Access

h6. Access By Shelterforce

From Crisis to Opportunity: Responding to the Growing Economic Crisis for Knoxville’s Marginalized Children, a report released by the Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, looks at opportunities available to children in Knoxville, Tenn., particularly those in concentrated poverty and racially isolated neighborhoods. The report incorporates several interviews with local stakeholders and finds that children in the most distressed communities face “multiple barriers to opportunity,” including safe and stable housing, access to health care, high quality education, viable transportation, healthy food, and encouragement.
www.nhi.org/go/crisis

The High Cost of Segregation: Exploring the Relationship Between Racial Segregation and Subprime Lending, released by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, builds on the reporting that that the subprime mortgage crisis has disproportionately hit communities of color by examining if borrowers who live in more racially segregated metropolitan areas are more or less likely to obtain subprime loans. The report also looks at the composition of the borrower’s neighborhood and how that could play a factor in the kind of loan the borrower receives.
www.nhi.org/go/furman

Preserving Affordability of NSP Funded Foreclosed Properties, a report developed by Burlington Associates and the law firm Goldfarb and Lipman for NCB Capital Impact, outlines federal requirements for preserving affordability of NSP assisted homeownership units. The report describes specific legal and financial structures that jurisdictions might use to meet HUD requirements and preserve long-term affordability and provides a template for describing such programs in a local or state agency’s submission to HUD requesting NSP Funds
www.nhi.org/go/nsp

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned: Advancing Economic Mobility Through Savings, by Reid Cramer, Rourke O’Brien of the New America Foundation, with Daniel Cooper, and Maria Luengo-Prado, explores whether having parents with high savings—above median savings—or having high savings oneself, improves the chances of making the climb up the income ladder, or prevents one from falling down it. The report also looks at federal incentives and disincentives to savings in the federal tax code and public assistance programs, and makes recommendations on ways public policy can be improved to encourage savings, especially among low- and moderate-income families.
www.nhi.org/go/penny

Communities At Risk: How the Foreclosure Crisis Is Damaging Urban Areas and What is Being Done About It, by Living Cities, looks at the impact of foreclosures on American cities and the subsequent abandonment, decay, and budgetary shortfalls, but also what community groups and partnerships are doing in 10 cities with projects funded by Living Cities.
www.nhi.org/go/livingcities

Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong, by Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin examines the media coverage of the ACORN, including a break down of the coverage leading up to the 2008 elections and how a “little-known community organization became the subject of a major news story in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.”
www.nhi.org/go/acornstudy

Dangerous by Design: Solving the Epidemic of Preventable Pedestrian Deaths is a new report from Transportation for America that ranks America’s major metropolitan areas according to a Pedestrian Danger Index (PDI) that assesses how safe they are for pedestrians. The report also calculates the PDI for all metro areas and includes state specific facts, showing how all U.S. communities compare.
www.nhi.org/go/t4america

Published by the National Housing Institute