Affordable Housing Institute : US

When most people threaten to sue, it’s simply a yawn-inducing tactic. 
 

Somebody’s suing me?
 
When a state attorney general does it, the tactic has more effect. 
 
Litigators!  Litigators!
 
Of such threat vaporware is New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo a past master, as he recently demonstrated by parlaying his face-down cards into an important settlement action.  […]

[Continued from yesterday’s part 1]
 
Yesterday I enumerated two of the four observational questions:
 
How do people buy and sell homes?
Where does the financing for homes come from?
 
Those two questions deal with static supply and demand — people changing chairs. 
 

You move out, I move in?
 
Now we have to tackle the changes in supply and demand: why […]

When one encounters a new ecosystem, how do you come to understand it? 
 

Just push the AHI blog button
 
The question’s been on my mind lately.  Currently I’m the non-faculty advisor (in the lingo, they call me the ‘client’) to a half-dozen graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who, for their Policy Analysis Exercise […]

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, […]