Affordable Housing Institute : US

 Should policy be driven top-down (large units of government creating the program and distributing resources) or bottom-up (local units of government inventing independently)?

It’s a puzzle, Batman
 
If you ask around the world, the great body of experts will tell you that programs have to originate nationally first.  In the last few years I’ve become much […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]  
Yesterday, in search of the answer to whether the sweeping reforms proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson might be enacted any time soon, I posed the question: is the current catastrophe big enough?
 

Paste one on the nearest financial crisis
 
We saw how Shay’s Rebellion led to the Constitution, the Panic of 1907 to […]

The last few weeks have revealed gaping fissures in our financial liquidity system. 
 

What do you mean, we outran our boundaries?
 
Will they lead to meaningful reforms, such as the sweeping reforms proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson?
 

As treasury Secretary, I pray they do
 
It’s evident to me they should be – with any luck I’ll write the […]

More than twenty years ago, at a housing conference I co-chaired where I was describing a then-nifty innovation in affordable housing finance, someone tossed up the doubting-Thomas question, “Why get in now?  Why not wait until things are clearer?”
 

I’m not ready to take a position on the matter
 
“Because,” I extemporaneously shot back without thinking, […]

[Continued from yesterday’s  Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we saw that HUD not only is under-funding Section 8 contracts, it is using the holdback of even the partial payments as a coercion to compel owners to sign new amendments acknowledging that HUD is doing so.
 

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
 
A system that depends on the government honoring its […]