Affordable Housing Institute : US

With America’s housing markets diverging as employment and red state/ blue state policies either stimulate or repel affordable housing production, creating workforce housing is increasingly being driven by state or local policies rather than Federal ones. 
 
As decision-making moves down the governmental pyramid, state and especially local policy makers may inadvertently overlook promising ideas, or […]

Way back when the home market was still rising with no apparent end in sight, I used defaults in subprime lending as the miner’s canary,
 
For housing markets, forecasting is notoriously difficult.  Prices are extremely complex, interdependent, multi-variant, and phase-delayed (with larger and smaller economic forces having both leading and trailing effects). 
 

Waves upon waves […]

O those lovable legislators! 
 

Itinerants, bindlestiffs, and navvies: all following the money to the jobs
  
In an episode more worthy of MTV’s Road House than the august Boston Globe, Alex Beam profiles the slovenly and substandard housing conditions confronting those itinerant laborers who come to the Big City for work:
 
WASHINGTON — In the barren kitchen of […]

[Previous months in review available here: Dec 06, Nov 06, Oct 06]
 
New years require Predictions for 2007 (guaranteed right until proven wrong!) and I obliged, of which this is one of my more pessimistic:
 
8.         Public housing recapitalization will be debated … and not enacted.  Even as the public housing delivery system continues to break down, […]

[Continued from previous Parts 1, 2, and 3.]

[Previous posts on the proposed takeover here (newest), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (oldest).]

So the deal has closed. Who won?
 

At least somebody won

Ultimate winner: Equity Office and Sam Zell. A year ago at this time, Equity was trading […]