Understanding the Role of Housing Navigators

This year, five Ralph W. Voorhees Public Service Fellows worked with New Community Corporation, a community development organization in Newark, New Jersey, to research housing navigation. Part of a Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health (REACH) community engaged project, the Fellows sought to better understand the work of contemporary housing navigation.

Corporate Ownership of Small Residential Properties in 7 Municipalities in New Jersey

Eric Seymour, Will Payne, Kathe Newman and Lauren Nolan published a new report on Corporate Ownership of Small Residential Properties in Seven New Jersey Municipalities. This report examines  changes in corporate ownership of 1-to-4 unit residential properties in Asbury Park, Millville, Montclair, New Brunswick, Passaic, Phillipsburg, and West New York, New Jersey between 2010 and 2022. The report finds that in the seven municipalities corporate ownership is increasing, spatially concentrated, associated with foreclosures, small scale and owned by local/regional entities. This research was funded by the Schalkenbach Foundation. A video discussion of the research can be watched here.

Homelessness in New Brunswick and Programs to Address It

This report identifies the challenges that emergency service organizations and their clients are experiencing as they attempt to access, or consider accessing, the existing service infrastructure and to identify areas of unmet need.

New Jersey State of Affordable Rental Housing – NJSOARH

The NJSOARH team of Professors Eric Seymour, Kathe Newman, Will Payne, Postdoctoral Associate Shiloh Deitz, doctoral student Lauren Nolan and masters student John Smith are building a housing data infrastructure to describe the landscape of rental housing affordable to lower income households in New Jersey and conducting interviews to better understand the processes that shape housing insecurity. Other team members have included undergraduate Bloustein Honors student Lily Chang and Esther Colon-Bermudez, RISE undergraduate fellow from the University of Puerto Rico – Rio Piedras as well as masters students Jonathan Bonilla, Erica Copeland, William Downie, Mila Hamilton, and Smriti Singh.  An Advisory Committee comprised of leading NJ community development and housing organizations guides the project.

Equitable Home Mortgage Lending in Camden (REACH)

Housing is a critical social determinant of health. The absence of secure and affordable housing creates chronic stress and can affect present and long-term health. Homeownership is regarded as an important mechanism for both securing affordable and predictable housing costs and building equity. However, people living in low-to-moderate income neighborhoods of color have and continue to face barriers to access affordable and safe credit to make sustainable and wealth-building homeownership possible. Instead, residents in these communities may either be denied credit or steered toward expensive and risky products. Though lending processes, products, and institutions have changed over time, this concern about access to high-quality, affordable credit remains. This two part project in partnership with St. Joseph’s Carpenter Society– a community-based non-profit organization– seeks to better understand lending processes and to consider strategies to address the lending needs of low-income borrowers in Camden, NJ. In Part 1 of the project, we will conduct mixed methods community engaged research to understand the landscape of home mortgage lending in Camden. In Part 2 of the project, we will organize a convening to discuss the findings with practitioners and community members and create a plan to improve access to high-quality credit for Camden borrowers to further housing security. This project has been funded by Rutgers REACH initiative.

Research team members include:

• Kathe Newman, PI
• Katharine Nelson, UPENN
• Lauren Nolan
• Eric Seymour

The Landscape of Cooperative and Shared Equity Housing in the United States

James DeFilippis and a set of students – Erica Copeland, Mila Hamilton, Celeste Royo, and John Smith with funding from the Cooperative Development Foundation – are conducting a nationwide “landscape analysis” of the field of shared equity housing for the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF). CDF is interested in moving into co-op and other forms of shared equity housing, and we will be providing a “state of the field” analysis for them as they move into this work.

Faith-based Affordable Housing

Nadia Mian received a 2-year grant from the Louisville Institute to examine how US faith-based institutions use their property to build affordable housing while advocating for changing land use, zoning and housing policy. She conducted about 25 interviews with faith-based leaders, urban planners, developers, and affordable housing advocates working on faith-based affordable housing in the US. Kyle Cruz, MCRP, helped with interviews. Dr. Mian is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Church Management at Villanova University studying Seattle’s faith-based density bonus. She recently received a grant from the Duke Endowment and Trinity Church to support the creation of a faith-based affordable housing database. Her work has been published in Planning Magazine, Shelterforce, The Conversation, and Faith & Leadership.