Insights

How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the affordable housing landscape in New Orleans, and how can policymakers respond? This  report by Reinvestment Fund reviews demographic, economic, and housing market data prior to and immediately following the start of the pandemic, as well as interviews with local experts and stakeholders. The report concludes with a set of geographically targeted policy recommendations.

On April 9 – 10, Reinvestment Fund and the City of Kansas City, Missouri hosted the second Market Value Analysis Community of Practice (COP) convening. The COP brought together representatives from cities and organizations from around the country who use Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis (MVA) to inform community and economic development activities in their communities.  This brief presents a summary of the panels, discussions, and key learnings from the event.

A working paper exploring the Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) phenomenon. The paper derives learnings from interviews conducted with practitioners, funders, developers and policymakers. Those learnings are also rooted in data on the NOAH stock and the types of markets wherein NOAH seems to be most effectively created. The paper concludes with a thought experiment about how the power of the market could be harnessed to support the production and preservation of NOAH for modest-income households in a way that is both responsive to the realities of the housing market in general as well as to local market conditions.

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) is a federal agency created through the Small Business Act of 1953. In the Act, Congress stated:

“The essence of the American economic system of private enterprise is free competition. Only through full and free competition can free markets, free entry into business, and opportunities for the expression and growth of personal initiative and individual judgment be assured… It is the declared policy of the Congress that the Government should aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns in order to preserve free competitive enterprise…”

We’re always looking for new ways to improve the MVA. Most recently, owing to issues observed during our field validation in Indianapolis and Philadelphia, we made an adjustment to the way we calculate median home values to account for the growing number of condos appearing in our data. This post gives some background behind our new methodology; we call it “condo adjusted sales prices.” This is not something we’ll do in every city, but where the market calls for it, we have a new tool in our box.

Presentation by Ira Goldstein at the Center for Community Progress 2013 conference on Reclaiming Vacant Properties. Dr. Goldstein presented on a panel  titled “Filling out the Tool Box: Market-Smart Approaches for Dealing with Vacant Houses.”

Chapter on the Market Value Analysis by Reinvestment Fund’s Ira Goldstein in Putting Data to Work: Data-Driven Approaches to Strengthening Neighborhoods, a publication of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The chapter uses Reinvestment Fund’s MVA for Baltimore as the working example.

Analysis of Baltimore’s commercial real estate markets conducted with the City of Baltimore as part of its efforts to develop a citywide Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS). Reinvestment Fund helped create a method for indexing all of Baltimore’s commercial corridors to provide the public and private sectors an analytic tool to understand the nature and strengths of each.

Remarks to the Association of Performing Arts Presenters addressing the counter-cultural logic of creativity in an economic crisis.

Presentation by Ira Goldstein about the Market Value Analysis (MVA). The presentation was part of a session at the Federal Reserve Board of Philadelphia’s 2008 Conference, “Reinventing Older Communities: How Does Place Matter?”