Affordable Housing Institute : US

Traditionally, homeownership is the ladder to personal wealth because it:
 

Offers security of tenure (and hence incubates healthy and growing families)
Rewards initial asset accumulation (the down payment)
Enforces savings (equity buildup through amortization)
Motivates property upgrades (through home improvement and its developing-nation analog, incremental housing)
Creates a tappable source of equity for personal needs (children’s education, new business formation).

 
Inherent […]

When we design affordable housing programs, what assumptions should we make about the behavior of program participants? 
 
Back in the fourth century, a major theological debate erupted between two schools of thought about man’s nature: was man fundamentally good, or was he fundamentally a sinner?
 

“God give me chastity — but not yet!”
 
Followers of St. Augustine […]

As an equal-time counterpoint to a previous blog post about Harvard’s State of the Nation’s Housing study showing strong home-price fundamentals, we present the Economist, which refreshingly cuts through the newspaper blather shrieking “housing bubble” with a reasoned and statistics-heavy global survey of home prices and a soberly dour editorial that indeed opens with a curious bit […]

Long-time housing expert, head of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, former FHA Commissioner, and AHI Affiliate Nic Retsinas and his colleague Eric Belsky have issued the fourteenth annual edition of their essential work, The State of the Nation’s Housing (executive summary and full report, both in .pdf).
 

 
With far too much policy driven by anecdote, […]

[Return to Part 1]
[Return to Part 2]
 

9. Urban revitalization requires soft debt and soft equity

Further to the preceding points, the transaction obviously faced an enormous cost-value gap (with value defined as that supportable by economic debt/ economic equity). Indeed, when we reclassify the sources […]