and then earned a construction management certificate.

The Big Idea: Social Housing

February 20, 2025 J. Patrick Patterson, In These Times. , , ,
Affordable housing — which typically involves giving tax breaks to real estate developers — isn’t working so well. The open secret is that, all too often, it isn’t actually ​“affordable.” Nearly 40% of tenants using the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, for example — the largest federal program subsidizing affordable housing — are still rent-burdened, and the subsidy doesn’t require homes to be permanently ​“affordable,” leaving renters vulnerable to eviction. As Peter Dreier explains in The American Prospect: ​“The quest to provide what has come to be called ​‘affordable housing’ in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality.

Five Years In, Philly’s Kensington Corridor Trust Is Building Momentum

February 18, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. , , , ,
The first time Yolanda Del Valle came to work at Sherry’s Restaurant, she was a teen covering a friend’s shift at the popular local diner, located for 50-plus years at the corner of Kensington and Ontario Avenues in Philadelphia. Eleven years ago, Del Valle returned to Sherry’s as an employee, doing everything from serving to dishwashing to minding the griddle. This past November, she became the owner. And Sherry’s got a new landlord: its community. The diner’s building, which includes three apartments above the restaurant, was acquired a little over a year ago by the Kensington Corridor Trust, a community-controlled commercial real estate entity that recently celebrated its fifth birthday.

Could A New Housing Cooperative Help Create Affordable Homes?

February 16, 2025 Noelle Fujii-Oride, Next City. , , ,
For the last year and a half, Chase Hasegawa and a few of his neighbors at the Courtyards at Waipouli have been trying to preserve their Kaua‘i apartment complex as a much-needed source of workforce housing. The tenants have been working with a Honolulu nonprofit with the hope of buying the property and turning it into an affordable housing cooperative. If their Waipouli Housing Cooperative is successfully established, it would be the first affordable housing cooperative to be created on Kaua‘i and the first in decades for the state. But the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) is planning to acquire the property for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries soon.

How Federal Disaster Funding Can Slow Rent Increases

January 20, 2025 Robert Davis, Next City. , , , , , , ,
Coloradans often welcome rain storms with the refrain, “We need the moisture.” After the deadly floods in September 2013, many Coloradans sang a different tune. Over five days, a slow-moving storm covered some areas of the Front Range with up to 20 inches of rain. Overall, the floods killed 10 people, displaced 18,000, and caused more than $4 billion in damage to more than 17,000 structures, of which 1,882 were completely destroyed, according to the Colorado Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management’s after-action report.

As Fires Rage, Activists Put Price-Gouging Landlords On Notice

January 15, 2025 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. , , , ,
A four-bedroom home advertised for nearly $29,500 a month. Bidding wars for vacant apartments. As anecdotal reports rolled in of rent-gouging amidst Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires, tenant organizer Chelsea Kirk thought, ​“We need to be tracking this.” So over the weekend, Kirk launched a public spreadsheet noting Zillow listings that appear to show a more-than-10% hike in the recent asking price, the maximum allowable under state emergency protections currently in effect. News of the crowdsourcing effort spread quickly and a team of more than 40 volunteers is now helping root out potential price-gouging.

Justice Department Sues Six Of The Nation’s Largest Landlords

January 9, 2025 Heather Vogell, ProPublica. , , , ,
The Department of Justice on Tuesday sued six of the nation’s largest landlords, accusing them of using a pricing algorithm to improperly work together to raise rents across the country. The lawsuit expands an antitrust complaint the department filed in August that accused property management software-maker RealPage of engaging in illegal price-fixing to reduce competition among landlords so prices — and profits — would soar. Officials conducted a two-year investigation into the scheme following a 2022 ProPublica story that showed how RealPage was helping landlords set rents across the country in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior.

The Homelessness Crisis Is About To Get A Lot Worse

January 2, 2025 Chloe Atkinson, Counter Punch. , , ,
With just weeks to go before Donald Trump waltzes back into the White House, America has an additional problem on its hands. The homelessness rate has surged, rising by 18% in 2024 compared to last year. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual assessment report, more than 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. Nearly 150,000 children experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, a whopping 33% increase from 2023. The number of homeless older Americans also rose, with more than 140,000 people over the age of 55 going unhoused in the U.S. this year. Nearly half of these older Americans reported living in places not meant for humans.

US Report Finds Homelessness Soared 18% This Year

December 28, 2024 Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams. , , ,
The controversial federal system for tracking homelessness in the United States recorded an 18% increase from 2023, breaking the record previously set last year, according to a report released Friday. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) process—which advocates and experts have long argued is flawed and results in inaccurate data that understates the homelessness crisis—provides a snapshot of how many people are unhoused for a single night each January. This year, the HUD report states, "a total of 771,480 people—or about 23 of every 10,000 people in the United States—experienced homelessness in an emergency shelter, safe haven, transitional housing program, or in unsheltered locations across the country."

Housing Cooperatives: Preserving Affordable Community Ownership

November 23, 2024 North Missoula CDC, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , ,
With affordable housing becoming increasingly scarce in Montana, innovative solutions are more important than ever. This documentary short highlights an inspiring cooperative housing model designed to prevent displacement and create home ownership opportunities for Missoula residents. This initiative, driven by the collaborative efforts of North Missoula Community Development Corporation (NMCDC) and Neighborworks Montana (NWMT), offers a promising blueprint for addressing housing challenges across Montana.

There’s A Severe Housing Crisis In The US: The Work To Make Housing A Right

October 29, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , , , , , ,
A new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis, explains how the United States has entered a state of hyper-gentrification in which the average person has to compete with a large corporation when it comes to buying or renting a home. There are currently 28 vacant homes for every homeless person. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chuck Collins, a co-author of the report, and Mehrdad Azemun of Peoples Action, about the housing crisis, the vision for a homes guarantee and how people are working to make housing a human right.

Report: Billionaire Investors Are ‘Supercharging’ Housing Crisis

October 23, 2024 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. , , , ,
A new report out Monday puts "into numbers the trend that ordinary Americans have known to be true for years," said economic justice advocates behind the analysis: "Their everyday struggles of affording a home are made worse by the sweeping influence that billionaires have over the market." The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) joined Popular Democracy in compiling a 71-page report titled Billionaire Blowback on Housing, aiming to get to the bottom of growing concerns in recent years about how Wall Street, as Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said earlier this month, is "buying up housing and making them less affordable."

A National Tenants Union Has Arrived

August 7, 2024 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. , , ,
Five tenants unions from around the country convened Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in 40 years. “Every tenant deserves a union — everyone deserves to move with the kind of power I found here,” said Donna Goldsmith, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union (one of the federation’s founding members) to a virtual audience of renters from around the country. Goldsmith moved to a senior-living community in Louisville looking for a fresh start after the murder of her daughter and two grandchildren more than a decade ago.
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