Affordable Housing Institute : US

Is lending about trust or distrust?
 

All others pay cash?
 
Sherlock Holmes believed that debt says, I don’t trust you.  As he put it:
 
 “Consider debt.   I lend you money, which you promise to repay, in regular installments.  Everything about the transaction breathes distrust.  In fact, while I personally am no romantic” — Watson broke out in a […]

For nearly two months I’ve been hoping to be able to write this post as I, like much of the world, watched in anxious passivity as Kenya brought itself to the brink of a tribally based civil war … and then, apparently, brought itself back from the cliff.  As reported in the Boston Globe:

Kenya […]

When tragedy strikes, the poor suffer first.  When violence breaks out, the poor suffer most. 

Riots are so depressing, I think, because they are the poor expressing rage and the immediate effect of their rage is to make themselves poorer — by destroying what the poor have. 
 
Such a spectacle appears to be gripping Kenya […]

Ever have a story that you were bursting to share?  Now, finally, I can tell this one, because it’s been publicized in a Neal Peirce column in such places as the Houston Chronicle:
 
Nov. 22, 2007, 1:17AMGates millions, slum-dwellers: Thanksgiving miracle?
By NEAL R. PEIRCE
 

A man who knows how to tell a story in 800 words
 
Call it, […]

The violence appears to be subsiding:

The first thing everyone mentions is the helicopters: the relentless throbbing of blades cutting through the skies above and the probing searchlights that have kept the residents awake over the last four nights.
 

Helicopter flying over VIlliers
 
The gunfire that echoed off the walls of the tower blocks in a violent […]