Affordable Housing Institute : US

Are you new to the Fannie Mae scandal?  Disoriented?  Feeling trapped?
 

Where am I?
In the GSE mess.
What do you want?
Explanation.  We want … explanation.
 
Feel like you’re arrived halfway through the movie and you don’t know who is who?  Need a condensed and hyperlinked summary?  Here it is, in six acts and nearly fifty scintillating blog posts.
 
1.         […]

[Interrupting a two-part post in light of breaking news.]
 
In the type of language normally reserved when giving the guilty the severest possible sentence, OFHEO has released a scalding 304-page report excoriating Fannie Mae up one side and down the other:
 
The report details an arrogant and unethical corporate culture where Fannie Mae employees manipulated accounting and […]

Although I’ve snickered at suburban snobbery –
 

“You nattering nabob of negativism.”
 

– neighborhood sensitivity (one might say anxiety) around affordable housing is just as common in urban neighborhoods, as in this good Washington DC example [hat tip: reader Andrew Trueblood] via the Washington Post:
 

St. Martin’s Catholic Church is proud that for more than […]

[Another entry in our occasional series on local property taxation: previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4.]
 
Obviously the homeowner writes the check, but is that who really pays? 
 

 
What are the secondary effects — in, for instance, house prices?
 
An intriguing Land Lines article by Rice University’s George Zodrow, who’s spent a decade researching this question, both […]

Pawns, the great chess theoretician Hans Kmoch preached, are a position’s backbone; because they alone cannot move backwards, the pawn structure defines the terrain. 
 

Pawn chains divide and fence the open board.
 
In the same way residential housing — people’s homes — defines cities.  Like pawns, homes are small scale (relative to other capital), and the […]