Affordable Housing Institute : US

Via the Washington Post’s technology columnist comes an update on an apparently-long-overdue innovation that, like brokerage’s baby bang, might revolutionize another part of the home-selling services market:
 
When I saw a demo of the Zillow.com real estate service last month, it struck me as so obvious I wondered why no one had done it before.
 
It’s hard […]

[Continued from last Wednesday’s Part 1]
 
If Portland’s growth management has had the unintended effect of creating work traffic congestion, why don’t Portland’s citizens use its touted mass transit?
 
With transit use accounting for less than 2% of all trips in the region, it remains a fairly negligible factor in the vast majority of the metropolitan area.
 
Finally, […]

In public companies like Fannie Mae, earnings management is like skin care, smoothing out the wrinkles to present a shinier corporate image.  Like skin care, it seems almost every publicly traded company uses it to some degree or another.  As the New York Times puts it:
 
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — An internal investigation has uncovered new […]

In the best mystery novels, like those of the unparalleled John Dickson Carr, the clues come all out of order, often before the nefarious deeds are done.
 
 
 
As in the movie Memento, running the film backwards can organize the story.  Consider this trio of stories about the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
 
 
To connect the dots, […]

Having already mined Robert Bruegmann’s fascinating Sprawl: A Compact History for disproofs (Part 1 and Part 2) and insights about cities, I want to finish with his examination of Portland, Oregon’s thirty-year experiment in what might be called a monetarist approach to land use:

 
The Portland Postulate

Restrict supply and you will manage growth and […]