As climate change intensifies, severe flood events have become more commonplace across the entire U.S. Extreme flooding disproportionately impacts low-income communities and people of color because they often live in areas that are more prone to flooding, in housing stock not well suited to weather such events, and lack adequate disaster plans as well as the financial means to evacuate and/or temporarily relocate.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, otherwise known as the Housing Credit, is the nation’s number one tool for financing the production and preservation of affordable rental homes. So how can we expand access to this crucial tool for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and other historically marginalized housing providers?

Several stories of communities developing their own solutions to environmental and climate-related challenges are profiled in “What’s Possible: Investing NOW for Prosperous, Sustainable Neighborhoods,” a collection of essays published by Enterprise, LISC, and The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

More than 300 years of exploitive and racist housing policies fostered many of the socio-economic inequities currently borne by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC).

The NMTC is a “place-based” tax credit that drives capital to distressed and low-income Census tracts typically overlooked by traditional investment. Advocates say that making the credit a permanent part of the tax code is the most significant way to realize the full potential of the NMTC program.

Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration announced a set of actions intended to address racial bias in the home appraisal process. The announcement followed a two-year effort led by the Interagency Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE), an inaugural task force comprised of 13 federal agencies and offices directed to evaluate the causes, extent, and consequences of appraisal bias, as well as establish recommendations to eliminate racial and ethnic bias from the home valuation process. The task force found that the legacies of past racist housing policies, along with industry practices that reinforce negative perceptions of neighborhoods with high concentrations of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color contributed to the under-valuation of homes in majority-BIPOC neighborhoods and the loss of billions of dollars in wealth for their owners.

Blog series which explores the many ways housing policies contribute to racial disparities in our country.

A new study commissioned by Enterprise shows voucher holders in New Orleans continue to face discrimination, highlighting the need for source of income protections in the city.   

Connecting the dots from slavery to Jim Crow, to voter disenfranchisement and the reasons present-day persistent poverty counties and areas of deep disadvantage in rural America overlap so heavily with communities of color.