Publications & Research

Do climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience matter to community development? You bet!

How can housing nonprofit organizations nationwide engage more households in need, especially communities of color? NeighborWorks America is committed to helping them do just that. 

In the US, 22 percent of households in tribal areas either have severely inadequate housing or are overcrowded—or both. This reality is abysmal, especially in comparison with the significantly higher quality of housing on nontribal lands. Furthermore, projects funded, designed, and/or run by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are often poorly built and designed in ways that do not respect cultural norms, perpetuating the economic instability implicit in inadequate housing. Simultaneously, there are several promising nascent efforts to develop housing that is affordable, higher quality, and culturally sensitive. This paper, based on research conducted while the author was a Gramlich Fellow at the Center, examines three such efforts with reference to the following questions:
 

How do Native design practitioners define Native and culturally sensitive design? How can design uplift Native communities? How can design create self-determination for tribes? What current design practices exist that have been successful in addressing housing needs on tribal lands? How do current design practices relate to past methods of housing construction on tribal lands? How does federal policy influence the design decisions practitioners are able to make with tribal housing?

 

Shared equity housing creates lasting affordability, builds wealth for people with limited incomes and helps create vibrant and inclusive communities. Shared equity programs typically realize these outcomes by limiting the sale or rental price of homes in their portfolios; requiring the sharing of home appreciation gains; and providing homeownership assistance to program residents. Residents and community members often participate in governing shared equity programs through democratic decision-making and/or a cooperative ownership structure. 

Our blueprint serves as a primer to manufactured housing — and a roadmap for community development professionals with the desire to build and scale sustainable programs centered on manufactured housing. 

This research offers organizational- and policy-level insights into the implementation and sustainability of delivering resident services. To enable and improve this field, a call is made to policymakers and other funders to increase the stability and availability of funding for resident services. This opportunity, if met by government, foundations, private donors, and organizations themselves, has the potential to transform not only the physical, emotional, and financial health of residents, but our definition of and approach to housing as we know it.

This short paper takes a first look at middle neighborhoods in a cluster of Desert Southwest cities in order to provide some initial and provisional answers to these questions. We selected six, more or less, representative cities to examine: Fresno, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Albuquerque, new Mexico; and Arlington and Lubbock, Texas. 

This study explores how the community development sector can strengthen the recruitment and retention of staff at all levels — a topic top of mind for organizations around the country. Based upon a review of leadership programs nationwide, it includes concrete next steps to help secure the next generation of community development leaders, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.