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The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University recently released its annual State of the Nation’s Housing report. The report takes a sweeping look at housing trends in America, finding an increasingly competitive rental market and falling homeownership numbers. The report also provides compelling data depicting the sober reality of social and racial…
Read More »Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. In what’s being widely hailed as a gigantic victory for civil rights law, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday to uphold the use of disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. The much-debated theory…
Read More »Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. Three hundred and forty-one pages and 235.5 megabytes. That’s the length and size of the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force plan, published last year. Based on a survey of the city’s 380,000 parcels, the…
Read More »Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. The verdure of spring is on full display in Detroit — but so, too, are the challenges of maintaining open land in a fiscally challenged city where over 30 percent…
Read More »Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. With property taxes accounting for up to 75 percent of local government revenue, everything depends on getting them right. It’s the pool of funds we depend upon to support everything from infrastructure…
Read More »At the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference held last week in Detroit, more than 1,100 attendees engaged in meaningful conversations about causes and solutions for vacancy and abandonment. But those conversations weren’t just taking place in meetings rooms. Using #RVP2015 and #RVPMovement, thousands of tweets covered a range of topics, including those highlighted below: Land Banking & Code…
Read More »Post-industrial cities throughout the Rust Belt have experienced significant population loss over the last fifty years, leading to unprecedented numbers of vacant and abandoned properties. Immigrants can breathe new life into neighborhoods that have seen disinvestment and abandonment. At the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference, participants will have the opportunity to explore immigration and…
Read More »The City of Flint Planning Commission recently adopted Beyond Blight: City of Flint Blight Elimination Framework. With a five-year implementation timeline, the Framework uses an in-depth, data-driven approach that brings increased transparency and clarity to the City’s work — and, in so doing, it offers a model other cities can learn from….
Read More »Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, hit the nail on the head when he shared with us his thoughts on the value of the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference: it’s a chance learn from each other but, perhaps just as importantly, it is an opportunity to remember that we aren’t alone in this…
Read More »In just a few months, Detroit will play host to community development leaders from across the country for the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference (RVP), charting the course for the emerging movement to reuse our nation’s vacant properties. After visiting five other cities over the last eight years, we could not…
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