Affordable Housing Institute : US

Not only does the US have the world’s most complex housing finance ecosystem, we also have an unusually complex hierarchy of government when it comes to place, with three full levels:
 

Nice doggie, with three heads
 
·         Federal: 1.  By all relevant measures (revenues, span of control, people employed), the Federal government is the dominant actor, from […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
The proposed stock transfer.  Stock transfer is one of three ways that existing local authority stock can be recapitalized (the other two are Arm’s-Length Management Organizations, ALMOs, and the Private Finance Initiative, PFI), and in many ways it is the cleanest.  It is simply a change of landlord, from local […]

[An English-to-American glossary may be found here.]
 

In a recent post I listed five UK innovations the US ought to explore importing:
 

UK innovations worth US study

1. Shared ownership
2. Housing Associations.
3. Corporate financing applied to affordable housing portfolios.
4. […]

[Previous months in review available here: Sep, Aug, Jul, Jun, May,  Apr, Mar, Feb, Jan-06, Dec-05.]
 

October is the time to reap
 
In a month that we associate with resumption of studying, I offered a series of essays, starting with a half-century’s worth of learning compressed into three easy blog posts: The 50 year trends in affordable […]

Among those certain to have been cheering the Democrats’ recapturing of both houses of Congress must have been the two GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for the result dramatically changes the political calculus of their future regulatory structure. 
 
Or has it? 
 

 
That depends on whether the lame duck flies.
 

A ‘lame duck’ session
 
A Congressional session […]