Gentrification. Is it displacement or is it revitalization? A sign of rising inequities or improving urban economies? Do we even need to worry about gentrification in a shrinking city?
This report outlines some of the main findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s years of research and outreach with Ohio bankers, community development practitioners, and other market participants.1 We offer this white paper as an Ohio-centric companion to the nationally focused housing market report issued by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in January 20122, and we offer it in the same spirit—as providing a framework for weighing the pros and cons of programs aimed at stabilizing the housing sector.
Ohio foreclosures are at crisis levels, with more than 70,000 new foreclosures filed in 2012. This was about the same as in 2011 when the state experienced 71,556 foreclosures. What began as mostly an urban problem in the mid-1990s later erupted into a statewide epidemic.
In celebration of the community foundation field's 100th anniversary in 2014, the Mott Foundation is continuing its series of articles that examine various facets of the field's growth and development. The articles report on what is occurring in Mott's major geographic focus areas — Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, South Africa and the U.S. — and provide information about how the field is expanding globally.
This report, the culmination of a 16-month examination of some of the key issues in housing, provides a blueprint for an entirely new system of housing finance for both the ownership and rental markets. Under this new system, the private sector will play a far greater role in bearing credit risk and providing mortgage funding, and taxpayer protection will be a central goal.
Investing to help low-income people solve their legal problems is smart, results-oriented philanthropy. For decades, all over the country, legal aid groups have been a driving force that makes change real in millions of lives. They have answers when families need housing, food, health care. It’s their work that corrects bad policy and changes how society treats the most vulnerable.
