Where you live determines so much about your overall quality of life. For many Latinos, housing segregation limits their access to quality education, healthcare, and opportunities and often limits them in what they can do for employment. In the city of San Francisco, Calif. (15.3% Latino population), city planners have been seeking input from residents on a new 130-unit housing project in the historic Mission area. According to CBS News, San Francisco is the fourth most expensive city to live in in the United States. In order to reduce health disparities, it is critical to address inequities in programs, practices, and policies. Join our site, connect with others, and get involved. The rising costs for housing (the median home price there is $820,000) have simply ...
In March 2016, President Barack Obama launched the Opportunity Project calling for technologists, local governments, and community groups to harness technology and innovation to expand access to opportunity for all Americans (17.6% Latino). The result? Non-profits, companies, and students built 29 new digital tools-during an 8-week software development sprint-using federal and local data to help communities access and navigate information to empower communities to solve problems in their everyday lives, such as affordable housing, quality schools, and jobs. Latinos often face social, environmental, and political barriers when accessing everyday opportunities, like healthy schools and safe places to walk and play. Equitable opportunity and easy-to-navigate information are ...
What happens when Latinos get "priced out" of the homes they've lived in for decades? People like Luis Granados step up. Granados, Christopher Gil, and other leaders of the nonprofit Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) didn't stand by when a tech boom in San Francisco’s Mission District (30% Latino)—a hub for the city’s immigrant population—brought in higher-priced homes and threatened to push out lower-income families. They embarked on a mission to create 100% affordable housing in the area.
The rising housing costs in San Francisco
Since 1973, the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) offers free financial services to lower-income families in San Francisco’s Mission District, a traditionally Latino neighborhood where most rent their homes, said ...
The Strategic Growth Council recently released their final guidelines for the Affordable Housing Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program. The new guidelines reflect the feedback received during the program’s first year from its first round of applicants and its stakeholders. The changes were put into place to strengthen the AHSC and cover a range of topics including revising scoring criteria, projects in rural areas, and community benefits and engagement. The Safe Routes to School National Partnership worked with Sustainable Communities for All (SC4A), and the Coalition for Active Transportation Leadership (CATL), three of the program’s main stakeholders, to promote improvements for active transportation and to increase funding for walking and bicycling in communities in ...
The Center for Active Design and the Partnership for a Healthier America joined to develop the Active Design Verified initiative to encourage and recognize developers that implement evidence-based, health promotion design strategies in a defined percentage of the construction or renovation of their affordable housing properties over a period of time. Active design is the development of buildings, streets, and neighborhoods, through architecture and urban planning, to support physical activity and health. The Active Design Verified initiative supports a holistic approach to development that helps make the healthy choice the easy choice for residents, by engaging leaders in the affordable housing development community to prioritize health through active design concepts, particularly ...
A new KaBOOM! playground has just arrived to Marshall Meadows, an affordable housing community in San Antonio, Texas. With the help of 200 volunteers from Foresters, The Housing Community Services, Inc. and a team from KaBOOM!, kids living in and near Marshall Meadows now have a new place to play. Plans for the project started with a design day in June 2014, according to a news release. As part of the playground design process, children were asked to draw their dream playground. Designers used their drawings as inspiration for the new playscape. The playground is expected to serve more 25,000 children. "A community's well-being starts with a child's well-being," said Tony Garcia, president and CEO, of Foresters. "Playgrounds are important to communities, providing an ...
Financial stress has been linked to numerous negative health concerns. The stress felt from financial pressure can affect appetites and sleep patterns and greatly impact overall physical and mental well-being. One of the most pressing financial stressors people deal with stems from paying for housing. IN rural areas, the difficulties of finding affordable housing is often exacerbated. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently invested over $74 million to build and preserve affordable rural rental housing for families across the country. In order to reduce health disparities, it is critical to address inequities in programs, practices, and policies. Join our site, connect with others, and get involved. “[The] USDA's multi-family housing program has ...
Latinos are the nation's largest minority, making up 18.5% of the population. This dynamic population is also helping fuel the red-hot housing market, even amid COVID-19. "The number of Hispanic-homeowner households rose by more than 700,000 to nearly 9 million in 2020, according to Census Bureau data compiled by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, an industry group. Those gains marked the biggest one-year increase in data on Hispanic homeownership going back two decades," the Wall Street Journal reported in April 2021. Let's explore the this surge in the Latino housing market, challenges, and the future of housing.
What's Causing the Surge in the Latino Housing Market?
The Latino homeownership rate has "increased more during the past several years ...
Close to 40% of Americans struggle to meet the rising costs of housing, and Latinos especially face hardship in affordable housing as the pandemic worsened inequities, says a new report. As the economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans are struggling with soaring home and rent prices, affordability issues, and the risk of eviction and foreclosure, according to The State of the Nation’s Housing 2021 from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Latinos and other people of color are impacted on a greater scale. "Millions of households that lost income during the shutdowns are behind on their housing payments and on the brink of eviction or foreclosure," the report states. "A disproportionately large share of these at-risk households are renters with ...
