Affordable Housing Institute : US

A building collapsed in Nairobi yesterday, and with the web-linked world, we instantly have (via the Washington Post and CNN) haunting pictures and story:
 
 
Nairobi, January 23, 2006: The crowd gathers around the collapsed building.
 
NAIROBI, Kenya — A five-story building collapsed Monday in central Nairobi with more than 280 construction workers inside, killing at least 10 […]

Channeling AHI’s various predictions and recommendations (Part 1 and Part 2), the Economist provides both an update and a suggestion for New New Orleans:
 
IN PARTS of the Lower Ninth Ward, people who want to rebuild their houses will have to find their land first. 
 

From the Economist: life in the Lower Ninth Ward
 
[AHI’s NNO posting […]

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average.
– Garrison Keillor
 
Every year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition performs a real service, addressing the data paradox by calculating the ‘housing wage’ in every American metropolitan market. 
 

Housing wage
 
The hourly earnings required by a […]

Something about real estate fuels the ire of rock-ribbed capitalists like Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal, who can write breathy paeans to corporate titans even while sneering at grubby landlords who build property empires.  (My Fannie Mae archive can be found here.)  That antipathy is on full display in the Wall Street Journal’s […]

A while back, in giving a blog interview, I commented:
 
As a business, classical real estate brokerage is facing the kind of big-bang price drop that confronted stock brokers when Charles Schwab and others introduced first discount and then on-line brokerage. In real terms, fees are likely to drop, and the service is going to reinvent […]