Books

2008

Revisiting Rental Housing: Policies, Programs, and Priorities

Rental housing is increasingly recognized as a vital housing option in the United States. Yet government policies and programs continue to grapple with widespread problems, including affordability, distressed urban neighborhoods, poor-quality housing stock, concentrated poverty, and exposure to health hazards in the home. These challenges can be costly and difficult to address. The time is ripe for fresh, authoritative analysis of this important yet often overlooked sector.

2007

Our Communities, Our Homes

In Our Communities, Our Homes: Pathways to Housing and Homeownership in America's Cities and States, Henry Cisneros, Jack Kemp, Kent Colton, and Nicolas Retsinas put political views aside to address the impediments to housing and homeownership at the state and local levels. This volume is a compilation of bipartisan recommendations from the authors and success stories from all corners of the country.

2005

Building Assets, Building Credit: Creating Wealth in Low-Income Communities

Today, more low-income Americans have greater access to credit than ever before, thanks in large part to the growth of global capital markets and liberal use of credit scores. But not all have benefited equally from the opened spigots. Some are overpaying for mortgage credit, others are getting in over their heads, and some have become the victims of predatory lenders.

2004

House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods

For sixty years, federal policy has attempted with little success to solve the problems of housing and poverty in America's inner cities. Against all odds, local organizations picked up where Washington has left off. In a series of dramatic and colorful narratives, von Hoffman shows how these groups helped revitalize once desperate neighborhoods in five major cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Based on years of research and more than a hundred interviews, this book is the first systematic account of the dramatic urban revival that took place in the United States.

Opportunity and Progress: A Bipartisan Platform for National Housing Policy

Debates about housing programs too often become mired in partisan battles instead of addressing innovative ways to solve housing problems as a country. Historically, successful housing programs are only developed with the support of both political parties. Two former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretaries—one democrat and one republican—a former CEO of a housing trade association—who is a republican—and a director of a housing research center—who is a democrat—set aside their differences to focus on today's housing challenges.

2003

Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment

In Mega-Projects, Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff analyze the unprecedented wave of large-scale (mega-) public investments that occurred in American cities during the 1950s and 1960s; the social upheavals they triggered, which derailed large numbers of projects during the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the political impulses that have shaped a new generation of urban mega-projects in the decades since.