Affordable Housing Institute : US

The pillory, I have always thought, was among the cleverer of human punishments, mingling ostensible restraint with cynical cruelty.  What could be more salutary than exposing the malefactor to public humiliation and shame?  And what could be more deniably vicious than placing him where one could rely on the cowardly sadism of passers-by to shower […]

A couple of weeks back, so quietly you might have missed it [You certainly did! — ed. I said it was quiet, didn’t I? — Ed.], the President took his (and therefore the Federal government’s) position on the rebuilding of New New Orleans. 
 
He punted.
 

“Put that problem in somebody else’s territory.”
 
He issued Executive Order 13389 […]

Even as Paris suffers through the hideous consequences of malignant income over-­concentration, back home Hurricane Katrina has done what three decades of well-meaning urban social policy could not: it has decisively and permanently deconcentrated poverty from Old New Orleans.   
 

New Orleans public housing, 2001
 
Old New Orleans was one of the nation’s sickest cities, with declining […]

[Previous posts on New Orleans here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]
 
A Washington Post article from two weeks back illustrates the many ways in which markets and people are moving even if elected officials are not:
 
These days, as planners and […]

In many previous posts I’ve alluded favorably to the concept of inclusionary zoning. As one of the two truly innovative affordable housing resources invented in the last thirty years (the other being investment tax credits, the purest and most effective expression of soft equity), it deserves its own exposition, using as a case […]