Affordable Housing Institute : US

Like many public goods, affordable housing is something we want … but want someone else to pay for.  So the manner by which government raises and spends money for affordable housing programs has a lot to do with how they are received politically, and therefore how much long-term impact they have. 
 
Consider, for instance, the […]

In any public-private partnership, the government will seek to accomplish certain tangible public policy goals through the imperfect mechanisms of motivating the private sector.  In such a program, the government regulator will be seeking to measure the private partner’s performance, and then to use the resulting measures to incentivizes (reward and punish) the partner’s performance.
 
In […]

Is affordable housing political?  Are building lobbies just a rallying point for political lobbying?
 

Lobby
 

Lobbyist
 
At yesterday’s hearing on tightening regulation of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of all the issues that might draw debate — how tightly to regulate the companies’ balance sheets, whether to require pre-approval before they enter new […]

Winds of change ruffle Congress’s topsails:
 
 
USS Constitution — two hundred years old, still in commission!
Sailing from Boston to Marblehead, July, 1997
 

with the Senate’s introduction of its answer to the House’s proposed GSE legislation:
 
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) yesterday released legislation that could force mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to […]

The United Nations — or more properly, its urban development arm UN Habitat — has done the world a service by looking crime in the face and calling it a crime:
 
U.N. Slams Zimbabwe on Slum Destruction
 
UNITED NATIONS — Zimbabwe’s destruction of urban slums is a “disastrous venture” that has left 700,000 people without homes […]