Affordable Housing Institute : US

All legislation is carefully stored in labeled blue plastic bins
 
Since affordable housing policy is always an output of the government factory, I have over the years become fascinated by the complex ways in which legislation is created, how elected officials use their political capital, and how they use many things (including political vaporware) to manufacture […]

Yesterday’s post commenting on the Economist’s lengthy year-end article about Dharavi (Asia’s largest slum) had reached the point of asking, how can one bankrupt a slumlord? 

It takes the output from the government factory: laws and money. 
 
It has become safer for two main reasons.
 
Laws.

[1] One is that in 1976 the state government gave […]

As begun in yesterday’s post, the Economist’s lengthy year-end article about Dharavi (Asia’s largest slum) vividly and sympathetically show us life for Mumbai’s poor, and also illustrates so many of the principles about which I’ve previously posted.
Slums are where housing has outrun public infrastructure, and since there ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure, […]

Over the last six months I’ve written extensively about slums generally, and Dharavi (Asia’s largest slum) in particular.  Last week the Economist, which seems eerily to write about subjects on which I’ve posted, did a lengthy year-end article on Dharavi, from the slum-dwellers’ perspective.  Even as it vividly captures Dharavi, the piece also illustrates many […]

In yesterday’s post, we followed a Boston Globe story about the demographic shakers — Cape Cod’s home owner population, which has voted itself restrictions on growth and in so doing insured that on the one hand, the incumbents will become richer, and on the other, that they will find it ever harder to lure in […]