Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a long expose of the federal department of Housing and Urban Development's HOME Investment Partnership program, which has distributed $32 billion to state and local organizations since 1992 to build or refurbush affordable housing. According to the Post's analysis, $400 million of that has gone towards 700 projects [...]

My column this week deals with the fence around Potomac Gardens, which doesn't seem to fit in an neighborhood where crime is nothing compared to what it was in the 1990s. But I didn't have space to go into the larger anachronism: The existence of a huge, solid block of concentrated poverty in the middle [...]

Here's the lesson of Gibson Plaza, the 10-story Shaw behemoth housing mostly Section 8 tenants: If you suffer through bad conditions long enough, you might just be there when a fantastic upgrade comes around.
The 217-unit building hadn't had a major renovation since it was built, back in 1974, by the development arm of First Rising [...]

Okay, we all know what area median income is, right? For the purposes of this blog, it's the measure by which we set rent levels at affordable housing projects. The area median income for the Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area is a little over $100,000, so if the city works out a deal to build housing [...]

While we're all mourning the loss of the TIGER II grants, which would have funded transit improvements from Bikeshare to Union Station, today brought something to celebrate in the world of federal largesse as well: A $3 million chunk of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Sustainable Communities funding, awarded to the District's Department [...]

The District of Columbia Housing Authority announced this morning that it had recieved a $2,529,288 competitive grant from HUD to find permanent supportive housing units for the homeless. That's great news, especially since the Department of Human Services–which usually secures such apartments–just had its budget cut by $11 million for fiscal year 2011, which was [...]

On a Friday evening in late July, a small group of residents gathered around a white sheet taped to the side of Ferebee-Hope Elementary School in Washington Highlands, straining to hear the faint soundtrack of a film projected from a laptop. The audience’s intense concentration didn’t just come from the low volume, however. The balmy [...]

In the last few months, it's seemed that the ice floes have started to crack and shift for development in Shaw: Project after project has broken financing deadlocks and will see shovels in the ground this year. Add another to the list: Gibson Plaza, the 10-story public affordable housing behemoth on 7th and O Street [...]

Today, the DC Housing Authority announced it had received a total of $34.4 million in competitive grants spooned from the honey pot that is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AARA) of 2009. All of this money must be spent within three years, which leaves little room for dilly-dallying!
The money will be disseminated to projects across [...]

Ever wonder just how much the foreclosure crisis is impacting your neighborhood? Well now, you'll be able to say "Meh, not so much" or "Holy crap—That explains the $60,000 property value drop!" with definitive authority.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has created a map, which examines census tracts and provides two "scores" regarding the [...]