Research

How can housing nonprofit organizations nationwide engage more households in need, especially communities of color? NeighborWorks America is committed to helping them do just that. 

Shared equity housing creates lasting affordability, builds wealth for people with limited incomes and helps create vibrant and inclusive communities. Shared equity programs typically realize these outcomes by limiting the sale or rental price of homes in their portfolios; requiring the sharing of home appreciation gains; and providing homeownership assistance to program residents. Residents and community members often participate in governing shared equity programs through democratic decision-making and/or a cooperative ownership structure. 

Manufactured housing represents a potential untapped, affordable housing solution in communities across the country. NeighborWorks America and Next Step, Inc. partnered together to develop "Manufactured Housing: A Resource for Engaging Nonprofit Boards and Community Stakeholders" to address this challenge and help organizations advance manufactured housing programs. 

Our blueprint serves as a primer to manufactured housing — and a roadmap for community development professionals with the desire to build and scale sustainable programs centered on manufactured housing. 

This toolkit presents frameworks and tools for leaders who seek to build sustainable, deep partnerships with health partners to address systemic inequities in disinvested communities. These tools were developed to accompany a mindset shift. 

This research offers organizational- and policy-level insights into the implementation and sustainability of delivering resident services. To enable and improve this field, a call is made to policymakers and other funders to increase the stability and availability of funding for resident services. This opportunity, if met by government, foundations, private donors, and organizations themselves, has the potential to transform not only the physical, emotional, and financial health of residents, but our definition of and approach to housing as we know it.

NeighborWorks America's Housing and Financial Capability Survey shows that most people believe homeownership has benefits but also feel that homeownership is out of reach for them because of their financial situation. Over several years of collecting national data on housing affordability trends and financial preparedness, NeighborWorks has found that the disparity in homeownership between communities of color and white communities continues to grow and the majority of Americans still need help in understanding the homebuying process. 

This short paper takes a first look at middle neighborhoods in a cluster of Desert Southwest cities in order to provide some initial and provisional answers to these questions. We selected six, more or less, representative cities to examine: Fresno, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Albuquerque, new Mexico; and Arlington and Lubbock, Texas. 

This study explores how the community development sector can strengthen the recruitment and retention of staff at all levels — a topic top of mind for organizations around the country. Based upon a review of leadership programs nationwide, it includes concrete next steps to help secure the next generation of community development leaders, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion. 

As part of our efforts to build the capacity of nonprofits to use shared equity and cooperative housing strategies to preserve long-term affordable housing, build wealth for low-income families and promote neighborhood stabilization, we produced this guide to serve as a starting point for organizations and community leaders. We offer a set of guiding questions and considerations that should be noted when exploring the benefits and tradeoffs of pursuing shared equity housing models.