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Employer-Assisted Housing
EAH is a flexible tool that can be tailored to work in different community contexts and to support various equitable development goals. Most EAH programs help employees purchase homes—often near their workplace. They can also provide rental assistance or increase the amount of housing in the surrounding community that is affordable for an employer's workers.
Healthy Food Retailing
For decades, low-income urban and rural communities have faced limited opportunities to purchase healthy food. This tool focuses on strategies to increase access to retail outlets that sell nutritious, affordable food in these underserved communities.
Brownfields
This tool covers strategies used to encourage redevelopment of brownfields
(abandoned, idled, or underutilized commercial or industrial sites). Brownfield
redevelopment is complicated by the real and perceived dangers of environmental
contamination. Infill development is the use of vacant land within built
urban areas. Reclaiming brownfields and the use of infill development offers
new land use options in gentrifying areas.
Minority Contracting
Ensures that healthy local businesses owned by people of color are a basic
component of strong, sustainable communities. These businesses generate
job opportunities for residents, and keep money circulating within the neighborhood.
This tool reviews major approaches for achieving parity for minority-owned
businesses.
Local
Hiring Strategies
An array of strategies that connect economically marginalized communities
to regional job opportunities. For example, linkage programs can require
that a percentage of jobs created by a commercial development go to local
residents. Other programs link urban core and inner-ring suburban residents
to employment opportunities around the region. Building such economic opportunity
helps residents remain in their communities.
Affordable
Housing Development 101
Increasing and preserving affordable housing stock is critical to community
stability. There are a range of practices that are aimed at both existing
housing and new development. The focus is typically protecting low-income
residents most at risk of displacement from gentrification. Often strategies
expand to include a spectrum of housing choices from rental to ownership
in a range of income classes.
Expiring
Use: Retention of Subsidized Housing
Protects "expiring use" subsidized housing from losing its affordability-designation
and reverting to the private market. This tool clarifies ways to protect
affordable housing originally supported by HUD, with a special focus on
regions with extreme housing shortages, and not coincidentally, considerable
amounts of gentrification.
Commercial
Linkage Strategies
A range of programs and fees that tie economic development to the construction
of affordable housing. Most require developers of new commercial properties
to pay fees to support affordable housing construction. Linkage programs
support smart growth, mitigate rising housing costs caused by economic development,
and provide a dedicated source of revenue for affordable housing.
Commercial
Stabilization
This tool reviews effective techniques employed by community-based organizations
to preserve cultural organizations and longstanding commercial enterprises
that define the historic character of communities. These institutions are
frequently the most vulnerable to displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Community
Mapping
This tool identifies key information needed to assess the considerable public
and private forces driving gentrification. The tool reviews effective community
mapping and indicator projects; identifies key data sources to guide community
interventions; and shows the role of mapping in community education and
organizing.
Community
Development Financial Institutions
Existing and emerging resident-owned financial institutions serve to build
assets for low-income/low-wealth residents and provide them with a stronger
voice in running an institution dedicated to neighborhood development and
revitalization.
Cooperative
Ownership Models
Businesses, based on democratic principles, owned and run by various stakeholders
such as employees, producers, consumers, or others. Co-op models targeted
to low- income/low-wealth residents can offer potential financial benefits,
business skills, and experience in running a democratically controlled enterprise.
Just
Cause Eviction Controls
These laws give special protections to the elderly, disabled and catastrophically
ill, and ensure that landlords can only evict with proper cause, such as
failure to pay rent or property destruction. They protect renters against
being unfairly evicted by landlords who want to capitalize on the explosive
rental and housing markets.
Code
Enforcement
Prevents and abates violations on private property such as vacant, poorly
maintained, and dangerous buildings, illegal dumping, weeded lots, graffiti,
junk motor vehicles and more. Code enforcement can be an important way to
protect existing residents or to accelerate gentrification. This tool will
provide strategies to ensure resident protection.
Infill
Incentives
Density bonuses allow developers to create higher density projects, increasing
affordability measures. Infill incentives reward innovative housing efforts
to expand homeownership through unused or abandoned lots in urban core neighborhoods.
Used properly, these programs can produce new housing units, reduce blight,
preserve open space, reduce traffic, and encourage retail development that
serves the needs of existing residents.
Developer
Exactions
Requires new commercial developments to contribute fees to the development
of affordable housing, community services and infrastructure. Creative nonprofit
organizations are utilizing exactions as an anti-gentrification tool to
finance services such as day care, cultural centers, job training, below
market rate housing, and ride sharing.
Living
Wage Provisions
Ordinances that ensure the employees of public contractors, private contractors
receiving public sector funding, and public employees are paid wages at
pace with regional cost of living measures. Higher wages achieved through
living wage ordinances assist low-income residents in remaining in their
communities, lead to greater stability in the workforce and increase the
municipal tax base.
Rent
Controls
A review of legal and programmatic protections for renters to slow the pace
in markets with rapidly escalating rental prices. The effectiveness and
implications of rent control has been heavily debated for as long as such
ordinances have existed. This tool reviews their potential application in
gentrifying contexts, as well as the compeimentary techniques necessary
to make this a useful strategy.
CDC's
with Resident Shareholders
An emerging tool that offers low-income/low-wealth residents the opportunity
to own equity in real estate projects spearheaded by community development
corporations (CDCs). Owning CDC project stock provides residents with financial
benefits and voice in the neighborhood development process. This tool directs
profits from development back into the community, ensuring benefit for existing
residents.
Community
Reinvestment Act
Congressional mandate that financial and depository institutions, such as
commercial banks, help meet credit needs of the communities in which they
operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. To utilize the
Act as an anti-displacement tool requires diligent monitoring to ensure
investment occurs, as well as strategic planning to direct investment to
benefit residents.
Inclusionary
Zoning
Land use regulation mandating a percentage (usually 15-20%) of the housing
units in any project above a given size be affordable to people of low and
moderate incomes. The developer can build the housing or contribute to a
fund to develop it elsewhere. This tool has particular relevance in gentrifying
communities, where high-income and luxury apartment developments can quickly
overrun the existing low- and moderate-income housing stock.
Housing
Trust Funds
Public funds, established by legislation, ordinance or resolution, to receive
specific revenues dedicated to affordable housing development. The key characteristic
of a housing trust fund is that it receives on-going revenues from dedicated
sources such as commercial development taxes, fees on loan repayments, and
transfer taxes. These funds can stabilize communities facing gentrification
pressures.
Limited
Equity Housing Cooperatives
A partnership wherein residents collectively own and control their housing.
The limited equity component limits the return on resale, insuring that
housing remains affordable to future residents. Limited equity co-ops promote
democratic participation through resident control and ownership.
Community
Land Trusts
A model where nonprofit organizations acquire and hold land for community
benefit, making the land available to individuals through long-term land
leases. Residents own the homes located on the land. This alternative property
ownership model insures long term community benefits such as permanent affordability,
while creating homeownership and equity opportunities for individual residents.
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