On Our Radar

Joint Center For Housing Studies, 2024, The State Of The Nation’s Housing Homeowners and renters across the US are struggling with high housing costs. On the for-sale side, millions of potential homebuyers have been priced out of the market by high home prices and interest rates, while the number of renters with cost burdens has […]

The New York Times, June 29, 2024, How ‘Rural Studies’ Is Thinking About the Heartland Kristin Lunz Trujillo grew up proud of her family’s way of life. She spent summers getting ready to show cattle at the county fair. During the school year, she rushed home after class to feed the chickens on her family’s

Calmatters, July 1, 2024, State Inspectors Are Supposed To Visit All Farmworker Housing To Ensure Its Safety. Sometimes They Used FaceTime Instead When Antonio Bravo stepped into the Salinas hotel in May 2020, he first noticed a foul smell. Then he saw the bare metal cot with no mattress that his employer had given him

NPR, July 1, 2024, When Little Kids Don’t Have Stable Housing, It Can Affect Their Health Later Not having secure housing is a huge stress for anyone. But when children experience this, especially in early childhood, it can affect their health years down the line. That’s the finding of a new study in the journal Pediatrics,

CalMatters, June 28, 2024, Parents’ Lawsuit Forces California Schools To Track Discrimination Against Students California will play a more active role in ensuring school districts don’t discriminate against students with disabilities, English learners and Black students, under a legal settlement announced this week. The agreement between the state and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California

wbur, July 8, 2024, Converting Boston’s Offices To Housing Is Tricky, But It’s Starting To Happen When Rich Kershaw’s company bought the building at 95 Berkeley St. in 2016, the plan was to renovate and rent out the offices. “Upgrade the elevators, upgrade the bathrooms, redo the lobbies and the facade and hopefully increase the

The Wildlife Society, June 10, 2024, Discriminatory Housing Practices Of The Past Still Shape Urban Wildlife Discriminatory housing practices that kept people of color from moving into white enclaves generations ago still leave a lingering mark on California cities—and on the urban wildlife that occupies them. Looking at the four largest cities in California, researchers found

NPR, July 4, 2024, As Heat Waves Intensify, More Public Housing Residents May Get Help With AC Bills The summer has already been a scorcher and heat alerts across the country could lead to more records broken. Public housing residents, many elderly, children or sick, are disproportionately vulnerable to heat illness, yet there’s no federal mandate to

STAT, June 26, 2024, National Academies Proposes Reimagining Health Care To Fix ‘Fundamental Flaws’ That Underlie Inequity The nation’s longstanding racial and ethnic health inequities will not improve unless Congress steps in to provide affordable health insurance for all and federal agencies start enforcing existing laws against discrimination and improve collection of racial and ethnic

AP News, July 8, 2024, Scorched By History: Discriminatory Past Shapes Heat Waves In Minority And Low-Income Neighborhoods Ruben Berrios knows the scorching truth: When it comes to extreme heat, where you live can be a matter of life and death. The 66-year-old lives in Mott Haven, a low-income neighborhood in New York’s South Bronx,

The Hill, July 10, 2024, Lawmakers Call For Pentagon To Address ‘Poor’ Military Housing Conditions A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday called for the Defense Department to address “poor living conditions” at military houses for service members and their families, pointing to particular concerns with private companies that oversee housing with what the congressional

Axios, July 9, 2024, High Inflation Is No Longer Only Risk For U.S. Economy: Fed Chair Powell Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers on Tuesday that a weakening labor market is just as much a risk to the economy as high inflation. Why it matters: In recent months, Fed officials have said they want to see more economic

Housingwire, July 9, 2024, SFR Investors Drive Up Rents, But Don’t Cause Gentrification: Philadelphia Fed Institutional investors in single-family rental (SFR) houses cause rents in a neighborhood to increase quickly, but their entrance into a neighborhood doesn’t cause gentrification.  That’s the conclusion from a working paper released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The paper examined the impact