June 2009

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    Neighborhood Schools that Work for Kids, Communities, & the Environment

    Smart Growth Schools expert Nathan Norris lists eleven key principles for measuring how well schools and school policies fit in with their communities. I really like them: Restoration Preference: Will old schools be restored rather than replaced so long as…

  • Tracking Job Creation in the Nonprofit Sector

    Rick Cohen, a long-time Shelterforce contributor and editor of The Nonprofit Quarterly‘s “Cohen Report” wrote last week on the importance of nonprofits tracking their own industry’s job growth as a result of additional funding from the American Reinvestment and Recovery…

  • Joint Center’s Housing Report Points to Challenges Ahead

    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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    Revitalizing Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (Series Conclusion - Making It Green)

    This is the final installment of my miniseries (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) about Cincinnati’s remarkable Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, potentially a national model for smart, green revitalization. The reason that revitalizing Over-the-Rhine should be just as important to environmentalists…

  • A Third Strand of Sustainable Housing

    There’s quite a jumble of tools out there for people who want to make their houses into models of energy efficiency. As far as the best way to go about achieving higher levels of sustainability at home, I’ve been aware…

  • Tracking the Recession and the Recovery

    The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings announced today the launch of its MetroMonitor, a tool that measures the health of 100 of America’s largest metropolitan economies. The tools aims to look “beneath the hood of national economic statistics to portray…

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    Revitalizing Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (Part 3 - the Progress)

    This was going to be the final installment of my miniseries about Cincinnati’s remarkable Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, but I’m on too much of a roll to finish today. (Or, as my man Van would put it, “it’s too late to stop…

  • Kelo v. Sotomayor

    Kelo v. New London remains a sticky subject. (Ongoing debate in Shelterforce and Rooflines is proof of that.) The 2005 Supreme Court case that upheld a municipality’s ability to take private land for private development in the public interest is…

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    GIS Mapping in Australia Shows How Transit Reduces Auto Dependence

    GIS mapping in Melbourne, Australia, on patterns of car ownership shows that transit works: the closer one is to a rail transit line, the less need there is for a car. The farther away, the greater the need for multiple…

  • Seriously Commuting

    May was Bike to Work Month, designed to encourage commuters to step out from behind the wheel and find ways to ride, but did anyone think it could go this far? Watch CBS Videos Online Do you bike to work?…

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    Revitalizing Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (Part 2)

    Last week I wrote the first installment of my miniseries about Cincinnati’s remarkable Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. As I wrote then, this distinct and historic quarter adjacent to Cincinnati’s downtown is full of promise but bears considerable scars from decades of disinvestment,…

  • HUD Wants $150M For “Geography of Opportunity”

    HUD Secy. Shaun Donovan announced today at the National Fair Housing Alliance’s 2009 conference that his department has requested $150 million for the Sustainable Communities Initiative to create a “geography of opportunity” for residents. The term, “geography of opportunity,” echoes…

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    Detroit as a Test Site of the Green Future

    Recently a group of planners, including long-time NHI researcher Alan Mallach, visited Detroit to survey the city’s vast vacant spaces and make recommendations on how to re-organize the city for the future. The team proposed relocating many of the city’s…

  • NHI/Shelterforce Is On Facebook

    We’ve been here a while, but this is a great venue for one-stop shopping for national and industry news from National Housing Institute’s home page, as well as the latest from Shelterforce and Rooflines — NHI’s blog that attracts practitioners,…

  • Growing The Community Development Vision

    Burgeoning Asian-American communities in places like Colorado and Georgia are not necessarily served by Asian-American-based community development corporations — though they should be, according to Jeremy Liu, Executive Director of the Boston-based Asian Community Development Corporation. Liu, who made his…

  • TARP for Community Development?

    Doris Koo, president and CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, brought up an interesting concept of using TARP monies returned to Treasury by various lending institutions and re-appropriating them toward community development financial institutions. Community Development TARP, as she called it…

  • Social Innovation and Civic Participation

    We have some insight from Sonal Shah, the head of the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, who is advocating here at here at the 10th annual National CAPACD convention for government to play a limited…

  • Keep It Local

    Mark Winston Griffith of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy is making a particularly keen point here at the National CAPACD 10th Annual Convention in Washington in regards to community organizers becoming too enamored with the Washington, DC lifestyle now that a community organizer occupies the White House: “We need to steer clear of a “Beltway conversation” now that we’ve won the White House and the thkning that we’re part of the political elite. We can’t only be focused on getting our organizations invited to the White House.” Staying local, he said, is imperative: “We need to exploit this power to our fullest ability now that we’re here. Just as the tide came in we also have to think about the tide going back out. We need to think not only in terns of electoral victories, but local victories as well — building very local alliances, focusing on local events, and local impact. more

  • A Squatter’s Discourse

    Spurred by the Bullet Space squat in Manhattan’s East Village making the transition to being a co-op, we find an interesting conversation on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show on squatting’s legitimate place in the housing field. The interview includes Andrew Reicher…

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    Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine, On the Verge

    Cincinnati’s historic and very centrally located Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is poised to become one of America’s greatest revitalization stories, in the process creating a national exemplar of green, sustainable development. But a lot of things will need to happen in the…