Year: 2024

Affordable Housing Funds in the Inflation Reduction Act

Interested in a new funding source to support climate-friendly affordable housing? The 2022 federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offers potentially billions of dollars toward decarbonization affordable housing in California. Unfortunately, the regulations and timing are different for each program which makes accessing IRA resources challenging. The California Housing Partnership held a series of workshops to provide information about the resources Read More

Author: Siera Beal

Posted in Uncategorized, Sustainable Housing

Have State opportunity area incentives changed the kinds of schools children living in affordable housing have access to?

Discussion about the State of California’s efforts to advance the affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) objective of increasing access to opportunity have typically framed neighborhood opportunity broadly, in terms of higher and lower levels of “resources,” rather than in terms of the specific characteristics of those neighborhoods. This framing is helpful in the context of policy design and also understandable Read More

Author: Siera Beal

Posted in Research

Tackling the Two-Headed Beast: What Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me about the Housing and Climate Crises

Dungeons and Dragons, in its most basic form, is a game where players overcome obstacles while on a quest. Players have near endless options when making decisions, and, even though it is imagined, the creative solutions discovered offer insights into solving problems more generally. Teamwork is fundamental. When an obstacle has multiple threats, like a two-headed beast, there are three Read More

Author: Siera Beal

Posted in Uncategorized

Affordable Housing Compares Favorably to Market-Rate Housing From a Cost Perspective

Have you ever heard someone say that affordable housing costs too much to build? It’s hard to justify that statement unless we first compare the cost of affordable housing to the cost of private market-rate housing. Until now, we’ve never had public data on the latter, but recently, the Terner Center at UC Berkeley published Making It Pencil: the Math Behind Read More

Author: Siera Beal

Posted in Uncategorized

Examining the Argument that Building Affordable Housing Increases Crime

It seems difficult for many people to escape or deflect the preconceived notion that low-income people or housing dedicated to low-income people will bring “criminal elements” to a neighborhood when much of what they see on TV/online keeps perpetuating these ideas. News media and social media users routinely show images and videos of low-income neighborhoods with dilapidated properties or crimes Read More

Author: Siera Beal

Posted in Uncategorized