RESOURCES Multifamily Urban Homesteading Bulletin, free from: , The Bulletin c/o The Urban Homest~adiqg Assistance Board 1047 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10025 Depending on which issue of "The Bull" you read you'll find that it is published bimonthly, quarterly, or never again, since its budget from HUD was slated to run out June 1980. With its current status hopeful, I highly recommend it as perhaps the only journal covering the nuts and bolts of cooperative urban homesteading. Each issue combines technical assistance (from how to package a Section 312 loan financing program, to methods of retrofitting multifamily buildings) with reports to update existing models. There are pull-out sections on specifics and reviews and news to keep you current. The price is right! -CC People Power: What Communities Are Doing to Coun·ter Inflation, 1980, 410 pp., free from: Consumer Information Center Dept. 682-H Pueblo, CO 81009. Neighborhoods: A Self-Help Sampler,· 1979, 161 pp., $5.50 from: Superintendent of Documents U.S. Govt. Printing Office Washington, DC 20402 SIN 023-000-00559-0 Maybe someday the federal government will figure ,out how to communicate between branches to reduce the sort of overlap evidenced in these two documents. Knowing how they operate, you can bet an enormous amount of time, energy and money went into,each of these publications and with a little coordination a combined effort could have eliminated both redundancy and areas . where one or.the other is thin. They each aim to involve more mainstream Americans in the work of improving communities and reducing the impact of inflation. They each present numerous groups and projects by issue area (food, health, energy, housing, etc.) and the resources in both public and private sectors that the groups access to serve their communities. Each has extensive, very useful appendices (neither is as well crossreferenced as Good Works-see Access this issue). The lessons of both are similar: grass roots organizations tend to produce tremendous results with few dollars; they are becoming more sophisticated-drawing toOctober 1980 RAIN Page 15 gether larger, more skilled coalitions of people to confront more complex social arid economic scenarios; and they rely a great . deal on each other's examples and support through regional and national networks. The books provide the linkages between analysis of problems and solutions to them. They serve like phone books, to put you in touch with other people doing what needs to be done. They are equally good. People Power, with more extensive examples (and free) is your best bet. -CC "Spe~ial Hotline Issue," The Information Report, Vol. 6, No. 4, July/Aug., 1980, 8 pp., $5.00, from: Washington Researchers 91816th St. N.W. Washington, DC 20006 Subscriptions $24/yr The bimonthly Information Report is one of those handy periodicals that access public reference materials. It's the sort of guide that can walk you through much of the W~shington bureaucracy, and if you happen to be a researcher with an eye on the federal government, you'll want to ·see it regularly. This special "Hotline Issue" is particularly useful, listing nearly 200 phone numbers (about 50 of them toll free) for government offices, department news recordings, free research assistance, national statistics, and more. - cc
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