Subject: Affordable Housing
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Last week, the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey celebrated its 20th anniversary in New Brunswick, New Jersey’s humble urban area in the center of the the state. The mood was celebratory, at times raucous, at times reflective,…
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Everywhere we go we hear about transit-oriented development: bringing the home closer to the transit hub. Not only does TOD offer an opportunity to fix up areas near the rails, but it also provides a chance for localities to increase…
Yesterday NY1 tried to set up New York City’s mayoral race as an affordable housing vs. education spat, based on the candidates’ negative soundbites about each other. Although this is a bit of a stretch anyway (and not generally two…
It seems that opponents of Massachusetts’s “40B” affordable housing law, which lets developers build higher density housing in unaffordable communities if they set aside affordable units, are gearing up for another petition drive to repeal it. They say this time…
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Think all planning and community development should be local? Think again, said a judge on Monday when she told a New York State county to force dozens of towns and villages within its borders to get serious about fair housing.…
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Describing the problems facing the housing market today as “hard to overstate,” representatives from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies last week announced the release of the 2009 “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. The report, which acknowledges the depressed…
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It was often disappointing during the long housing boom to see the affordable housing stock continue to dwindle even as CDCs continued to build more supply. In a somewhat similar vein, one of the frustrations of the foreclosure crisis has…
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Affordable housing is being built in New Jersey’s urban centers, and why not? There, you have the low- and moderate-income demographic who qualify for affordable housing, and you have all of the transportation infrastructure needed to get folks around. Problem…
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As New Jersey’s Council on Affordable Housing, or COAH, continues to defend its plan to use a growth-share model to encourage towns to build working class and affordable housing, we’re reminded of one thing that became clear a long, long…
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The following was released Thursday by the MacArthur Foundation. Seizing the opportunity to make needed long-term investments in the face of a weak economy, 12 states and cities are launching innovative projects to preserve more than 70,000 affordable rental homes.…
Where I grew up, a lot of people lived in mobile homes, as a way to enter the housing market at an affordable price. Still do. And now there is some fascinating new thinking about how to make such sites…
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I enjoyed looking at the examples of smart growth in NRDC’s new online feature, Picturing Smart Growth. Thanks to Kaid Benfield for bringing this great resource to everyone’s attention! I was pleased to see three of the examples, in Miami,…
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Driving along I-95 from Virginia to New England, I noticed how many townhouse-style developments have cropped up where apartment complexes would have been built a decade ago. Here is an example of the demand for housing shifting in a small…
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Here’s a handful of somewhat radical planning ideas to ponder as we enter the Great Mini-Depression: I am wondering what sort of innovations will go mainstream in this strange new age. General Motors is busy touting a plug-in electric car…
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This past summer, I wrote a feature for Shelterforce about a community where a CDC was battling a NIMBY mentality. The CDC was trying to build neighborhood support for over a hundred units of new market and affordable housing in…
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This morning I read about the dismay of residents of a New York City neighborhood who have watched as people who owned homes on their block have suddenly disappeared. Foreclosure signs have popped up on lawns up and down the…
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Losing a home to foreclosure is a nightmare, causing at least one person—Carlene Balderrama of Massachusetts—to commit suicide in recent months. Seeing all the money, work, love, care and dreams put into a home seized out from under you is…
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Wall Street is in meltdown. Banks are collapsing. Developers can’t get loans to build homes. Housing values are plummeting. Millions of Americans are facing foreclosure. But in Los Angeles late last month, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, speaking at a crowded union…
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It’s been interesting to watch the conservative conga line blame the affordable housing expansion effort for the country’s current financial crisis. But, as writers on Rooflines displayed when community organizing fell under attack at the Republican National Convention, what’s equally…
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What do you do when your CDC can’t afford to buy pencils or print business cards, and certainly can’t buy land or buildings? You consider a major change in the way your CDC functions, is what. An idea is developing…
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National Housing Institute
