Congress May Lock in Large Housing Voucher Losses For Years to Come
Congress may be close to finalizing 2015 funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which includes almost all federal rental assistance and affordable housing programs....
View ArticleBlack and Brown and Redlined All Over
Home prices have been on the rise for several quarters now but the housing crisis is not nearly over. Despite the speculator-fueled rise in home prices in some parts of the country, hard-hit...
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In Our Backyard: Beyond Closing D.C. General, Time for Real Change
The headline of an October 2007 press release read: ”Closure of D.C. Village Gives Way to Best Practices.” D.C. Village, an emergency shelter for homeless families, had been widely criticized for...
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No Safe Place: How Cities Are Making It Illegal to be Homeless
Tonight, thousands of homeless people in the United States will face the possibility of arrest because they do not have a safe place to sleep. Thousands more could be arraigned for sitting or standing...
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Segregation in the Era of Housing ‘Choice’
A few months before I met Vivian Warner,* she got the call she had been waiting so long for that she’d forgotten to hope for it. It was Baltimore Housing, the agency that oversees subsidized housing in...
View ArticleUtility Policy Reform Must Be a Focus for Lawmakers
More than a decade ago, when Ms. Charles needed some help catching up on her utility bills and maintaining service for her home, she was able to receive a payment agreement from the Pennsylvania Public...
View ArticleTour Guide to Homelessness
Editor’s Note: This piece is an edited essay based on a compilation of real life interviews between the author and her social worker. Oh, hi. I’m Lydia. I’ll be your tour guide to HOMELESSNESS today....
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In Our Backyard Interview: “Homelessness is Like Being Slowly Disassembled”
Alyssa Peterson: Can you explain Street Sense’s mission? Brian Carome: We are a street newspaper, which is a model that exists in a lot of different places. Street newspapers are print newspapers that...
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The answer to homelessness? Reliable employment.
This week, the city of Boston conducted its annual Homeless Census, during which teams of volunteers spanned the city and counted the number of people living on the streets, in shelters, or...
View ArticleClosing the Justice Gap for Low-Income New Yorkers
Each year, thousands of New Yorkers find themselves in Housing Court facing eviction. All court cases are important of course, but the potential ramifications of eviction cases are particularly...
View ArticleAs Affordable Rent Disappears, Lawmakers Propose Slashing Funds that Could Help
Last week, the Washington Post reported on a D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute study which found that there are virtually no apartments available on the open market in the nation’s capital that are...
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A City that Values My Brothers and Sisters
Editor’s note: Like many people living in urban communities across the country, residents of the historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati are struggling to stay in their homes and have a...
View ArticleStop Ignoring Residential Segregation and the Concentration of Poverty
Over the last two weeks, disturbing images of Baltimore’s civil unrest have flooded mainstream and social media. For many, the images recall other past uprisings still fresh in our nation’s collective...
View ArticleEnding ‘Debtors Prisons’ for Arkansas Renters
While it may not sound like something that should be legal in modern-day America, being arrested for failing to pay rent on time is a reality for some Arkansans, thanks to a state law – known as the...
View ArticleA Story of Why We Need Housing First Right Now
We need a national Housing First plan implemented as soon as possible if we are to effectively deal with the problem of homelessness in America. This is a story that explains why. I became homeless in...
View ArticleRemembering Katrina in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
This is an excerpt from a post that first appeared at Medium. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 80 percent of New Orleans was under water, thousands of people were displaced, and at...
View ArticleWhat I Told the Attorney General and the HUD Secretary About My Criminal Record
After four decades of mass incarceration and over-criminalization in the United States, as many as 1 in 3 Americans now have some type of criminal record, and nearly half of U.S. children now have a...
View ArticleNew Mortgage Disclosure Requirements a Win for AAPIs
Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released a much needed and long-anticipated rule—a milestone not only for fair housing policy and advocacy groups, but also for the nation’s...
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In Our Backyard: Responding to the Affordable Housing Crisis
Low- and moderate-income people across the country are facing a rental affordability crisis. TalkPoverty’s backyard in Washington, D.C. is no exception. Over the past decade, low-income D.C. residents...
View ArticleIn Our Backyard: A Golden Opportunity for Affordable Housing
“Our affordable housing issues are directly related to our progress. We developed areas that weren’t developed—we’re attracting a lot of people. When there’s more demand, the prices go up. That’s why...
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