Affordable Housing Institute : US

“Earth isn’t a place,” says Mayor John Amalfi, the hero of James Blish’s Blish’s multi-volume space epic Cities in Flight [One of our Ultimate Future Cities – Ed.], at the end of Earthman, Come Home.  “It’s an idea.”
 
Homeownership is an idea, too, one whose powerful lure moves money and people across vast distances.  As reported […]

Not only is the world urbanizing, so too is America, and as we do, The value of urban land will continue to rise, with consequences that are both logically predictable – Every silver lining has a cloud – and utterly astonishing to those experiencing them, as detailed in this article from The San Francisco Chronicle:
 
It’s […]

Every now and then, an article makes me sit up and think twice.

Such a piece is an extravagant speculation by columnist Spengler that I came across in the Asia Times, with the curious title of “The monster and the sausages”
 

The original monster and the whirlpool, reimagined under William Pitt
Since I don’t quite know what […]

Yesterday we saw that Youngstown, Ohio, whose population now is half what it was forty years ago, has made an enormous break with its past.

More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.
 

It’s for the greater good
 
Choosing to cull wasn’t easy.  First, Youngstown tried everything else:
 
For a while, Youngstown, with its population at just […]

 
A town is a business that sells quality of life and competes with other towns to attract real estate tax payers.  It spends its revenue on infrastructure that enhances quality of life and enables it to attract more workers and real estate tax payers.  Some towns are so attractive, relative to their rural competition, that […]