Affordable Housing Institute : US

Quite possibly America’s earliest form of ‘market’ affordable housing.

 
 
Triple-deckers in Dorchester
 
Though affordability is defined economically, it must have a physical expression — a place whose market value yields an affordable rent or home purchase price.  While government can use the four kinds of money to narrow and close the cost-value gap, affordability can be approached […]

“It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
 
Is it?  Not in housing and urban development, where it can lead to a lose-lose situation:
 
A politically connected Dorchester family is getting help from the highest levels of City Hall to save a newly constructed house that two courts have ordered destroyed because it violates Boston’s zoning […]

Having survived the committee consolidation by migrating to HUD’s new host (Transportation Treasury plus), Senator Kit Bond (R-MO)
 

“Bond.  Kit Bond.”
 

… wasted little time telling HUD what he thinks of the Administration’s housing budget:
 

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Along the continuum of objections to affordable housing, from the legitimately rational to the blatantly racist, lies the middle ground where economics and prejudice collide, as expressed in statements such as, “this will hurt property values.” 
 

Heaven forfend that this come to your town …
 
Many other forms of development help property values, and homeowners happily […]

When creating new housing programs, when is piloting appropriate?
 

Some experiments work …
 

And some don’t …
 
What types of pilots work best?
 

Fearless ones!
 
Oliver Faltin-Traeger, graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has produced an illuminating and provocative paper (full disclosure: prepared under my supervision), Housing Policy Innovation Through Effective Experimentation (link in .pdf) that’s chock-full of […]