Browsing by Subject "Homes"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Creating Affordable Homes: An Evaluation of the Minneapolis Homes Create Strategy
    (2024-05-01) Goodrich , Dan; Yudelman, Beth
    This project was a qualitative analysis of the Create Strategy of the Minneapolis Homes Program. The project was designed to determine to what extent the strategy is meeting its goals. The Minneapolis Homes Program is managed by the Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) housing division. The mission of the Minneapolis Homes Program (started in 2020) is to help people access, create, and sustain affordable homeownership to eliminate racial disparities in homeownership. This capstone project was specifically focused on the Create Strategy of the program - to what extent are the Minneapolis Homes: Financing and Property Sale Programs successfully creating opportunities to build new homes and rehabilitate existing homes to eliminate racial disparities in homeownership within the city of Minneapolis? Three key findings emerged from our research: 1) Minneapolis Homes is well led and viewed as a national leader, 2) Some developers experience significant “pain points” when working with the city. Further, the experiences that builders have with the city can vary significantly and can be inconsistent. For example, newer community developers need more support navigating the city’s process and receiving early financial support for construction, while larger developers want more consistency, and 3) The Create Strategy is underfunded. More funding is needed for the Minneapolis Homes Create Strategy to increase capacity within the city as well as for specific development projects. In addition, outside forces such as post-Covid inflation, labor shortages, and the Minneapolis 2040 plan lawsuit are adding time, costs, and stress for builders. On a macro level, we recommend that Minneapolis Homes work closely with city departments and divisions to advance the city’s identified primary goal. On a micro level, we recommend that Minneapolis Homes 1) clarify the primary goal within CPED in relation to equity and homeownership: what to incentivize and what to require, 2) seek additional funding to advance the identified goals of the Create Strategy, 3) continue to streamline the process for developers and customize support (including more financial and logistical support when needed), and 4) continue to strengthen communication with developers, city staff, and funders. In addition, Minneapolis Homes should examine whether more homeowner participation in evaluating the Create Strategy is beneficial.
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    Home Improvement through NRP: An Analysis of the Distribution of Funds for Single-Family Home Improvement Projects.
    (Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2006) Nesse, Katherine; Lukermann, Barbara
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    Modern American pilgrims: dwelling and religious travel in the lives and works of Herman Melville and T.S. Eliot.
    (2012-07) Mabie, Joshua
    Part biography, part critical study, and part literary field guide, “Modern American Pilgrims” considers the houses and families, the churches and congregations, the schools and educations, and the offices and businesses that formed Herman Melville’s and T.S. Eliot’s senses of identity and understanding of the power of literary art. This dissertation argues that the degradation and destruction of the material and institutional structures that constituted Melville’s and Eliot’s homes led them to purposeful and directed journeys to traditional sites of Christian pilgrimage. Unlike many of their contemporaries and most of their antecedents, these two American pilgrims did not seek open space where they could make something new, they sought to recover something old that could both ground and transform them. The first chapter of the dissertation shows that the project of self-fashioning that located Herman Melville’s ancestors in a family tradition, in a community, and within American history broke down in the face of early nineteenth-century urbanization and economic change. The second chapter considers Melville’s 1856-57 journey to the Holy Land as a response to his failure to secure a satisfactory literary and spiritual place for himself. I argue that the epic poem Clarel records Melville’s attempt to construct poetically a coherent landscape out of the crumbling landmarks he encountered in the Holy Land and that the poem testifies to his engagement with, but ultimate rejection of, religious discipline within an historical creed. The second part of the dissertation turns to T.S. Eliot and considers a degradation of Eliot’s St. Louis context that parallels the destruction of Melville’s New York homes. In the first of two Eliot chapters, I argue that Eliot did not reject outright the St. Louis world his family labored to build as much as he fled its collapse. In the final chapter, I show that Eliot responded to the instability of the city of his youth by searching for new spiritual refuges among the churches of England. Though London’s cityscape was manifestly more historically stable than the rapidly industrializing St. Louis, it too was being undermined. Ultimately, Eliot found a series of satisfactory dwelling places on the idiosyncratic pilgrimages described in the Four Quartets. The dissertation’s conclusion proposes Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love as a twenty-first century analogue to Melville’s nineteenth century and Eliot’s accounts of modern American pilgrimage.