Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we saw that Brookings’ study, Where Did They Go? The Decline of Middle-Income Neighborhoods in Metropolitan America, based its whole analysis on the census tract, a very small area (4,000 people, one-quarter of a square mile, and in my city of Cambridge, there are thirty of them). 
 
Does a ‘census […]

From the Washington Post comes a summary of an important Brookings Institution study with a lurid title, Where Did They Go?, highlighting a major if perplexing demographic trend:
 

INDIANAPOLIS — Middle-class neighborhoods, long regarded as incubators for the American dream, are losing ground in cities across the country, shrinking at more than twice the rate […]

Levittown, Pennsylvania
 
“My favorite illustration of the long history of suburbia is an excerpt from a letter reported in Ivar Lissner’s The Living Past, p. 44:
 
“Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world.  It is so close … that we enjoy all the advantages of [the city] and yet when we come home […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1]
 
For more than seventy years, visionary architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, and public officials have sought the elusive cheaply replicable house:
 

He tried in 1939

He tried in 1947

He tried in 1969
 
PORT ARTHUR, Texas — It’s a modest little house, perched atop piers, and its very existence among the neighborhood’s other homes gives no clue […]

If as a society we are to have affordable home ownership, should we not begin by lowering the cost to create new housing?
 

Every other aspect of modern society has been transformed by mass production, starting with machine tooling, through the assembly-line automobile, and to today’s we-built-it-for-you personal computers.
 

Now all we need are […]