Nobody's Home American Banker
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- News
Housing blight — concentrated areas of vacant properties in cities, rural areas and suburbs — is associated with everything from poverty to crime to health disparities. But governments seem powerless to turn it around. We're finding out why. A special 10-part podcast series by American Banker.
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Ep. 10: Starfish Solutions: What can we do if we try?
In the series finale, we examine how to get people who aren’t directly affected by vacant housing to care about finding a solution. How do you focus policymakers on a problem with so many different moving parts?
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Ep. 9: Marshall Plan: How to Fix Vacant Housing
If housing blight costs money, renovating vacant housing and creating new affordable housing also costs money. Where might that investment come from? An examination of community land trusts and the Community Reinvestment Act.
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Ep. 8: Sweat Equity: What Does it Cost to Build a Home?
The crisis in affordable housing has its roots in the high cost of building entry-level single-family homes. But why does it cost so much to build a house? And what did previous generations do to build affordable housing?
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Ep. 7: "You're either growing or you're dying"
Small towns across the country struggle with vacant housing as much as cities, even though some of those places have plenty of jobs. Geography and a declining population lead rural communities to make hard choices that often play themselves out in unexpected ways.
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Ep.6: The New Blue Collar Job
People need jobs to afford housing, but how can cities attract more jobs to places that need them the most? And what happens to a neighborhood when drug activity and crime move in after blue-collar jobs move out?
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Ep. 5: The American Dream: Is Homeownership Really the Answer?
The 2008 financial crisis nearly destroyed the global economy, and was driven by an asset bubble in what has been among the most secure financial products: the home mortgage. Can policymakers expand homeownership without endangering the financial system? Should they?