Affordable Housing Institute : US

My interest in cities was first piqued when, in 1970, I read Isaac Asimov’s two imagined-future-city novels, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1956). 
 

Original Doubleday hardcover, 1954
 
While each is structured as a murder mystery — a wonderful armature for exploring a foreign place, as I used for that purpose in In […]

Much though I love Monty Python, the Sixties’ funniest comedian ever was the incomparable Peter Cook, who with partner Dudley Moore hosted, wrote, produced, and performed a series of side-splitting shows called Not only Peter Cook but also Dudley Moore.

 
Because, ever since the Cook-Moore Not only … but also … I have been unable […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s post on the public-policy and market ramifications of the subprime mess focuses on the case, covered in the Boston Globe, of a rent-paying tenant who finds himself under an eviction threat because his new owner is, in rental terms, a zombie. 
 

Blogs — must — read — AHI blogs!
 
Most residents […]

Every time I think I understand the potential full public-policy and market ramifications of the subprime mess, another one pops up.
 

Stop reading the financial pages!
 
What happens when the subprime borrower isn’t an owner-occupant, but a landlord?  Not what I thought, as reported in this little tale from the Boston Globe:
 
The foreclosure crisis increasingly is claiming […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s post started with chicken parts (subprime residential second mortgages) and saw how Goldman Sachs chopped, pressed, and sliced them into thirteen different types of chicken parts. 
 
“As I hear tell all the parts are crammed into one big part.”
“Fused.”
“Then the one big part is cut up into little pieces parts.”
 
Now comes the […]