Affordable Housing Institute : US

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, […]

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 […]

 
After the cities-are-doomed gloom of the 1950’s, as imagined by Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1956) — about which I wrote a two-part post — the 1960’s ushered in a different era of urban pessimism, with the Club of Rome’s frightening pseudo-computerized forecast, The Limits to Growth, and Paul […]