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As we celebrate the start of a new year, Next City is looking back at our most impactful and interesting reporting on housing and homelessness in 2024. From innovative financing models to tenant-led solutions to emerging legislation to upend our current housing systems, our reporters are examining creative, collaborative efforts to address one of the most pressing challenges in urban policy today.
Alongside editors’ favorites, we’ve included the most-read stories of the year. All of these articles showcase Next City’s mission to deliver solutions journalism that explores how to build more equitable cities.
For more, see our most popular stories across the board for 2024. Or check out our annual Solutions of the Year magazine, an 80-page print edition highlighting 2024’s 24 best ideas for making liberating cities from systems of oppression.
They Bought an Apartment Building in D.C. Now They’re Turning It Into an Affordable Housing Co-op.
Since the district’s landmark Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act was enacted in 1980, very few tenant organizations in Washington, D.C., have ever successfully purchased their buildings when they’ve gone up for sale.
Northwest D.C.’s Baldwin House, planned as both an affordable housing cooperative and a mutual aid hub, is poised to defy these odds, thanks to robust tenant organizing and a critical mass of mostly small-dollar donations. But a hefty loan to repay, along with mounting interest, could cut their ambitions short. – Roshan Abraham, February 2024
A Rare Success Story for Public Housing Conversion
After HUD advocated demolishing 201 public housing units in the small St. Louis suburb, unlikely collaborators spearheaded a yearslong effort to voluntarily convert them to private ownership instead.
The result: A $44.5 million community reinvestment project that saved 186 of the homes. Mayor Nathaniel Griffin and other community leaders believe that although it was unique in many ways, the framework can ultimately be replicated in other struggling public housing projects. “We have a blueprint for how to change high-poverty communities from the ground up,” Griffin says. – Amy De La Hunt for Next City and Shelterforce, January 2024
A Unique Community Land Trust Making Homeownership Affordable in Richmond
As a rare CLT that serves as both a housing developer and a land bank, the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust has developed a powerful approach to make housing affordable to more low- and middle-income Richmonders through private and public sector partnerships.
Since its founding, Richmond’s community land trust has sold 89 homes to income-eligible homebuyers, with a few more homes currently under contract and 150+ properties in their pipeline. It’s on pace to close on its 100th home in under a decade, a pace enabled by its three-pronged approach. – Barry Greene, Jr. for Next City and VPM News, May 2024
Seattle’s Newest Housing Hero: Credit Unions
When the Copper Way housing development opened in Spanaway, Washington in 2024, it provided needed homes to hundreds of low- to middle-income families in the region. What made the project most notable is the unique financing model that made it possible.
The development is one of the first projects to come out of the Evergreen Impact Housing Fund. “The [EIHF] was conceptualized as a way for private, public and philanthropic sectors to come together and bring more attention and more resources to bear on the affordable housing crisis,” said Kris Hermanns, fund manager at EIHF and chief impact officer at Seattle Foundation. – Marianne Dhenin, January 2024
Minneapolis Residents Are Building Yurts To Shelter Their Homeless Neighbors
Organizers with Minneapolis’s Camp Nenookaasi say the situation is untenable for the city’s unhoused residents. They’re pushing local elected officials to decriminalize safe outdoor encampments, keep encampment evictions to a minimum, and protect residents’ rights and dignity during necessary evictions.
And in the meantime, they’re finding creative ways to help protect encampment residents: Inspired by the yurts used to shelter activists at the 2016 Standing Rock protests, the Autonomous Yurt Union constructs yurt-inspired structures with wood-burning stoves to house residents in cold weather. – Lorena Bally, September 2024
The Housing Movement Failed Gaza – and Revealed Its Own Double Standards
How can advocates, researchers, and policymakers working to solve a massive housing crisis turn a blind eye to the forced displacement of over 1.4 million people, including 600,000 children? How can we talk about gentrification, placemaking and livability while the deliberate urbicide in Gaza erases more than four decades of hard-won development and progress in this territory?
When it comes to empathy for the Palestinian families displaced using our tax dollars, America’s humanity falters – as does the humanity that I know drives those of us in the urbanism and housing advocacy space. It’s particularly tough to swallow given that every dollar funding bombs abroad is a dollar not used to house people at home. – Muhammad Alameldin, May 2024
Meet the Bill To Ban Hedge Funds From Owning Single-Family Homes
The bulk purchase of single-family homes by corporate owners, who then turn them into rentals, has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Legislators have gradually been responding with bills to rein in and in some cases ban private equity, real estate investment trusts and hedge funds from purchasing single-family homes.
The most prominent of these bills was introduced in December 2023: the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, which, would effectively ban hedge funds from owning any single-family homes within 10 years of its passage. – Roshan Abraham, March 2024
Make Your State’s Housing Affordable Forever With This One Weird Trick
This decade, the U.S. could lose close to 500,000 units of affordable housing built in the ‘90s using federal low-income housing tax credits. The LIHTC program requires property owners to keep units affordable for 30 years. Once those protections expire, landlords will be legally allowed to charge market rents despite a once-in-a-generation housing crisis.
The LIHTC program does not guarantee permanent affordability, but the law grants powerful flexibility to states and municipalities to determine how the credits will be distributed. These state and local requirements, called Qualified Allocation Plans, can be used as incentives to nudge affordable housing developers to impose a deeper level of affordability than the federal government requires, extend the length of affordability, or to enact tenant protections.
Here’s how Vermont uses its allocation plan to extend the affordability of LIHTC-financed housing indefinitely. – Roshan Abraham, September 2024
The Plan to Bring Social Housing (Back) to New York
In February, New York State Assembly member Emily Gallagher introduced a bill that tenant rights and housing advocates hope can tackle housing unaffordabiltiy at its root: the market’s profit motive. Decommodifying housing, advocates say, would suppress the rise in price of rents and property values.
“There is no reason why profit should be mixed up in things that people need to survive,” says Gallagher. Introduced in February, the bill would establish a state housing authority that would enable the mass development of permanently affordable, democratically controlled, union-built housing across New York. Here’s how it would work. — Leo Miranda, July 2024
Colorado Is Pioneering A Way To Let Renters Earn Cash Back for Paying Rent
In 2022, Colorado voters approved Proposition 123, which set aside 0.1% of the state’s income tax revenue for affordable housing programs. This includes familiar programs like housing vouchers and down payment assistance for home purchases.
But Proposition 123 also included a unique program that would allow tenants of new affordable housing financed by the initiative to be paid the “equity” for the homes they rent, in theory giving them some of the financial benefits a homeowner might get. Likely the first such program in the nation, the Tenant Equity Vehicle program is still in its early stages and has not been fully developed, but the state has slowly started making some of its parameters public. – Roshan Abraham, June 2024
Modular Construction Is on the Rise. Can It Build High-Quality Affordable Housing?
When Minneapolis’ housing authority put out a request to build affordable housing at scale across the city, eight teams submitted proposals. The winning bid: a plan for modular housing.
The public housing authority says modular housing saved time and money and helped it shorten the city’s waitlist for affordable units. Is modular construction the way forward for America’s overburdened and underresourced housing agencies?
“There are possibilities for modular construction to revolutionize the way affordable housing can happen,” says Peter Anderson, architect and professor at California College of the Arts. “But it’s going to take changes all through the system, from the design end, project delivery end, the optimization in factories.” — Leo Miranda, July 2024
This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our weekly Backyard newsletter.