When suddenly faced with paying his mortgage alone, Noah Tang of Bloomington, Illinois, went old school. He turned his spare rooms into monthly rentals for students in his college town. This helped him make ends meet and also helped him build community.
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Detroiters seem to be leading a reclamation of vacant homes since the Covid-19 pandemic. Here are some possible reasons for this resurgence in local homeownership.
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If we listen to those concerned about housing affordability, rents are already too high and may only go higher. If we listen to those concerned about housing finance, rents are about to collapse. Can both of these narratives be true?
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Immokalee, FL, sits 30 miles from glitzy Naples, yet it’s one of the most rent-burdened places in the state. Local nonprofits are teaming up to change that by planning a new community for Immokalee’s agricultural workers.
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Americans need housing relief imminently. Despite what you may have heard, upzoning isn’t likely to be the thing that delivers that—but here's why it’s still worth pursuing.
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High-earning Americans are saying they might choose to rent indefinitely. Why?
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If you don’t own a home, and don’t have plans to own one anytime soon, you might think property taxes don’t concern you. But, what if we told you that they definitely do?
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Vacancy rates are a crucial piece of bottom-up feedback. They can tell us when the housing ecosystem is out of equilibrium. But there are larger questions they can’t answer.
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Boulder, Colorado is one of the most complex and competitive housing markets in the country. A ballot initiative that would have helped renters (and those with rooms to rent) died recently under strange circumstances.
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The housing crisis is complex. It was made more so by the pandemic. What can Strong Towns advocates do to bring some sanity back to the housing market?
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Some cities and states are allowing tenants to defer rent payments. What happens when those rents come due before the economy is back on its feet?
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What if Airbnb—maligned by urbanists everywhere—didn’t have to be part of the problem, but could rather be part of the solution for making our neighborhoods stronger, more adaptable, and more resilient? Drawing both from personal experience and historical precedent, a Strong Towns staffer makes just that case.
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Two diehard urbanists swore they would never open a neighborhood-killing Airbnb. They changed their minds. Here’s why.
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A new study of San Francisco’s rent control shows it raises rents for some.
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Seattle, WA may be the first city in the US to create a formal “renters’ commission” to advise the local government.
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The perspective of renters is often ignored in neighborhood decision-making. Here are some ideas for how to change that.
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Zoning is often explicitly biased against renters. This creates challenges not only for the renting population, but also for small-scale developers who would like to build rental housing.
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Small scale developers envision a world with a lot more landlords. Here's why we think that’s such a good thing.
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In spite of the fact that ⅓ of all American are renting their housing, there seems to be a notion in many neighborhoods and towns that owners are the only residents who are going to be valuable members of their communities. Instead, renters should be more fully welcomed into their neighborhoods and respected as the diverse, engaged community members that they can be.
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