Local Housing Solutions is a web site designed to help people who want to take action to help make housing more affordable to people with very low incomes. It is designed to support changes in the United States at the local level. It has great graphics and articles that are written using language that is easy to understand.
There is a huge amount of material on the site, which has assembled ideas that have been tried across the United States. The designers have obviously spent a great deal of time sorting through the information and thinking about how to organize it to be helpful to people who want to use the site. Here are a handful of examples:
- a housing affordability 101 page that talks about what has happened to housing prices, which have gone up, compared with incomes, which have not kept pace, especially for people with low incomes
- the components that are key to an effective affordable housing program at the local level and the reasons why these components are critical
- a tool to assess a local affordable housing program’s strengths and weaknesses
- several ways to access the hundreds of policy initiatives, and
- explanations of how combinations of policies complement each other.
Reading through Local Housing Solutions, it is evident that it isn’t offering silver bullet solutions. A combination of actions is needed to make housing more affordable for people with extremely low incomes. Local Housing Solutions helps by offering new ideas, and ways to sort through them. It should contribute to constructive debate and policy change at the local level.
Local Housing Solutions looks like an ideal resource for local politicians in the United States who have just been elected and need a crash course on housing issues. It will also benefit their seasoned colleagues who want to do more, as well as those who would rather not. It will also benefit activists who are looking for ideas to promote at the local level.
People engaged in local politics outside the United States may also find the wide range of ideas helpful. Finally, web designers and academics may find the site’s structure useful for organizing similar material elsewhere.
To read more visit: Local Housing Solutions
