housing – Page 2

Will Banning Single-Family Housing Make for More Affordable Homes?

1Aug

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

Will Banning Single-Family Housing Make for More Affordable Homes?

Minneapolis effectively eliminated single-family zoning in order to undo decades of segregation and create more affordable housing options. Other states are watching closely. Nothing captures the housing affordability crisis as well as this fact: In no single city, state, or other municipality in the U.S. can someone earning minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment. This is compounded by the fact that housing prices continue to rise, and cities don’t have the ability (and in some cases, the physical space) to add more affordable housing to help keep costs down. So Minneapolis changed the rules, and others are taking notice. In December 2018, the city approved a plan that allows for duplexes and triplexes, effectively eliminating the future of building more single-family hou...

25Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

How This Black Entrepreneur Went From Homelessness to Housing Others

With help from a business incubator, Tyrone Poole created a platform to help people on low incomes find housing. Collapse and regeneration are experiences Tyrone Poole knows intimately. There was that period back in 2006 when he was homeless—that moment when, on crutches and in excruciating pain, Poole found himself staggering into the bus station in Portland, Oregon, where he collapsed on a bench and threw up. That was how a policeman found him that night and later took him to the YMCA homeless shelter, where he got a cot on the gym floor. Everything he owned was in a bag under the bed. What had led to Poole’s downslide was medical debt. He’d completed his associate degree at Portland Community College and was training to be a firefighter when he suffered a debilitating i...

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

Housing in Chicago: Pushing out the poor?

Geoff Smith: Low-income areas are losing affordable housing due to decades of economic disinvestment and discrimination. Newly sworn-in Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot ran on a campaign that promised change for every day Chicagoans. Pursuing office as an outsider without decades of connection to the Chicago political machine, Lightfoot pledged to address Chicago's growing housing affordability gap. Now in her first days as mayor, Lightfoot has appointed Marisa Novara to head Chicago's Department of Housing. The department will operate as a standalone government entity for the first time in 11 years, a decision that was made during the final months of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration. Novara comes from the Metropolitan Planning Council, where she he...

How the Ultra-Rich Can Help Fix the Affordable Housing Crisis

24Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

How the Ultra-Rich Can Help Fix the Affordable Housing Crisis

A growing number of people invest in real estate they never intend to occupy and push up prices for the rest of us. Cities should make them pay. Down the street from my office, a luxury residential tower is rising, the fifth such project in Boston in the last decade. The 61-story “One Dalton Place” is being marketed as “New England’s tallest and most luxurious residential building.” Across the coastal cities of North America, cranes are rising to construct similar stunning new glass towers of both residential and commercial properties. Real estate in existing neighborhoods is being bid up by investors and wealthy buyers, pushing up the cost of land and housing for everyone else. A high percentage of these housing units will sit empty or rarely occupied. In Boston’s ...

After Centuries of Housing Racism, a Southern City Gets Innovative

23May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

After Centuries of Housing Racism, a Southern City Gets Innovative

Denise Fitzgerald’s property abuts the string of quiet, empty lots that line Ewing Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Recently she was leaf-blowing detritus shed by the enormous sycamore tree dominating the yard of her tidy Habitat for Humanity home. She says she’d cut the tree down herself but knows it’s big enough to take out both her house and the house beside her if she dare try it. Fitzgerald is familiar with the empty lots of Ewing Street, just a few blocks from Jackson State University. She’s lived here since 2008, and she remembers when Ewing was a series of derelict buildings smeared across the neighborhood. Only two empty houses remain. The rest is a collection of oak and hackberry trees, with some untamed vines. There is some human intervention, however. Every other week ...