Affordable Housing Institute : US

More than twenty years ago, at a housing conference I co-chaired where I was describing a then-nifty innovation in affordable housing finance, someone tossed up the doubting-Thomas question, “Why get in now?  Why not wait until things are clearer?”
 

I’m not ready to take a position on the matter
 
“Because,” I extemporaneously shot back without thinking, […]

“Gimme some money, gimme some money!”
 
While debt service is the predominant element in occupancy cost, it’s far from the only one, and yet because debt service tends to be the controlling factor in how much house people can afford, the others are often overlooked, including the vital element of capital improvement or replacement reserves, as […]

… patting yourself on the back.
 

Better self-esteem, through engineering
 
Because I have an interest in such things, when I saw the recent headline in New York Business, “City develops affordable housing for teachers,” I thought it might constitute the seed for an interesting story about workforce housing, and perhaps how local initiatives are driving innovation in […]

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
 
So far we’ve seen that when cities grow big enough, they need to install municipal infrastructure, especially water and sanitation; and that expecting the private sector to cover all this cost, for all a city’s denizens, is unrealistic.
 

 
Instead, places like Philadelphia and San Francisco announced “private/public” partnerships. […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1 .]
 
Yesterday we explored the challenge of financing public-good infrastructure – big capital expenditures that create networks valuable to all of us.
 
In the US, we’re familiar with this via our friendly municipal power company,
 

 
or its close cousins, the water and sewer company.  So inextricably linked are they in American minds that […]