Affordable Housing

We Need To Completely Rethink Affordable Housing

April 14, 2025 Drew Warshaw, Next City. Create! Affordable Housing, climate crisis, Housing, Housing Crisis

I used to think climate change was the crisis we would solve last, if at all. But seeing the affordable housing crisis up close has changed my mind. Unless we find a reservoir of will to tap the oceans of money we are swimming in and the mountains of land we are sitting on, we may never solve this crisis. Instead, our country will be left with the challenges we at Enterprise Community Partners, the national affordable housing nonprofit that I help lead, push up against every day: Special interests that carve up the already-small pie of public funding into incoherent slices that don’t scale. The technocracy of building codes, zoning and regulation that has vexed basic home construction with a cipher so complex that you need a PhD to make sense of it.

The Rise Of Community Land Trusts In Hawai‘I

March 30, 2025 Noelle Fujii-Oride, Next City. Create! Affordable Housing, community land trusts, Hawaii, Land trusts, Wildfires

On Aug. 8, 2024, a new milestone was reached in the aftermath of the deadly Lahaina wildfire that destroyed 2,200 structures and displaced 12,000 residents on the island of Maui: A Lahaina nonprofit secured its first residential parcel for community ownership. 1651 Lokia Street, which once held a four-bed, three-bath house, sits empty. But one day, the property will accommodate a new main house and two accessory dwelling units — known locally as ‘ohana units — providing a stable, affordable home for an extended or multigenerational family.

A Land Bank Is Buying Property To Protect Altadena From Displacement

March 29, 2025 Eliana Perozo, Next City. Resist! Affordable Housing, Altadena, Privatization, Wildfires

On the evening of Jan. 7, the Eaton fire hit Altadena, destroying over 10,000 commercial and residential homes and displacing thousands of families. Just a little over two months later, and this historically Black community is facing a new threat. Shortly after the fire, a private developer paid $550,000 in cash for the first vacant lot left behind from the wildfires, about $100,000 above asking price. In the days since, at least 13 more properties have sold, at least half of them by offshore private developers. But community leaders are working to beat back the tide. Earlier this month, a Pasadena-based housing justice nonprofit purchased a burned lot in the neighborhood, marking the first Altadena property that has been removed from the market and protected in a community land bank.

Building Solidarity Around Survival: A Seattle Example

March 8, 2025 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. Organize! Affordable Housing, Housing, Seattle, Social Housing, Solidarity, Washington

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. Create! Affordable Housing, Banks, Community Banks, Development, Home Ownership

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. Create! Affordable Housing, Development, Participatory Democracy, Philadelphia

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.

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

February 18, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Affordable Housing, Community, Land Trust, Local Economy, Philadelphia

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. Create! Affordable Housing, Cooperatives, Hawaii, Housing

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. Educate! Affordable Housing, Disaster Recovery, Extreme weather, Flooding, Housing, Housing Crisis, Rent, Wildfires

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. Organize! Affordable Housing, Los Angeles, Price Gouging, Tenants, Wildfires

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. Educate! Affordable Housing, Housing, Landlords, Lawsuit, Tenant Rights

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. Educate! Affordable Housing, Donald Trump, Homelessness, Housing Crisis

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. Educate! Affordable Housing, Biden administration, Homelessness, Report

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."

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