YIMBY News for 12/17

[Eric Budd]

Pierce County Boosts Affordable Housing Creation, Leveraging New Maureen Howard Fund

The Urbanist

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KEYWORD SCORE: 58.42. affordable, affordable housing, apartment, bus route, comprehensive plan, density, development, growth, house, housing, housing and urban development, housing authority, income, parking, preservation, project, rent, single-family, supply, transportation, urban, zone, zoning

The Pierce County Council recently greenlit a set of awards for affordable housing projects using a relatively new funding source: the Maureen Howard Affordable Housing Act. The projects largely aim to serve households with very-low and extremely-low income levels. Passed in March 2023, the act aims to ramp up affordable housing production in Pierce County, which has lagged behind existing and projected needs. Council’s newly passed biennial budget also allows the County to use the tax to backfill federal support it expects to lose at existing facilities, following funding cuts. Though the Cou

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Next City’s Top Stories on Economic Justice in 2025

Next City

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KEYWORD SCORE: 45.77. affordable, affordable housing, apartment, construction, development, growth, housing, income, market-rate, mixed-use, project, real estate, rent, urban, zone

[image: The Bottom Line] An estimated 8,562 people attended Think!Chinatown's final Chinatown Night Market, held in August. (Photo by Oscar Perry Abello) No one can control everything. Not even an administration hell-bent on striking fear into immigrant communities, pushing more families into hunger, poverty and homelessness, and wrecking the economy. This year on the economic justice beat at Next City, our most-read stories include a few reports on landmark changes the Trump administration is making or attempting to make to the country’s community and economic development landscape. But the l

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Next City’s Top Stories on Transportation & Infrastructure in 2025

Next City

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KEYWORD SCORE: 35.56. affordable, bike lane, construction, density, development, downtown, housing, income, mobility, parking, project, transit-oriented, transportation, urban, vision zero, walk

(Photo by Basil Lade / Unsplash) This year, the transportation sector was marked by transit system death spirals, service cuts and escalating federal attacks on public investment — even as car dependence left many residents with few real options. Yet readers remained deeply engaged with stories about what can work. With coverage of cities still leaning into zero-fare public transit, new models for sidewalk repair reform, and bold approaches to guerilla urbanism, Next City examined where mobility systems are breaking down and where cities are charting new paths forward. Below, find this year’s

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COPA Has Helped Prevent Displacement in San Francisco. It Can Work in New York City, Too.

Next City

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KEYWORD SCORE: 34.16. affordable, affordable housing, development, housing, income, preservation, real estate, urban

Through COPA, the San Francisco Community Land Trust purchased 285 Turk Street in the Tenderloin neighborhood to convert into permanently-affordable housing. (Courtesy of San Francisco Community Land Trust) San Francisco made history in 2019 when it enacted the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), giving local nonprofits a first right to buy multifamily buildings when they go up for sale. In the years since, the San Francisco Community Land Trust and other mission-driven developers have completed dozens of COPA purchases, preserving 436 homes for more than 1,000 residents who would ot

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America is richer than ever. Why is it so unhappy?

Vox - Politics

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KEYWORD SCORE: 31.52. affordable, construction, development, growth, house, housing, income, rent, supply

Ordinary Americans today enjoy a living standard that would have awed kings for most of human history. We live in homes conditioned to our ideal temperature in any season; drive vehicles that pack the power of 250 horses into a 100-square-foot metal frame; carry six-ounce rectangles that offer instant access to virtually any loved one, book, song, fact, or pornography; inhale gases that take the pain out of any surgery; replace our worn-out hips with titanium; glide 40,000 feet above the Earth in pressurized aluminum tubes; and eat ground beef wrapped in tacos made of Doritos. But we don’t see

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Budget Cuts Threaten Oregon Program for Helping People Get Jobs After Prison

BOLTSmag

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KEYWORD SCORE: 25.39. construction, development, growth, housing, income, mobility, rent, supply, transportation, walk

*This story is a collaboration between Bolts and InvestigateWest, a nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest.* Thomas Van Hoose had been here before. Nearing the end of his third stint in an Oregon correctional facility on drug charges, he was thinking about what life on the outside would be like yet again. His first two times exiting prison went about the same way: He got a minimum-wage job, but soon found himself sinking under the weight of the intractable costs of living—rent, utilities, food, child support—that his meager paycheck could not cover. “I could p

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Neighbors, hikers rally as big gas station threatens their vision of Bakerville on I-70 

Colorado Sun

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KEYWORD SCORE: 22.33. bike path, development, house, parking, parking lot, planning commission, project, zone, zoning

A handful of neighbors and a mob of Front Range hikers are rallying to save a beloved 14er launching point at the Bakerville exit on Interstate 70 from a major gas station, truck stop and convenience store, moving fast and at high volume to block a rezoning. A developer working with a large gas station chain wants Clear Creek County to rezone 4.37 acres on the south side of I-70 from mountain residential to commercial tourism and recreation, making way for 24 car and truck pumps and nearly 6,000 visits a day. The developers see service to travelers, an improved recreation parking lot on a jamm

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