Reports and Studies

The period between 1995 and 2005 was a tumultuous one for low- and moderate-income (LMI) households seeking to purchase their first home. A booming housing market, stagnant incomes, and low interest rates taken together have presented both opportunities and challenges for these households. Meanwhile, regional disparities have increased markedly due to the different rates of price appreciation across housing markets. The upshot of these regional disparities is that LMI households can achieve homeownership without significant subsidies in some places, while in other places multiple layers of grants and concessionary financing, in combination with other policy tools, are the only hope for such families to ever achieve homeownership.

The severe erosion of housing affordability in many markets has undermined the ability of government and nonprofit organizations to promote homeownership attainment by blunting the effectiveness of their traditional policy approaches. The response to this situation is a two-stage process. First, the nature of affordability challenges must be understood at the market level, and metropolitan-level housing markets must be accurately classified based on the difficulty that low- and moderate-income households face in becoming homeowners in each place. Second, organizations operating in each market must have access to the right tools to help their clients become owners; the approach must be accurately matched to the affordability regime in the market(s) in which they operate.

This paper addresses the first issue. It develops a housing market typology based on affordability into which markets can be sorted, and to which homeownership policy approaches can be matched. The paper unfolds in several steps. It begins by deconstructing housing affordability into three elements -- house prices, incomes and mortgage costs -- and reviewing recent changes in each. It then looks at the performance of house price indexes over the past decade, explaining why they tend to show only small affordability declines despite substantial changes in house price. Following this, the paper examines affordability conditions for low- and moderate-income families in 127 housing markets using two measures: the change in affordability-index values and the gap between the maximum mortgage a household can afford and the amount required to purchase a modest home. Based on these results, we develop an affordability-based typology of market types that can be linked to policy interventions designed to promote homeownership attainment in each type of market. Complete info »

The issue of how people can age in place in a safe, healthy and dignified manner is a front-burner issue, especially for the poor, frail elderly who live in communities served by the NeighborWorks network and by other community-based housing and health-care entities. The Southern District office of Neighborhood Reinvestment convened practitioners in the fields of housing, healthcare and supportive services to address this issue. Complete info »

The issue of how people can age in place in a safe, healthy and dignified manner is a front-burner issue, especially for the poor, frail elderly who live in communities served by the NeighborWorks network and by other community-based housing and health-care entities. The Southern District office of Neighborhood Reinvestment convened practitioners in the fields of housing, healthcare and supportive services to address this issue. Complete info »

Lists general resources and start-up guides for financial literacy, key organizations and their Web sites, programs of the Cooperative Extension Services, and books and periodicals. Separate listings for home-ownership education, micro-enterprise development and job training and education. Complete info »

This research examines how nonprofit owners of affordable multifamily rental housing choose their approach to property management. It draws on existing literature on property management, insight from leading policymakers and practitioners, and survey responses from Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation's NeighborWorks organizations that participate in the Corporation's Multifamily Initiative. The paper explores how the structural features of a nonprofit's portfolio and local market, the owner's priorities driven by its mission and resources, and the capacity and incentives of managers shape the property-management approach that the owner embraces. It encourages owners to evaluate these factors and seek out a range of choices. By considering portfolio size and stage of organizational development, the importance of property management to the core mission, and the quality of property-management options in their local market, nonprofits can align their property management approach with the financial and mission-driven double bottom-line focus of their organization. The paper also presents findings that describe how third-party managers tend to bring economic advantages of efficiency, while nonprofit managers often better serve owners seeking to organize and empower resident communities.

Policymakers should be mindful of the constraints that limit nonprofits from being effective stewards of their properties: burdensome requirements for regulatory compliance, insufficient financial resources to support asset management, and an underwriting process in which funders and developers can underfund operating budgets because of a desire to stretch limited subsidies. Policymakers and intermediaries can improve the quality of property and asset management by continuing to invest in property- and asset-management training and funding for the growing numbers of nonprofits becoming owners and developers of affordable housing. They can also contribute in a meaningful way by helping nonprofits to clarify their mission focus and by providing them with examples of effective decision-making and ongoing management practices drawn from strong self-managed and vendor-managed properties. Complete info »

The National Insurance Task Force (NITF) has conducted three, two-day classes of its Certified Insurance Counselor Training Program at Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation Training Institutes. These were held August 30-31, 1999; October 16-17, 2000; and October 15-16, 2001. There were 25 participants in each class, yielding a total of 75 certified insurance counselors. These counselors returned to their local nonprofit organizations equipped with a training manual, a PowerPoint presentation, and a new understanding of the insurance industry and of clients' insurance needs.

In early 2002, the NITF education subcommittee decided to commission an analysis that would examine and summarize the impact of its education efforts on community development organizations and the residents they serve. Toward that end, NITF staff and consultants conducted surveys and/or interviews of:

• 15 randomly selected community development practitioners who completed the training; and
• 37 residents who participated in the NITF Home Safety programs. These survey were given during focus-group sessions in St. Louis (Missouri), Staten Island (New York) and Richmond (Virginia).

Copies of these survey forms are contained in this report.

Both the surveys and in-depth interviews with five practitioners assessed the following:

• The quality of the Certified Insurance Counselor Training Program (CICTP);
• The value of insurance education;
• Perceptions of the insurance industry by residents both before and after they received insurance education;
• The impact of insurance-education programs on individuals and on communities;
• Information on the kinds of insurance residents wished to know more about; and
• Any other insights that might prove valuable to NITF in considering the overall effectiveness of its insurance education programs.

Complete info »

Residential property management is easiest to do well and profitably when a large number of units are concentrated in a small number of properties located in close proximity. Many managers of residential rental property consider 150 to 200 units a minimum threshold for undertaking the management of a property. Many managers of affordable housing throughout New England and elsewhere, however, are operating without these advantages: their portfolios are modest in size; individual properties typically have less than 50 units and are often scattered over a large geographic area.

Economies of scale can prove elusive for small properties or small portfolios. It is difficult to deploy management staff to administer and maintain properties over large geographic regions. Finally, many rural communities in New England have faced declining populations and softening real estate markets in recent years, creating further obstacles to profitable property management.

We visited seven property management firms, both non-profit and for-profit, who are widely regarded as doing good work even in difficult environments to learn how some property managers faced these challenges successfully. They have portfolios that range in size from 65 to 2,000 units and from one to 65 entities. (An entity is any building or number of buildings that have the same ownership structure. All but one of the organizations manage less than 1,000 units. We also spoke with four firms in other parts of the country that face similar challenges. We found that while it may not always be possible to turn a profit, a well-run company can sustain high-quality affordable housing even in the face of these challenges.

This article will highlight some of the successful strategies we observed are significant in managing small, rural or scattered properties. Complete info »

Across the 240 community-based organizations that are chartered members of the national NeighborWorks network, a growing number of programs offer commercial loans as a direct way to support entrepreneurs. With this inaugural edition of Beyond Housing, NeighborWorks showcases five stories from around the country that are testaments to the enormous impact that access to affordable capital for commercial enterprise can provide. From a $7,000 loan to a bi-lingual day care provider on Long Island, to a $35-million vision for a revitalized community in Kentucky, these stories reflect the diversity that has always fueled the strength of America's communities. Complete info »

In recent years, partnerships between nonprofits and private developers to develop affordable housing have become a topic of increasing interest. Through a review of current literature and interviews with housing thought leaders, nonprofits, private developers, affordable housing capital sources and others, this paper seeks to explore multifamily rental housing development partnerships. More specifically, research identifies attributes critical to these partnerships, and the economic, social and political drivers to both partnerships and the subsequent negotiated partnerships terms.

This paper concludes that there is a broad range of negotiated partnership terms between nonprofits and private developers. However, across all these relationships, both nonprofits and private developers prioritize two partnership terms: development fee profits, and degree of involvement and oversight. Further, research reveals while there are many different drivers shaping the decision to partner and subsequent partnership conditions, there are two key determinants: development experience and knowledge, and financial factors. Finally, while not all partnerships are beneficial, under the appropriate conditions, partnerships have the potential to not only build nonprofit capacity but also address some of our nation's affordable housing challenges. Complete info »

Nonprofit, community-based housing development organizations have only recently become significant players in the provision of affordable housing, at least in the United States. Historically, this job was left either in the hands of builders, developers, lenders and landlords of the business sector or in the care of agencies, planners and policymakers of the public sector. Only in the past 30 years has the provision of affordable housing moved beyond the familiar domains of the market and the state. A host of nonprofit organizations is now playing a larger role in constructing new housing, rehabilitating older housing, managing rentals and bringing home ownership within the reach of thousands of people for whom the American dream has proved elusive.

The growth of these third-sector organizations has been both rapid and impressive, but it also has been uneven. Across the country, there are places where nonprofit housing development organizations are both plentiful and productive, supported by sophisticated networks of interorganizational collaboration, public funding, private financing and technical assistance. There are many other communities, however, where no nonprofits are engaged in affordable housing or where the ones that do exist are very new or very small, accounting for only a handful of new housing units every year.

Lying between these two extremes are those communities where multiple nonprofits of varying size serve a similar geographic area, each producing a modest but respectable number of housing units; each competing for constituents, funding and development opportunities; each struggling to survive. The organizations that find themselves in this uncomfortable situation often confront a special set of challenges. They are productive, but not prolific. They are effective, but not efficient. They are successful, but not sustainable. Indeed, they are frequently quite precarious. The loss of a single staff person, the delay of a single project or the adverse decision of a single funder can threaten not only their short-term chances for success, but their long term prospects for survival.

Those who sponsor and fund such organizations sometimes find themselves in a situation where competition among multiple nonprofits is weakening them all. In these cases, the sponsoring and funding organizations have taken different tacks to address this problem. In some cases, they have acted to strengthen every nonprofit, while working to increase the division of labor or the division of territory among them. In other cases, they have acted to strengthen one (or more) nonprofit at the expense of the others, culling weaker performers from the herd.

While these have been the most common approaches for dealing with the weaknesses that organizational competition and duplication can sometimes create, a third alternative has been gaining ground. Multiple nonprofits, operating within the same jurisdiction, are being encouraged to collaborate -- even to the point of merging their programs, assets and hard-won identities.

Why is collaboration gaining in popularity? A financial explanation would be that it is becoming harder to find enough resources to strengthen every nonprofit to the same degree, funding multiple nonprofits to serve a similar clientele in the same locale. There is also the political reality that public and private funders find it difficult to choose easily (or accurately) which nonprofits should live -- and which should die. There is a practical explanation as well. Collaboration is becoming a strategy of choice simply because it is proving to be an unusually effective way of achieving greater productivity, efficiency and sustainability. When a collaborative (or a merger) is carefully crafted, the nonprofit partners do a better job together than they did apart. This is not true in every case, of course.

Read the full report for lessons in organizational matchmaking and the making of a nonprofit merger. Complete info »