Affordable Housing Institute : US

Why are slums so hard to eradicate? 
 

Partly because we fight back!
 
As I’ve previously written, slums are economically rational, they are a wealth-extraction machine, and they are places where private investment (usually in housing) has outpaced municipal infrastructure.  They cannot be bulldozed out of existence, much though some try.  That they are durable proves that […]

“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 […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s post, expositing on the theory of change that AHI received a $1,000,000 grant to explore, began with housing as the catalyst for improving urban environments, especially in the global south.
 
Housing is the world’s biggest property asset class.  In developed nations, it’s most people’s biggest investment, source of retirement savings, […]

Blog readers know that a while back, AHI received a $1,000,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for a two-year research effort, with a modest goal:
 

 
Change the world’s understanding of what slums socioeconomically are, and therefore change how benefactor entities can help improve slums and cities in the global south.  Do so by […]

On June 5, at a well-attended and highly anticipated Istanbul panel held as part of the Annual Summit of the Turkish national Real Estate Association (GYODER), I delivered a speech summarizing our six-month ‘country assessment’ of Turkey’s affordable housing ecosystem.
 

It sounds better in English
 
Our goal was to examine Turkey’s affordable housing financial environment today, identify […]