
ANHD staff notes the following striking trends in this year’s data chart:
- Real estate speculation is a key driver of the loss of affordability, and the Change in Residential Sales Price column shows which neighborhoods are most affected.
- Many neighborhoods have large numbers of affordable housing built with city subsidy in danger of going market-rate in the next few years, shown by the LIHTC Units Eligible to Expire column.
- Foreclosure is still a significant problem in many communities with smaller 1-4 family homes.
- The column on Families Applying and Eligible for Shelter shows which neighborhoods have the greatest risk of homelessness.
Local community organizations are often the most effective first-line defense against that a neighborhood has to stop the loss of affordable housing. There are two important Council-funded programs-the Housing Preservation Initiative (HPI) and Community Consultant Contracts (CCC) – that last year provided community groups with the resources to counseled over 16,000 tenants and 2,500 homeowners, and preserved the affordability of over 4,500 units that could otherwise have been lost to market rates.The mayoral-funded Neighborhood Preservation Consultant Program also supports core community strategies to combat displacement, but has unfortunately been significantly cut in recent years so it no longer supports this work at the levels needed.
In order to best achieve the goal of reducing the City’s housing crisis, we must invest in the local on-the-ground neighborhoods partners who are more important than ever in helping protect tenants and stabilize neighborhoods and communities.