Abstract
Instead of doing typical undergraduate summer research, I was a summer intern at the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing (SCANPH) in the downtown/Korea town area of LA. Established in 1989 it provides members in the housing community services, trainings and education, as well as advocates, lobbies, and works for affordable housing policy. In LA we have a housing trust fund that?s supposed to be $100 million per year. But since being passed by city council in 2001, the most it has gotten was under $50 million. SCANPH is about to launch a campaign to get the housing trust fund fully funded. My project was to create a PR piece that would be used as literature in the campaign to demonstrate that affordable housing is a good investment. I spent my summer trying to compile affordable housing success stories to do just this. I was looking for personal success stories of individuals and families whose lives have been greatly improved because of affordable housing. And I was looking for neighborhood turnaround stories of developments being built or rehabbed by affordable housing developers and positively impacting the neighborhood. At SCANPH we start campaigns like this one for the Los Angeles Housing Trust Fund to get policy made and changed so that our members will be able to provide more housing. Our members communicate with us at the same time, to let us know what works and what doesn?t work in the housing, community, and economic development sectors so that we are better able to advocate on their behalf.
