December 05, 2019

Eagle Village, a 24-unit, $3.3 million bridge housing development, is the first housing project in Seattle that explicitly aims to mitigate the disparate rates of Native American homelessness in the region. Keeping with fair housing laws, Eagle Village is not exclusive to Native American adults, but the project’s programming is specific to the community. Eagle Village will provide housing and wraparound support for residents that’s informed by the trauma of colonization. Janeen Comenote, executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, says that a project like Eagle Village has “never been done anywhere, not in Indian Country anyway.”

More than 200,000 homes in Memphis are at high risk for lead exposure—and these same homes are disproportionately occupied by low-income residents. To help families work through financial barriers to lead remediation, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, partnered with local housing agencies to form the Healthy Housing Partnership. To date, Le Bonheur has secured more than $1 million in state and federal lead remediation grants for the partnership. “Affordable housing is not affordable if the house is not healthy,” said Sharon Hyde, program manager at Green and Healthy Homes.

A recent investigation reports that gentrification caused public elementary school enrollment in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood to decrease by 40 percent between 2000 and 2017. The number of households with children in Pilsen has declined by 26 percent, and the median neighborhood income increased $10,000. In Chicago, public schools are funded based on enrollment. This creates what Stephanie Farmer, a sociologist at Roosevelt University, calls a “vicious cycle” of hard choices, such as “cutting teachers and support lines for students” in underenrolled, and thus underresourced, schools.

After five years of planning, Salt Lake City, Utah, transitioned its singular, downtown homeless megashelter in the Rio Grande neighborhood to a service-focused system of three scattered, gender-specific homeless resource centers that provide housing, drug treatment, and mental health services. “The past practices of just warehousing people, not enforcing laws… that leads to the tragedies at Rio Grande and the tragedies we’re seeing in Los Angeles and San Francisco,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox.

The National Park Service is prototyping a community engagement initiative, ParkXChange, that engages residents in the planning and programming of Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard to connect the community to this civic asset. The Navy Yard is a former US Navy shipbuilding center that holds the USS Constitution and attracts 1 million visitors annually. Boston’s largest public housing development borders the Navy Yard. Ginaya Greene-Murray, communications and events director for the Charlestown Coalition, says that many residents from that public housing complex have “never entered the Navy Yard… due to feeling unwelcome, or not thinking there’s anything to do there.”