For community developers and housing advocates, household overcrowding has long been a key concern. Across the country, housing needs assessments often list overcrowding as an economic outcome, an indication that affordable housing supply is unavailable. That is, individuals are forced to cohabitate … Read more

The Development Finance Initiative’s Community Revitalization Fellows represent students from a variety of graduate programs: City and Regional Planning, Business, Public Administration, Information and Library Science, Applied Geography, and Public Health. In addition to working as DFI Fellows, the … Read more

In previous posts the CED blog explored the many publicly available sources for local data that can inform municipal staff, real estate professionals, and policy makers. But how can local governments make use this data, and how can they know that the conclusions reached are valid? Often municipal go … Read more

Ever need to know how many single-family wood-framed houses were sold in the Midwest last year? Or the latitude and longitude of every farmers market in Wisconsin that sells herbs, flowers, and soap? What about the number of planes that sat on the tarmac more than three hours this past June? Or the … Read more

A previous post discussed the benefits of conducting community housing assessments for local governments and non-profit organizations interested in community and economic development. This post will discuss the methods and strategies that interested stakeholders, from local governments to neighborho … Read more

Energy and sustainability programs can be important economic development initiatives for governments.  Governments interested in initiating energy efficiency and renewable energy programs for their business and industry should first learn about how those businesses and industry sites use energy. Two … Read more