Subject: Communities
"From concrete to pasture." That's how one might characterize my relocation a couple years ago from Boston to Central Virginia. Boston is a place where a carefully landscaped pocket park nestled amid multi-family dwellings and shops represents the height of…
What's it like not having access to high-speed Internet today? For anyone who is aware of high-speed Internet, not having it is essentially to not have the Internet at all. If time is money, the time spent staring at the…
Last week's webinar, "Can Lease Purchase Save Us?," sponsored by NHI/Shelterforce and NeighborWorks America, provided an in-depth look at the lease purchase model that allows potential homebuyers to rent their intended home until they are ready to buy. The hour-and-a-half…
Milwaukee is about to lose an incredible economic opportunity due to an inability to capitalize on our talents. To kick off the new year and my inaugural Rooflines blog post, I'd like to begin by outlining an "Opportunity Profile." I…
Starting in the mid 1970s, Mel King and other visionary leaders of the community development movement worked systematically to build a support infrastructure for CDCs in Massachusetts. They understood that such a system could grow what was then a nascent…
On a map of the rural county where I live, there are many placenames that identify crossroads, significant in that many cars pass through them each day. When I go to these crossroads, I often find an abandoned general store,…
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear a little known case with profound implications for our nation’s progress toward equal opportunity for all. At issue in the case, Magner v. Gallagher, is whether the Fair Housing Act prohibits…
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Shelterforce has done quite a bit recently on community land trusts and tracking their ever-increasing role in creating affordable housing and stabilizing neighborhoods. In the Summer 2011 issue, our 36 anniversary, we continue our coverage of the CLT model, but…
In the Japantown section of San Francisco, a task force is revisiting a 1999 neighborhood plan that once gave a perfunctory nod to how a community land trust model could be considered to preserve the neighborhood’s cultural character. Now, 12…
A new report issued by the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations that documents the collective impact of CDCs across the state shows CDCs have been a boon to economic investment over the past four years. In June, on the…
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Here’s some great news for a transit project happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul that has brought together transportation and equity advocates in not only creating neighborhood connectivity but also establishing rail access in and out of lower-income neighborhoods. Those areas were…
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The little twin cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor — two lakefront localities in southwest Michigan are divided by a cultural rift far wider than their opposing banks. St. Joseph is 90 percent white and Benton Harbor is 90…
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The Twin Cities-based Star Tribune reports the impact of the potential loss of community development block grant funds in Minnesota’s Dakota County — funds that have gone to finance neighborhood programs for more than a quarter century there.
The impact could be felt in towns and cities across the country as the president’s budget proposes $300 million in cuts to CDBG. And while the threat to zero out the program is not necessarily new, the Republican-controlled House has set out on a much more aggressive path, worrying localities who have relied on these grants, as reported in the Star Tribune piece:
“Over the years, we’ve come to rely on it quite heavily,” said Jim Hartshorn, community development director for West St. Paul. “It’s a good program, especially in a town like this where there is a lot redevelopment.”
In the 2010 fiscal year, the county received about $1.9 million through CDBG. Most of the funds are used for housing rehabilitation programs. Rehab programs such as the one in West St. Paul help low-income residents get loans to improve their homes. The program in West St. Paul helps give out about 16 loans per year, Hartshorn said.
What does the possible loss of Community Development Block Grants mean in your community? What’s at stake? Comment here, or write us at letters@nhi.org. more
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Last year, Shelterforce featured an article about preserving a sense of history in the South Bronx amid years of demolition and redevelopment. The article, written by Nancy Biberman, director of the Women’s Housing & Economic Development Corporation, or WHEDCo, featured one of her organization’s housing developments, Intervale Green, which sets to increase community “pride and activism,” with WHEDCo sponsoring monthly community planning meetings to address crime and safety and to assist local businesses.
Intervale posed a particular challenge:
[It was] located in one of the few remaining urban renewal sites left in New York City, in the heart of the “burning Bronx” that President Jimmy Carter visited in 1977. Buildings in this area were not simply abandoned; they were demolished block by block. Photos of the area became icons of urban decay.
But when WHEDCo began working on Intervale roughly six years ago, subsequent development that had occurred in the last 30 years reflected little of the area’s history:
By the time we began working on this project . . . the rubble was gone. The surrounding blocks were filled with single-family homes, and two- and three-family low-rise buildings. All of this had been built within the past 25 years. It bore little resemblance to anything that stood before.
The neighborhood reflected a complete inattention to planning. While designing the new building, WHEDCo and the development team struggled to find nearby structures that might serve as architectural touchstones. We located some archival photographs of a building that stood on the site in 1915, and found it looked exactly like scores of other buildings that had escaped demolition and were restored in other neighborhoods.
We’re happy to report that a recently-released report, the Intervale Green Report, finds that, according to WHEDCo’s Facebook page, of the “127 families that moved into Intervale Green in 2009, 94 percent state that they are happy with the move.
Those families will now contribute to building and re-building the South Bronx’s living history. more
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In the spring 2010 issue of Shelterforce, Miriam Axel-Lute wrote about the challenges local post offices face amid technological and budgetary challenges and the subsequent effects on low-income communities, or communities where residence have limited access. In June 2009, the United States Postal Service began looking at a list of 3,300 branches — all potential candidates for elimination. By January 2010, that list had dwindled to an ominous 162. Axel-Lute quotes Denise Diaz of Central Florida Jobs With Justice, which protested against the potential closing of five post office stations in the Orlando area:
“It was clear that these were predominately in low- to moderate-income communities, plus one on the outskirts of downtown in the Vietnamese community with a lot of small businesses. It would have been a huge loss, particularly for seniors, small businesses, and people who don’t have a car. Some people would have had to go over six miles. [For some], if you were to look up your nearest postal station — those three [of the ones on the study list] would have been your options. They were going to wipe out a whole series of communities.”
According to the article, “The agency ended the first half of its fiscal year (October 1, 2009, to March 31, 2010) with a net loss of $1.9 billion, and its mail volume for 2010 is projected to be 10 billion pieces fewer than the previous year.”
These statistics prove to be foreboding not only in urban areas, but also in rural areas, where these post offices often represent outposts; a means of connectivity in communities that are physically isolated. National Public Radio recently conducted a profile on a post office in the West Virginia mountain community of Hacker Valley, where the the post office, though not “officially closed,” has been out of service since summer 2009. more
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In the upcoming issue of Shelterforce, we look at how urban agriculture brings not only food to communities, but also provides an opportunity to fill in vacant lots through programs like the Reimagining Cleveland project and the nationally-recognized Greensgrow Farm,…
Film director Michael Moore will use a $1 million dollar film tax credit he received for his film Capitalism: A Love Story to launch the State Theatre/Michigan Downtowns Project, which aims to promote nonprofit movie theaters as vehicles for revitalizing Michigan towns. Moore based production for Captialism in Traverse City, Mich., and founded the Traverse City Film Festival in 2005. “We want to turn on the marquee lights, bring in some jobs, pump money into the local economy,” Moore told The Traverse City Record-Eagle. The State Theatre/Michigan Downtowns Project will offer seed money to reopen vacant theaters, keep struggling theaters afloat, and open new movie theaters in towns that could benefit from a movie house.
“We want to turn on the marquee lights, bring in some jobs, pump money into the local economy,” Moore said. “This is just my effort to think of ways to do more.”
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The trendiest neighborhood in West Palm Beach is Northwood, a collection of historic districts, fading industrial areas, and blocks of small bungalows and grand Mission-style homes that is now hopping with cafes, boutiques, a monthly art and wine “promenade,” new workforce housing, significant streetscape improvements, a new Maritime Institute, and a can-do attitude. Yet not that long ago it was a worn-down area with declining property values (even pre-recession), empty storefronts, “slum landlords” and a dicey reputation. One local business owner lamented to Palm Beach Post reporter Rhonda Swann in 2008 that “Northwood Village [the commercial district] has been up and coming for 25 years, and that’s sad.”
Northwood is just north of West Palm Beach’s downtown, as you can see in the images. Its oldest part is Old Northwood, above the Village:
“Old Northwood was developed in the early 1920s during the Florida boom era. Prominent architects such as John Volk and William King designed homes that made Old Northwood one of the most exclusive communities this side of Palm Beach. By the 1970s, however, the boom time glamour was long gone. The renaissance of Old Northwood began in the mid eighties when residents formed an association to revitalize and restore this important part of West Palm Beach history.”
While the neighborhood has yet to reach its full potential, there can now be little doubt that a critical mass of revitalization has been achieved over the last decade and appears to be here to stay. As noted in West Palm Beach mayor Lois Frankel’s state of the city address in January, the Village now can boast 35 new businesses, plus the new Maritime Institute that will educate 800 students each year, including through a special program targeting high-risk youth in the neighborhood. Improvements to Northwood’s building stock, public landscaping, streets and sidewalks have been dramatic (see images), with more to come, and the neighborhood has also gained new mixed-use development and affordable housing. more
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The deteriorating building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, also known as General Sedgwick House, is credited as being the birthplace of hip-hop, where DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) first played his breakbeats in all-night parties in the building’s…
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National Housing Institute
