Cities and Neighborhoods

Publications on Cities and Neighborhoods

The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a collaborative effort of the Urban Institute and local organizations in more than 30 cities that operate recurrently updated information systems with neighborhood level data and work to ensure the data will be applied effectively in policy development and community building. This collection of brief case studies describes the local partners’ successes in using neighborhood indicators to improve their communities in several areas, including neighborhood development, housing, children and schools, crime and prisoner reentry, health and service delivery.

While HOPE VI has changed the face of public housing, it has not been a solution for the most vulnerable families. The Chicago Family Case Management Demonstration, an innovative model for serving these residents, provides them with intensive family case management, along with relocation, employment, financial literacy, mental health and substance use supports. This report focuses on one of the major challenges to serving vulnerable families: identifying which clients require the full intensive services. We develop a typology that provides a template for delivering wraparound services to public and assisted housing settings, including vouchers and units integrated into mixed-income developments.

The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program targets debt and equity capital to businesses or organizations situated in low-income, economically distressed communities. This is a report on a diverse sample of five projects that utilized New Markets Tax Credits allocated early in the program's history. Its substantive purpose is to describe the characteristics, evolution, financial arrangements, and anticipated community impacts of the projects, while its methodological purpose is to explore the strengths and limitations of using in-depth, semi-structured telephone interviews with key project actors and stakeholders as a basis for generating data for a future evaluation of the NMTC program.

Anthony A. Williams, the District of Columbia's two-term mayor from 1999 to 2006, has become a member of the Urban Institute's Board of Trustees.

Leadership Greater Washington, the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington, Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and the Urban Institute co-hosted an event to discuss the foreclosure crisis and its impact in the greater Washington D.C. region. As part of the event, the Urban Institute released it’s seventh in a series of annual reports, Housing in the Nation's Capital. This year's report focused on the foreclosure crisis and examined the level and trends of foreclosures and outlined potential secondary effects for families and neighborhoods.