In an article in GovTech magazine, Madeline Fraser 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.”

In a Q+A with Brick Underground, LISC’s Helene Caloir, lead author of a new LISC-Urban Institute report on remediating vacant homes and preventing foreclosure, explains the nature of “zombies houses” in our midst, and what to do about them. There’s important news in the story: says Caloir, “In the current crisis, [we have] more tools for keeping people in their homes.” The excerpt below was originally published by Brick Underground Zombie houses: Inside NY's effort to release derelict properties from legal limbo By Jennifer White Karp, Managing Editor of Brick Underground

The pandemic has prodded state and local governments to think hard and act quickly to move public money into shoring up the small business sector. An article in Next City looks at how new public-private partnerships—particularly ones engaging CDFIs, like the LISC-managed NY Forward Loan Fund—are paving the way to make equitable small business development part of a new normal.

In an in-depth article for The Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, attorneys David Goldstein and Jason Labate offer a case study of the Joint Operating Entity NYC (JOE NYC), which LISC has supported from its inception. The JOE NYC, a consortium of CDCs that have pooled their portfolios and expertise, is a blueprint that can help CDCs in other cities and regions shore up their stability in challenging markets and gain ground against the national affordability crisis.

Together with NYU and sponsorship from LISC, researchers at UC Berkeley have just released new findings about how development in the New York metro area is creating “islands of exclusion” and displacing more and more longtime residents. An interactive Urban Displacement Map, a byproduct of the investigation, aims to serve as an “early warning tool” to help affordable housing advocates and policy makers protect and preserve community stability.

by Maurice A. Jones

In this week’s Stanford Social Innovation Review, LISC CEO Maurice A. Jones takes a close look at the outcomes from one of the largest single-city community development efforts in the country, the decade-long New Communities Program (NCP) in Chicago. Most notable, Jones writes, is data on community networks and how closely they connect to local growth and opportunity. The evidence confirms what community developers have long assumed but previously never proven: a durable local infrastructure of nonprofits, businesses, and other stakeholders is able to both attract and absorb capital in ways that measurably improve residents’ quality of life.