USA- Affordable Housing Strategies for the city of Buffalo

Many of the 273 organizations that belong to the Partnership for the Public Good (PPG) work directly with affordable housing, and many others feel the impact of housing issues as they work in fields as diverse as education and criminal justice. Families do not thrive when they must spend over half their income on rent, when they lose their housing through eviction or tax foreclosure, when they live in high-poverty neighborhoods marked by segregation, abandonment, and disrepair, or when they experience lead poisoning or asthma in their homes. A family’s neighborhood affects whether their children go to a school with adequate resources, whether they can access jobs via public transit, and even whether they can purchase fresh food. Over the last ten years, PPG has published numerous fact sheets, policy briefs, and reports on housing issues. In this report, we draw on past work and supplement it with new research and analysis to present a broad range of affordable housing strategies for the City of Buffalo. None of these strategies will succeed in isolation, and like all public policies they should be re-evaluated regularly, but they offer concrete ideas to increase equity and sustainability in our city.