Category: Global news

Bring the city to the people

18 November, 2009 (11:53) | Cities, Global news, Infrastructure, Philippines, Slums, Speculation | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
“Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.”
– Noah Cross, Chinatown

 

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.”
 
Someday I’ll post in detail about Chinatown, because it (and its spiritual cousin, True Confessions) is a great film about housing development and municipal infrastructure, whose economic power did much to define [...]

Mutual stalemate

2 November, 2009 (15:17) | Affordability, Finance, Global news, Speculation, United Kingdom, Zoning and land use | No comments

If to a hammer everything looks like a nail, to a government everything should be solved by lawyers, guns, or money.  So when the government factory wants to achieve particular public-policy results, it manufactures either or both of its products – laws and money – to motivate private participants, principally Mission Entrepreneurial Entities (MEEs), as [...]

Dharavi: While the ice cream cone melts

30 October, 2009 (09:54) | Capital markets, Development, Dharavi, Global news, India, Slums, Speculation | No comments

Did you ever fight with your sibling over who got the ice cream cone, only to see it splatter onto the sidewalk?
 

Who ordered the large?
 
That’s the sinking feeling probably being experienced by the government public-private team trying to recruit developers into their Herculean effort to redevelop Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, as the global credit crunch thins [...]

Big, bad banks: Part 2, too bad to fund?

15 October, 2009 (10:27) | Capital markets, FHA, Global news, Subprime, US News, World Bank | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
[Continued from yesterday's in Part 1.]
 
In yesterday’s post, we compared the public pronouncements of two enormous governmental lenders whose financial viabiltiya nd liquidity are in question: FHA in the US, from the New York Times (in plain text) and the World Bank, from the UK Telegraph (in indigo palatino).  The World Bank, [...]

Big, bad banks: Part 1, too big to fail?

14 October, 2009 (10:07) | Capital markets, FHA, Global news, Subprime, US News, World Bank | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
Can a government bank fail? 
 

Something a little less visible than that
 
In the space of a week, that question’s surfaced about two governmental banks – FHA in the US and the World Bank – in stories in the New York Times (which I’ll excerpt in plain text) and UK Telegraph (in indigo [...]