HUD’s 2009 New Orleans Metropolitan Area Housing Survey, the first a comprehensive analysis of the area’s housing stock since the department’s last substantive assessment in 2004, finds that the area lost 75,000 housing units, or nearly 13 percent of its housing stock from 2004 to 2009. The report also found a 33 percent rise in median housing costs.

Building California’s Future, a new study from the Center for Housing Policy, outlines a correlation between economic activity stemming from newly built homes and job creation, a potential boon for cash-starved local budgets.

The Gains from Right to Rent in 2010, by Dean Baker and Hye Jin Rho for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, analyzes the costs of renting versus owning a house in several major cities and finds that fair market rents in these metropolitan areas are often much lower than the cost of ownership. The report documents the costs of renting and owning before and after taxes in 16 metropolitan statistical areas and highlights the savings that come from renting. Baker recommended a post-foreclosure “right to rent” in the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of Shelterforce.

Kids and Foreclosure: New York City, released by Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and its Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, looks at how children’s academic performance is affected by the foreclosure crisis. The report, funded by the Open Society Institute, presents findings from the first phase of a two-part analysis of how foreclosures affect children in three cities.

Maintaining Diversity in America’s Transit-Rich Neighborhoods, released by Northeastern’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, outlines policy tools being used across the country to help shape equitable neighborhood change in transit-rich neighborhoods.

Pathways out of Poverty for Vulnerable Californians: Policies that Prepare the Workforce for Middle-Skill Infrastructure Jobs, a new report from PolicyLink, shows how community colleges are a vital bridge to expanding job opportunities in the growing infrastructure sector for low-income young people and workers displaced by the recession. The report highlights innovative training programs in California, but its policy prescriptions are applicable across the nation.

The Next Economy: Economic Recovery and Transformation in the Great Lakes Region, from the Brookings Institution, looks at how the Great Lakes Region could transcend its Rust Belt moniker and show the rest of the country how to move on from old ways of thinking about the economy.

CDFIs and Transit-Oriented Development, an October 2010 study prepared by the Center for Transit-Oriented Development and issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Franciso, examines how, to date, most CDFIs have limited their TOD engagement to simply providing capital and technical assistance to individual housing and mixed-use projects in neighborhoods served by transit. The report notes that CDFIs have an opportunity to offer more in the way of advancing the TOD agenda, including technical expertise, creative financing tools, and advocacy.

Finding Certainty in Uncertain Times is a collection of commentaries from Urban Land Institute’s five senior resident fellows: Stephen Blank, Edward McMahon, John McIlwain, Thomas Murphy and Michael Horst. The report examines trends in population growth, consumer housing preferences, employment, real estate finance, environmental conservation, energy efficiency, venture capital investment, and public leadership. According to the publication, these factors are converging to shape “a new era of urban economics within which cities and urban regions will have to compete in order to be successful in the 21st century.”