Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s post introduced us to Builders Of Hope in Raleigh, North Carolina, whose executive director Nancy Murray and operating director Lew Schulman have invented a whizzo business model for what I have dubbed ‘hermit crab housing.’  As profiled in the Wall Street Journal, the program uproots good but economically obsolete houses from […]

What do you call the invention of something so clever you immediately say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
 

Why didn’t I think of that?
 
That’s what struck me upon receiving an email from Nancy Murray, executive director of Builders Of Hope in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a subsequent phone call with Lew Schulman, its Director […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1 and Part 2 .]
 
So far we’ve seen that American-born microfinance originated, as has global finance, based on shifts in the larger credit markets.  As chronicled in Funding Universe, what became Household Finance Corporation boomed during the good times, suffered a backlash during the Panic of 1907, was under financial and regulatory […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s post explored the emergence of ’steam-powered microfinance’ from the turn-of-the-century household-finance industry, as chronicled in Funding Universe.
 

Another turn-of-the-century invention: New York’s Williamsburg bridge
 
By 1900, HFC had established itself, developed a market niche, introduced its killer-app financial product – a short tenor, small personal loan for almost any purpose – and […]

Age has few enough consolations, of which one is that things others might have studied in school, you can remember.
 

Decades hence, who among us will still remember this class?
 
We think of microfinance as a post-electronic activity, yet some of us can remember a similar small-scale finance that comes from a time before the internet, before […]