Affordable Housing Institute : US

In yesterday’s post about HR 1461 (Fannie Mae archive here), I missed the significant amendment, offered by Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA-4):
 

Fastest (and funniest!) mouth and fastest brain in the House …
 
The legislation would revise the current affordable housing financing goals for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it would also require them to contribute […]

 
“Catastrophe is normally a precondition for improved regulation.”
– Smith’s Hypothesis of public-policy governance evolution.
 
 
With Fannie Mae making nice (contrition is free, which is all the more charming when, to judge by past behavior, it is so palpably insincere) and the Bush Administration proposing its own form of GSE regulation, the real action will take […]

“Nor shall private property be taken for public purpose without just compensation.” 
– U. S. Constitution, Fifth Amendment (the “Takings Clause”)
 
 
“We the people …”
 
Takings questions are critical to affordable housing because they provide clear boundaries and partner-protection mechanisms without which public-private partnership is conceptually unsustainable.  As I have written at length  (link in .pdf) regarding […]

What is urban land worth?
 
There is an answer:
 

A structural and formulaic algorithm.
Easily deducible.
Globally applicable — works from Alabama to Zanzibar.
Yet often ignored, especially by policymakers. 

 
“Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report!  Run out and find me a four-year-old child — I can’t make head nor tail of it.” — Duck Soup.
 
Functionally, what characterizes […]

In wrestling apocrypha, a pretzel hold is one that is auto-masochistic: it inflicts pain upon the holder. 
 
 
 
For the pretzel hold to work, it requires both a psychological and a temporal disconnect between the action and its pain — such as slow-moving affordable housing development and fairly complex market interdependency relationships.  But the consequences, like […]