Future Topics
Explore These Topics With the Edwardsville Community Housing Alliance:
- Community Housing Need for Workers
- Models for Local Housing Policies
- Housing Trust Funds
- Community Land Trusts
- How to Approach Allies
- How to Compare Market vs. Affordable Housing
- Housing Linked to Job Creation
- Affordable Housing Development Process
- How to Finance Affordable Housing
- Inclusionary Zoning
- How to Build Community Support
- How to Manage Community Resistance
- Messaging That Reflects Community Support
- Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing
Housing that Fits Edwardsville
To come: Examples of affordable housing developments for workers that could fit the Edwardsville community, and a discussion of several kinds of developments that would meet local need for housing.
Resources Are Available
Local Housing Solutions https://www.localhousingsolutions.org/
This site has a lot of tools and guidance for how cities, towns, and counties can develop comprehensive local housing strategies, including guidance on analyzing local housing needs, identifying housing policy objectives, selecting and implementing housing policies, and balancing competing needs and interests. It offers a housing policy framework outlining four distinct dimensions of an effective local housing strategy.
Elements of a Comprehensive Housing Policy
In addition, implement Complementary policies in other domains (e.g., health, education, environment)
Community Land Trusts
InclusionaryHousing.org is a project of Grounded Solutions Network [see above]. They help communities design inclusionary housing policies that tie the creation of affordable homes for low- and moderate-income households to the construction of market-rate housing or commercial development. [It’s inclusionary because the inclusion of affordable housing is a required consideration of new development.]
The Housing Trust Fund Project of the Community Change Center
This organization provides technical assistance to groups working to develop housing trust funds in local municipalities. Most often this revenue source for affordable housing development is created in part through advocacy of citizen group. These funds are set up to receive local revenues from a dedicated source, like developer fees or real estate transfer taxes. Although these trust funds are ultimately controlled by local authorities, they can be designed to serve people who are often left behind in a gentrifying housing market. A community group such as ECHA can develop and promote a plan for how Edwardsville could form and fund a dedicated fund for affordable housing. This fund could then be used by developers who meet the criteria. It could also be used for a Community Land Trust, and could provide partial funding for a project involving other funds, such as HOME/federal block grant funds from the County, Low Income Housing Tax credit funds from developers, etc.
Resources for Messaging in an Affordable Housing Advocacy Campaign
See: https://housingnarrative.org/ **
- The goal of Demos’ Race-Class Narrative (RCN) project is to developan empirically-tested narrative on race and class that resonates with all working people and offers an alternative to—and neutralizes the use of—dog-whistle racism.
- *The Housing Justice Narrative website is a resource is intended for organizers, advocates and community leaders to access tools and research that will allow us all collectively to shift the current discussions and debates around housing to advance a vision of racial justice and homes for all.
The publication Piecing It Together [see Google Drive link below] from the Enterprise Foundation has great stuff on how to frame the affordable housing message to appeal to shared values that uses the research from the above organizations. Another publication of theirs, You Don’t Have to Live Here [Google Drive link below] shows how affordable housing advocacy can go wrong. The Race Forward Narrative Pyramid and the Race/Class Narrative Handout also show the importance of bringing racial justice to light in a particular way. The Piecing It Together document has good examples of messages to use in an advocacy campaign.
You can access these documents from a Google Drive here:
Illinois Housing Development Authority https://www.ihda.org/
This agency manages the local income housing tax credit program in Illinois.