Real estate ownership is one of the primary vehicles for wealth creation in the United States, and consequently one of the core drivers of the racial wealth gap after generations of disinvestment in and displacement of BIPOC communities. Andre Perry, senior fellow at Brookings Institution and author … Read more

How much should North Carolina families pay for housing? Affordable housing experts generally agree that housing costs should not exceed 30% of a household’s annual income. This payment standard is applied to nearly every major housing program, including public housing, housing choice vouchers, and … Read more

Summer 2014 saw increased attention paid to the issue of housing affordability in America with reports by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the New York Times highlighting the squeeze low and middle income households face from ever-incr … Read more

When the five small water systems in Hampton County, South Carolina decided to band together to create the Lowcountry Regional Water System (LRWS), they, like many other small water systems across the country, faced a number of managerial and financial obstacles. Among these challenges were a flat g … Read more

In previous posts, we have talked about publicly available data on inflationary measures including the Consumer Price Index and the Construction Cost Index as well as on commercial energy use from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the US Census.  The US Census also has a rich set of … Read more