Foreclosure Report
A story that has not been fully told is the deep impacts foreclosures are having on America's cities, triggering a spiral of abandonment, decay and municipal budget shortfalls.
Our new report out today—“Communities At Risk: How the Foreclosure Crisis Is Damaging Urban Areas and What is Being Done About It”—tells that story and also looks at what community groups and partnerships are doing in 10 cities to fight for their neighborhoods. Living Cities funded those 10 projects last year as they forged new strategies at a critical moment.
The eye-opening report highlights:
- How the housing crisis in some cities has kicked off a cycle of plummeting real estate values, increasing crime and dwindling municipal revenues
- The innovative tactics that these 10 pilot projects have developed to fight for their communities:
- Becoming Landlords. 70 percent of the pilot programs are doing more rentals, many for the first time.
- Scaling Back Rehabs. Two-thirds of the pilot programs are limiting rehabs, in a bid to save as many properties as possible with limited resources.
- Backing Demolition. 70 percent of the program sites report they are including demolition in their neighborhood stabilization work
- What government, the private sector and others must do to rebuild neighborhoods riddled with foreclosures
Interim Evaluation of the Foreclosure Mitigation Initiative
Two years after the Living Cities began laying the groundwork for its Foreclosure Mitigation Initiative, an independent, interim evaluation by the Urban Institute has been released. This evaluation explores the experiences of the 10 Living Cities-funded sites, as well as their implications for practice, policy and philanthropy.
The evaluators found that the Initiative has:
- Helped to catalyze scalable and adaptable models for mitigating the consequences of the foreclosure crisis on urban neighborhoods
- Accelerated the flow of capital including federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds to local neighborhood stabilization approaches
- In some locations, helped create a cross-sectoral infrastructure to respond more comprehensively to the crisis; this infrastructure could be used to address other, related issues such as land use.
At the same time, the interim evaluations also reports that:
- Despite Living Cities’ relatively swift grantmaking, some of the pilot programs were slow to launchbecause of challenges in such areas as closing financing, the receipt of federal funds and snags in property acquisition
- Whether grantees' activities will ultimately stabilize neighborhoods remains to be seen. Moreover, it is not yet clear whether the cross-sectoral partnerships Living Cities helped to catalyze will endure beyond the current crisis.
The Full evaluation will be published in the second quarter of 2010.
Interim Evaluation of the Foreclosure Mitigation Initiative (PDF)