Affordable Housing Institute : US

Finance rests on the twin pillars of verifiable information and executable property rights, and both in turn require that property, income, and economic activity all operate in sight of the law.

That’s the main thesis advanced by Madeline Albright and Hernando de Soto, co-chairs of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, in a […]

We think of home ownership in terms of its upside benefits — such security of tenure, controllable occupancy cost, and appreciation — but of course it has downsides too.  Who owns the downside? 
 

From where I sit, it’s all downside
 
That’s the implicit subject of a curiously mixed-message article from The Boston Globe:
 
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — When […]

[Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.]
 
In the preceding two posts, we’ve examined and explained the thesis of a new PNAS paper, Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. 
 
The authors clearly understand the value of solving the problem they have chosen to tackle:
 
These unfolding complex demographic and social trends make it clear that […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

Yesterday we put up the remarkable — and if true, very important — hypothesis that city scaling behaves power laws analogous to those that influence biological scaling:
 

Animal body mass and metabolism scale
 
The thesis is put forward in a new PNAS paper, Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in […]

Why aren’t human beings an average of nine feet tall?  Isn’t size an advantage?
 

Robert Wadlow,  8′ 11″, died at the age of 22 of blood poisoning
 
For that matter, why aren’t we three feet tall?  (Arthur C. Clarke once observed that for going into space, smaller people would be better, since they will need much less […]