Ford Foundation Working with Visionaries on the Frontlines of Social Change Worldwide
Metropolitan Opportunity

Expanding Access to Quality Housing

Overview

The goal of this work is to increase access for low-income families to asset-building homes.

The Challenge

Metropolitan areas are struggling with vast numbers of vacant and abandoned housing units as a result of the foreclosure crisis. Ironically, these communities also face an affordable housing shortage as displacement of families through foreclosure, declining incomes, and increasing joblessness have increased demand for scarce units.

The national policy response has been distressingly slow. At the same time, conventional community development approaches have proven inadequate for addressing these challenges as the collapse of the world finance system has frozen these efforts in place.

The economic downturn has revealed the need for a more effective and stable housing and community development finance system to provide safe, affordable housing options and to promote sustainable and inclusive metropolitan regions.

What We're Doing

To help low-income families in metropolitan areas move toward financial stability and security, we promote the development of homes that are linked to public transportation, good schools, secure employment, and help provide innovative finance tools to purchase and maintain them.

In the short term, our strategy focuses on accelerating the reuse of foreclosed properties, and rebuilding the national housing and community development finance systems.

For the longer term, we are advancing efforts to establish reliable and sustainable public and private finance flows to community development, and build a national infrastructure to promote innovative tools and practices that support local efforts to develop metropolitan regions.

We are also supporting efforts to expand housing tenure and finance alternatives that protect low- and moderate-income families from undue risk through systems that deliver and finance permanently affordable homes.

Learn more about how our strategies and approaches shape our grant making.

From the Newsroom

Regions

 

Team

  • George McCarthy
  • Don Chen
  • Lisa Davis
  • Jerry Maldonado
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