By Jacqueline Waggoner, Enterprise Community Partners and Tahirih Ziegler, LISC

California’s recently formed Foreclosure Intervention Housing Preservation Program (FIHPP) is poised to fund nonprofit housing groups to buy rental properties in or at risk of foreclosure and quickly convert them to long-term affordable housing. Now, FIHPP is hanging in the legislative balance. LISC’s Tahirih Zigler and Enterprise Community Partners’ Jacqueline Waggoner weigh in on the imperative of safeguarding the program to help spare many Californians from the preventable tragedies of displacement and homelessness.

By Rob Portman & Robert E. Rubin

The country needs a renewed commitment to affordable housing production programs, including expansion of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and enactment of the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, argue LISC board chair Robert E. Rubin and former U.S. senator Rob Portman in a joint op-ed in The Hill. "Fixing the chronic shortage of affordable and available housing for low-income renters and first-time homebuyers requires immediate intervention and long-term commitment,” they stress.

In an article in GovTech magazine, Madeline Frasier Cook, LISC’s vice president for community building and resilient solutions, discusses how community members must be part of public transit planning, and all facets of community life taken into account. Policy makers and local leaders promoting transit-oriented development should be “very explicit about investment in affordable housing, and calling out that [there has to be] access for everyone. They can’t be displacing people.”

An article in Politico looks at the gains and losses—actual and potential—for lower-wage workers in the current economic climate. Katrin Kark, LISC’s director of workforce innovations, who is quoted in the piece, cautions that increased wages don’t suffice to stabilize finances or create economic mobility across the board. “Higher entry wages alone aren’t enough to close…opportunity gaps,” she says.

Author and Brookings Senior Fellow Andre Perry, who has collaborated with LISC on the work to upend racially biased real estate appraisals, inaugurates a seven-essay series from LISC and NPQ, “Community Strategies for Systems Change.” Perry's article dissects how progressive grassroots action can lead to critical policy change and, pointing to the upcoming series, authored by LISC's local partners, notes that it's in “community stories such as these that you will find the fundamental building blocks of systemic change.”

The National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) has launched a three-year assessment of the health of the community development field—a critical undertaking for our industry if we want to get the right resources to where they are most needed. Shelterforce, along with the rest of us, is tracking the project, and spoke to LISC’s Mark Kudlowitz for a recent article highlighting new information about the financial plight of community-based development organizations.