By: Michael A. Spotts, President
Today I am pleased to announce the official launch of the Neighborhood Fundamentals blog. This past August, I posted a brief article about Neighborhood Fundamentals’ mission: providing research and technical assistance to support housing affordability, community and economic development, equitable transit-oriented development, and affirmatively furthering fair housing. Moving forward, I will be posting news, analysis and resources more frequently.
This website contains resources that should be useful to practitioners at the local, state and national levels. These include research, reports and projects to which I contributed in my prior role with Enterprise Community Partners’ Policy Development and Research team. Topics include:
- Bending the cost curve for affordable housing development
- Balancing cost-effectiveness with building quality and resident opportunity in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program
- Effectively utilizing publicly-owned parcels to support affordable housing and community development
- Leading practices for implementing equitable transit-oriented development
A full list of resources can be found on the Projects and Publications page.
Moving forward, this blog will feature new resources as they become available, as well as my thoughts on issues critical to the field. From time-to-time, we will look back and feature some of the aforementioned resources in the context of current events. Later this week, I’ll be posting an article on the cost-effectiveness of our affordable housing construction and preservation efforts. This is a critical issue, given the scale of housing needs and the relative lack of subsidy resources. However, the nuance and complexities of analyzing costs are not always well understood, which can lead to policy solutions with unintended negative consequences.
You can read about this issue and any others by visiting the Neighborhood Fundamentals blog and by following us on Twitter: @NBHDFundLLC and @MichaelASpotts. You can also learn about our work by contacting us directly.