Press Releases

The Housing Puzzle

Stories from the Ford Foundation Report (FFR)

New York, NY (March 25, 2003) The need for decent affordable housing continues to increase in the United States and around the world, yet providing it confronts housing experts and agencies with a daunting puzzle. Articles in the spring 2003 issue of FFR, a magazine of the Ford Foundation, examine aspects of the problem, from the high-rise projects of Chicago to the shantytowns of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. “When is homelessness not a housing problem? What is a well functioning housing market and how can one be achieved?” ask George McCarthy and Kathryn Gwatkin in an introduction. “The keys to solving the housing puzzle lie in a continuing quest for practical insight and a humane sense of how people should live.” Articles on the housing puzzle include: Home Sweet (Manufactured) Home Nineteen million Americans live in manufactured homes, or "trailers." Nearly 80 percent of the units are financed more like cars than houses, with personal loans carrying ruinous interest rates and, often, costly add-ons. Half sit on rented land, so residents have all the burdens of home ownership but less than the full benefits. The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund helps manufactured home owners form cooperatives and otherwise gain more control over their lives. The Problem with Public Housing: Is Chicago Solving It? The Chicago Housing Authority is in the midst of one of the most ambitious housing experiments in U.S. history. As massive public housing projects are demolished, residents are being moved to mixed-income developments and to apartments in the private rental market. Whether it will succeed is a question that hangs as heavily over the city's razed projects as the despair that haunted their graffiti-scarred corridors and courtyards. Urban Gentry The “gentrification” of run-down neighborhoods in many U.S. cities—mostly by young, middle-class professionals--is generally regarded as a positive development. But once the process begins, it is not always possible to keep it in balance. How to protect the interests of current residents and support neighborhood reinvestment without condoning displacement and profiteering? A pair of community-based organizations -- the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, N.Y. and PODER in Austin, Tex. -- have developed some innovative responses. The State of the Nation's Housing The annual survey of U.S. housing by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that rising home prices and the resulting surge in household wealth encouraged consumers to keep spending even in a bad economy. But the report also points to some disturbing trends. Homeless in Ho Chi Minh City Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is Vietnam's largest city and a magnet for tens of thousands of landless migrants from rural areas desperately seeking opportunity in the country's new market-oriented economy. The city's government officials struggle with a complex dilemma: how to discourage the flood of migrants and, at the same time, care for those in need? The District 6 Health Education and Care for the Homeless project is the first in which local security authorities have joined with district officials, private groups and members of the homeless community to improve health conditions for the migrants on their doorsteps. Other articles in the spring 2003 issue of FFR include: Running 'Clean' Clean-elections laws passed in recent years by a handful of state legislatures--setting up public financing systems that seek to liberate candidates from the influence of special interest groups--are already having a dramatic effect. The progress so far gives the clean-elections-movement hope that public money, unconnected to any special pleading, can eventually reduce the outsized influence of private money in U. S. politics overall. Scales of Justice Unbalanced Black and Hispanic youth in trouble with the law are incarcerated far more frequently than their white counterparts. In Seattle, Wash., the Burns Institute, a project of the Youth Law Center, is reducing the numbers of youth in detention and yielding new insights about the disparity. For Chinese Women, a Long March Essays by Chinese women scholars explore such topics as women's changing social status as seen through the Peking Opera, gender inequality in rural education and women's role in Mao Tse Tung's epic Long March in the 1930's. FFR, a magazine published quarterly by the Ford Foundation's Office of Communications, offers journalistic reports, stories and interviews on a wide range of issues engaged by the work of the foundation's program divisions: Peace and Social Justice; Asset Building and Community Development; and Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom.

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The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.