The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration is equipped with an impressive list of housing experts at the top.

What started out as a “weird art project” in Toronto is
providing aural illustrations into a northern New Jersey community’s past, and, organizers hope, laying the groundwork for the future.

Shelterforce interviews George Moses, chairman of the board of the National Low Income Housing Coalition

Vacant land gives way to residential and commercial development is a classic urban renewal storyline, but DC’s Columbia Heights is getting more than just retail and residential: its reclaiming its history.

Between HARP, TARP, HERA, ARRA, TALF, NSP 1, NSP 2 and the rest of the alphabet soup of stimulus funding, there’s a lot of government money circulating around the country right now. How are communities using this money, and will the stimulus provide the springboard needed for equitable, sustainable change?

Urban Essex County, New Jersey, one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the ongoing foreclosure crisis, could be the laboratory for a reinvention of community development. A local CDC there has completed the successful acquisition, by way of an alliance of nonprofits, of 47 mortgages expected to foreclose with an eye toward stabilizing neighborhoods in some of the oldest suburban communities in New Jersey.

New Jersey’s Paterson is the nation’s oldest planned industrial city—depend on who you ask. But it has fallen on hard times since the once-booming silk industry there declined in the latter half of the 20th century. Much of the industry in this city of 150,000 has since left, but with the help of a local CDC there, as well as corporate and community partners, a geological attraction once envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as something that could be harnessed for industrial might, is fully protected, and being prepared for a makeover.

Urban Essex County, New Jersey, one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the ongoing foreclosure crisis, could be the laboratory for an ostensible reinvention of community development, as a local CDC there announced today the successful acquisition of 47 mortgages on troubled properties with an eye toward stabilizing neighborhoods in some of the oldest suburban communities in New Jersey.

Youth violence scars lives, turning America’s streets into war zones. How do we transform killing fields into training grounds for stronger communities?

Majora Carter saw natural beauty and economic empowerment in her South Bronx neighborhood where others saw only a dumping ground. She’s changing the urban landscape in a way that’s been an eye-opener to people around the globe.