Latest Reports from the Metropolitan Housing & Communities Policy Center

The National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program is a special federal appropriation, administered by NeighborWorks America, that is designed to support a rapid expansion of foreclosure intervention counseling in response to the nationwide foreclosure crisis. This report presents the results of preliminary analyses that attempt to measure the effects of the NFMC program on counseled homeowners. Overall, our analysis suggests that the program is having its intended effect of helping homeowners facing loss of their homes through foreclosure.

Community organizations, local governments, foundations, businesses, and social service providers rely on residential stability in their efforts to alleviate the plight of impoverished families in hard-pressed neighborhoods. While trading up to a better neighborhood may improve an individual family’s circumstances, frequent churning of residents may have negative effects for communities. A forthcoming examination of evidence from the Making Connections initiative, a decade-long effort sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to improve neighborhoods in 10 cities, will be the starting point for a debate about the intersection of poverty, neighborhood quality, and economic advancement.

Americans change residences frequently. Residential mobility can reflect positive changes in a family's circumstances or be a symptom of instability and insecurity. Mobility may also change neighborhoods as a whole. To shed light on these challenges, this report uses a unique survey conducted for the Making Connections initiative. The first component measures how mobility contributed to changes in neighborhoods' composition and characteristics. The second component identifies groups of households that reflect different reasons for moving or staying in place. The final component introduces five stylized models of neighborhood performance: each has implications for low-income families' well-being and for community-change efforts.

This brief, a companion to the Housing in the Nation's Capital 2009 report, describes the impact of the foreclosure crisis on the Washington metropolitan region, examining the level and trends of foreclosures, outlining potential secondary effects for families and neighborhoods, and looking towards the future of the region's housing market. It concludes with policy implications in four areas: foreclosure prevention, neighborhood stabilization, recovery assistance for displaced households, and services for children in foreclosed homes.

This is the seventh in a series of annual reports about housing in the Washington metropolitan region. It assembles and analyzes the most current data on housing conditions in the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs. This year's report focuses on the impact of the foreclosure crisis on the region, examining the level and trends of foreclosures, outlining potential secondary effects for families and neighborhoods, and looking towards the future of the region's housing market. It concludes with policy implications in four areas: foreclosure prevention, neighborhood stabilization, recovery assistance for displaced households, and services for children in foreclosed homes.

Nonprofits face growing demands to demonstrate their impact. Their ability to report on program performance is essential to organizational legitimacy and financial survival. This report chronicles the evaluation experiences of four youth-serving nonprofits that participated in the East of the River Initiative, a multi-year effort to increase the capacity of agencies to assess their performance. We detail key successes and challenges with the goal of sparking a dialogue between nonprofits, funders, and technical assistance providers about the proper value of evaluation in the sector.

Despite substantial progress since passage of the Fair Housing Act four decades ago, neighborhoods remain highly segregated by race and ethnicity. This paper summarizes existing research evidence on both the costs of segregation and the potential benefits of neighborhood diversity. It uses decennial census data to show that a growing share of US neighborhoods are racially and ethnically diverse, but that low-income African Americans in particular remain highly concentrated in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Because the dynamics that sustain segregation today are complex, strategies for overcoming them must address not only discrimination, but information gaps, affordability constraints, prejudice, and fear.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are an important problem, for affected individuals, caregivers, and society at large. Numerous remedial efforts have been launched, including the Finding Answers program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Reform calls for documenting disparities, developing and disseminating information about effective remedies, and generating supportive business cases for improvement. This brief report focuses the need for business cases, which are harder to build than might at first appear, as shown by a literature scan and interviews with entities working to reduce disparities under RWJF grants.

HOPE VI supports demolishing large, dilapidated public housing and replacing it with smaller-scale, more appealing properties. What makes this feasible (mixed financing; private-sector entities; and mixed-income, mixed-tenure complexes) also creates conditions that challenge and can undermine long-term sustainability. Sustainability has not yet been assessed and whether it should or can be assessed has been questioned. With input from housing practitioners and insight from a trial exploration of two HOPE VI redevelopments, this report demonstrates the need for, and feasibility of, conducting an assessment that can assist both private owners and public agencies in sustaining this valuable resource.

Many policy makers and scholars regard the HOPE VI Program as one of the nation's most successful urban redevelopment programs (c.f. Katz 2009; Cisneros 2009). But despite its very real accomplishments, the HOPE VI program's record in meeting the needs of the original residents who endured the worst consequences of the failures of public housing is mixed. With its proposed "Choice Neighborhoods" initiative, the Obama administration has the opportunity to build on the experiences of nearly two decades of experience with HOPE VI. Incorporating intensive case management and permanent supportive housing for the most vulnerable into Choice Neighborhoods and any other comprehensive redevelopment efforts is one way to ensure that these initiatives truly meet the needs of all public housing families.