Developing Affordable Housing Ecosystems World Wide
By: David A. Smith
… is affordability?
Am I up when you’re down?
When the homeownership rate drops, what happens to apartment occupancy? As illustrated by this Wall Street Journal article, the answer depends on two factors:
1. Why homeownership rates are dropping
2. How long it has been since the homeownership drop began
Start with a fact.
Start with [...]
Here in the comfortable West, we think all our housing is formal, in contrast to that ‘informal’ housing they have in the global south – yet all around us, we tolerate permanent informality, because we think it temporary, as unwittingly revealed by this faintly touch-in-cheek Wall Street Journal article:
A sky of scrapers … if you [...]
What to do with the homeless? Can we just wish them away?
Just say yes, and an anonymous person vanishes
A moral-philosophy question rattling through cyberspace asks, If you were offered $1,000,000 to make someone disappear, would you?
Happy to make the stain of homelessness vanish?
Actually, as documented in this New York Times article, the cost is much [...]
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
When an owner skedaddles, leaving a trail of crumbling buildings and reams of uncured building code violations, whom can we vilify?
Building code violations! New York Times articles! Run away!
Certainly someone is culpable:
At 1744 Clay Avenue, residents have endured winter days without heat and hot water. The super has not been paid [...]
Residential property is an exoskeletal shell that, like the chambered nautilus, is alive only when inhabited, the occupant playing the important role of eternal vigilante.
I may not own it, but I occupy it!
These two roles are best fused via homeownership, where the occupant and the owner are one and the same, but can also [...]
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Oct | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
