Nobody's Home American Banker

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?

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.

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?

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. 

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?

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?