Affordable Housing Institute : US

“It’s worth what I say it’s worth.”
 

The louder I shout it, the truer it must be!
 
That, more or less, is the defense offer by Bear Stearns as to the value of enormous pools of highly structured complex instruments on their books, a declaration so patently self-serving and self-interested that, with Bear now absorbed into JPMorgan […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Yesterday’s post laid out as a hypothesis, and then proved as a syllogism, that: 
Urbanization implies Formality

Und it has been proofen!
 

 
In today’s global south, cities expand because slums – whether you call them favelas, gecekondu, shanty towns, squatter settlements, informal settlements, or spontaneous communities – create housing that rapidly outgrows the […]

I had finished up my presentation at GYODER’s Turkish national real estate summit, and was listening to a well-reasoned statement from Faruk Goksu on the necessity for Turkey developing a policy to tackle the formalization of gecekondu (informal housing), when what should have been obvious to me years ago struck me with full force: urbanizing […]

[Continued from the previous Part 2 and Part 1.]
 
The idea is as old as the Roman army, as American as the Homestead Act, and as timely as formalizing slums in the global south via urban homesteading.
 
Now for a little more fun: could you use it to stimulate private colonization of the Moon? 
 

See any […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s interplanetary riff about potentially sell land rights on the Moon, stimulated by a provocative Drake Bennett article in The Boston Globe, suggested that pre-selling future rights would stimulate not only investment but also exploration with a view to investment.  Hernando De Soto and numerous others (including me) believe that ownership […]