Individual Wealth Preservation

Community Check Cashing

http://www.communitycheckcashing.org/home

Community Check Cashing is a nonprofit organization established to help Oakland residents increase their income and assets, save money, and improve their financial position and knowledge.  To do so, it offers below-market priced financial services and products, financial coaching, and small business assistance.  Opened in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood in 2009, it is the first nonprofit, full-service, stand-alone check cashing store in the country. Read more about Community Check Cashing...

The Rise of the Corporate Landlord

Desiree Fields, Rachel Laforest, Tony Romano, Tony Roshan Samara and Rob Call
Right To The City Alliance

This new report from The Right to the City Alliance’s Homes for All Campaign examines how large, well capitalized, private equity firms, entering rental markets create the risk of a second housing bubble. The author, urban geographer Desiree Fields, demonstrates that the institutionalization of the single-family rental market benefits the same financial institutions behind the housing market crash of 2008, while disproportionately impacting low-income communities. She lays out a policy agenda that can promote greater diversity and broaden ownership of land and housing. 

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The Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati

http://www.hometoday.cc/homeownerRetention2.html

Established in 1973, The Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati is a nonprofit focused on helping area residents achieve and maintain homeownership. Although its main focus is providing free foreclosure prevention services, it also offers homebuyers’ education and financial skills classes. In 2012, the Center launched a new initiative through which it rehabilitates vacant, single family homes that contribute to blight in area neighborhoods and sells them at below-market-rate prices. Read more about The Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati...

Cornerstone Corporation for Shared Equity

http://cornerstone-equity.org/

Founded in 1986, Cornerstone Corporation for Shared Equity is a nonprofit that finances, develops, and manages affordable apartment housing with “renter equity,” a program through which renters earn up to $10,000 in financial equity—and thus build and preserve wealth—by participating in the management, routine maintenance, and governance of their communities and paying their rent on time.  Cornerstone also operates a community loan fund that attracts funds from socially conscious investors and makes loans to finance Cornerstone and other nonprofits’ housing development projects. Read more about Cornerstone Corporation for Shared Equity...

The Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati

http://www.hometoday.cc/homeownerRetention2.html

Established in 1973, The Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati is a nonprofit focused on helping area residents achieve and maintain homeownership. Although its main focus is providing free foreclosure prevention services, it also offers homebuyers’ education and financial skills classes. In 2012, the Center launched a new initiative through which it rehabilitates vacant, single family homes that contribute to blight in area neighborhoods and sells them at below-market-rate prices. Read more about The Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati...

Working in Neighborhoods

http://www.wincincy.org/?page_id=2

Founded in 1978 to empower low and moderate residents of Greater Cincinnati, Working in Neighborhoods (WIN) promotes homeownership and community engagement. To boost homeownership, WIN builds and renovates homes for first-time homebuyers, an initiative credited with selling over 160 homes and increasing home values in targeted areas by as much as 25 percent. WIN also offers foreclosure prevention services, which have saved 1,131 homes representing over $99.7 million in assets from foreclosure. Read more about Working in Neighborhoods...

Underwater America

Peter Dreier, Saqib Bhatti, Rob Call, Alex Shwartz and Gregory Squires
Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley

Measuring how communities have recovered from the national foreclosure crisis, the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, has analyzed the concentration of underwater homes by race and income. The findings reveal geographic “hotspots” of underwater homes and how the legacy of predatory lending has concentrated these homes in African American and Latino communities. The report recommends a range of loan restructuring strategies to assist severely impacted communities.

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Banking in Color: New Findings on Financial Access for Low- and Moderate-Income Communities

Jane Duong, Alvina Condon, Katie Taylor, Marisabel Torres, Lindsay Daniels and Valerie R. Wilson
Alliance for Stabilizing Our Communities (ASOC)

The Alliance for Stabilizing our Communities — a collaboration between National CAPACD (Coalition of Asian and Pacific Americans for Community Development), the National Council of La Raza, and the National Urban League — has released the findings of a national survey of bank account ownership and use in communities of color. To reduce continued disparities and close the financial services access gap, the coalition recommends a multi-faceted approach that combines technological innovation, bricks-and-mortar bank branches in communities of color, financial education, and asset building programs.

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Neighborhood Housing Services of Greater Cleveland

http://www.nhscleveland.org/

Founded in 1975, Neighborhood Housing Services of Greater Cleveland aims to help people achieve and maintain homeownership through a range of programs and services, including homebuyer education, down payment assistance, foreclosure intervention, reverse mortgage counseling, home improvement loans, and credit counseling.  Since merging with the Community Land Trust of Greater Cleveland in 2011, it has used the land trust to develop seven, permanently affordable, energy-efficient homes. NHSGC’s initiatives are also credited with contributing over $105 million to the Greater Cleveland economy, generating $14 million in tax revenues, and sustaining 153 jobs on an annual basis.

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Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People (ESOP)

http://www.esop-cleveland.org/

ESOP was founded in 1993 to address the issues and challenges facing neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio. Formerly East Side Organizing Project, ESOP changed in name in 2007 to reflect its broadened focus toward the entire state. Its core goal is to preserve homeownership by preventing foreclosures and curbing predatory lending practices. Through community organizing, ESOP maintains campaigns concerning payday loans, vacant properties, and local development. ESOP also offers housing counseling and can directly negotiate with lenders to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. In 2002, ESOP negotiated a 5-year Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) agreement with Charter One bank—the first CRA agreement between a bank and a community group in Cuyahoga County in over a decade.

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