ABSTRACT
For decades, charitable, not-for-profit organizations have played a leading role in efforts to provide decent and affordable housing for low- and very-low-income households in the nation's small towns and rural places. In the 1930s, the American Friends Service Committee promoted owner-built housing to house the Depression-era poor in Appalachia, experiences that inspired the modern-day mutual self-help housing movement. In the 1960s, the Institute for Community Economics first pioneered the community land trust model as a way to house dispossessed southern black share-croppers (Wiener. 2006: 360). With limited resources, working in some of the poorest and most remote communities, nonprofit organizations have managed to achieve a remarkable record of success, along the way demonstrating methods and practices in the housing sector that have been modeled in urban and suburban America.
