In your town, is an owner of a single family home able to get permission to add a small rental unit onto their property without any real hassle? If not, you've got work to do.
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New Urbanist design has been praised and criticized alike. A recent development in Orlando, FL offers a unique opportunity to examine the challenges and potentials for success in planned New Urbanist communities.
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Increasing affordable housing doesn't have to require millions in public dollars or fancy new construction.
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Last year I bought a $15,000 uninhabitable shack in Cincinnati, Ohio, hoping to renovate it into a nice two-story duplex for renters. Here's what went wrong.
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This suburb is a growing place, but it's not a successful place. It risks becoming an increasingly isolating place full of people who are cut off from the economic mainstream.
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Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents.
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Suburbia cannot and will not be retrofitted to a substantially different model of development. But a small portion may be salvageable.
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Tulsa, OK is one of the most unlikely suspects to attract urban, entrepreneurial millennials. Yet here we are.
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When there is demand to live in an area, the market should naturally respond by increasing the supply of housing.
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The majority of young people now go to school longer to compete in an economy that pays less for full-time work while charging much, much more for the primary cost of living — a home.
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HUD has, with its mortgage funding, chosen to primarily support the creation of single-family dwellings, which are far more accessible to white middle class people and far less accessible to minorities in poverty. This contradicts Fair Housing laws and the Supreme Court's recent ruling on the subject.
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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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What does the actual global middle class looks like? Take all 7.3 billion people on the planet and line them up according to material wealth like a statistician. Then look toward the center.
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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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A little update on the storm that passed over Chuck's home last weekend. Thanks to everyone who checked in and sent well wishes.
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Comprehensive affordable housing that actually benefits a community is not just cheap housing.
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What combination of increase in private investment and downsizing of public investment will give my city a private to public investment ratio of 30:1?
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Seth Zeren provides this week's version of the Monday Member News Digest, a look at the blog posts written this past week by Strong Towns members.
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Aging suburbia is going through an identity crisis. Existing residents would like the place to stay much the same. New residents, including those who don’t live there yet, are demanding something else. The problem is that these places can’t continue to stay the same. Yet, the change is too difficult for many to swallow. This is why the default for most suburbs is decline. Growth isn’t built into their DNA.
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We can’t over-simplify the dynamics of all that has happened in Ferguson, but it’s obvious that our platform for building places is creating dynamics primed for social upheaval. The auto-oriented development pattern is a huge financial experiment with massive social, cultural and political ramifications.
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