Heartland Blog

By Jerusalem Demsas and Ranjani Chakraborty, Vox.com The rules that keep American housing expensive. Over the past year, housing prices rose precipitously, shattering the dreams of many would-be homeowners and highlighting the underlying inequalities in the housing market. Low interest rates and millennials’ entry into the market spiked demand across the nation, leading housing prices to increase by more than 20 percent in some cities. But while this year was unique in many w

whitehouse.gov/cea/blog By Jared Bernstein, Jeffery Zhang, Ryan Cummings, and Matthew Maury The COVID-19 pandemic shifted families’ preferences for location and type of housing, exacerbating existing supply chain constraints that—for several reasons—have persisted for many years. These pandemic-related changes interacted with the existing housing inventory shortage, resulting in sharp price increases for both owned homes and rental units. Indeed, national home prices, as meas

Michael D. Lappin ‘The next mayor and comptroller can speed New York City’s recovery by working with public employee pension funds to increase investment in affordable housing, as they have in response to previous economic distress.’ The COVID pandemic exposed the unprecedented severity—and the adverse consequences of— New York City’s extraordinary shortage of affordable housing. The next mayor must meet this crisis head-on by increasing production and preservation of afforda

buildingamericacde.com/news The U.S. Department of the Treasury Community Development Financial Institutions Fund awarded Building America CDE, Inc. (Building America) a $55 million allocation in New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) on September 1, 2021. Building America, a subsidiary of the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, uses New Markets Tax Credits to finance union-built projects that revitalize neighborhoods, bring critical services to low-income communities, and act as catal

Tom Croft, Heartland Capital Strategies As Steve Sleigh, co-chair of the Heartland Governing Board put it, the world lost an important voice on August 5 with the untimely passing of Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. Rich, as we knew him, spoke with passion and authority on behalf of all workers, not just union members in the AFL-CIO, which he led since 2009. One of Rich’s many enduring legacies was his commitment to developing labor’s capital strategies -- finding way

by David S. Blitzstein On March 11, 2021, Congress passed the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA). This section of ARPA is named after the deceased leader of Teamster pensioners, who was at the vanguard of this legislative campaign. ARPA provides dramatic and unprecedented financial relief to hundreds of multiemployer pension plans covering three million retirees and workers in plans projected to exhaust their assets and