Developing Affordable Housing Ecosystems World Wide
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
Yesterday we covered four fifty-year trends:
Cities move from manufacturing to information and knowledge work.
Land use rules proliferate and development becomes more protracted.
Houses become larger, lots become smaller.
Housing costs more as a percentage of income.
These four physical-market trends stimulated responses in the capital and financial markets:
5. [...]
The more I study affordable housing,
That’s a lot harder than I worked
the clearer it becomes that what we have witnessed in the last half-century is a revolution in just about everything our parents took for granted about their homes and cities. But this was an accelerated continuous change rather than any [...]
Even allowing for its tone of sanctimonious, you-do-I-critique grandstanding quality, a recent State Auditor’s Office report [5 Meg link in .pdf] on Massachusetts public housing paints a depressing and grim picture of an inventory suffering from financial starvation, as reported in this recent Boston Globe story:
The state auditor blasted the Romney administration’s funding of [...]
About halfway through his provocative albeit unstructured book The Anglosphere Challenge, verbally peripatetic author James C. Bennett
James C. Bennett: You need a hard hat to design housing programs
briskly lists (pages 136-137) six terrific, cogent rules of thumb for state intervention, applicable to affordable housing.
Six useful points!
1. Avoid self-deception. Admit that interventions have a price. [...]
[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and Part 1.]
Yesterday we saw that, in the lushly populated home-mortgage financial ecosystem, those closest to the borrower (individual agents and mortgage originators) were quite understandably marketing aggressively the new lower-payment-per-dollar-of-house loan variants that included not just interest-only loans but negative-amortization loans. Insurers were whimpering that lenders [...]
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