Affordable Housing Institute : US

Yesterday’s post on my experience teaching a brand-new course, Mortgages for the Poor; An Overview of Products and Supporting Infrastructure at the world-famous Boulder Microfinance Training Program (MFT), brought us to the point of wanting to follow the customer. 

Whoever gets the customer first, wins!
 
The MFI customer needs and wants a housing-finance product, because traditional microfinance […]

Somewhere in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein describes his intellectual hero Professor Bernardo de la Paz working as an itinerant teacher on the Moon, teaching anything to anybody, by reading up furiously and staying a few weeks ahead of his syllabus.  It was with something not entirely dissimilar that I put together, and […]

Yesterday’s post about the prejudices against rental naturally invites the question, what is true about rental?

A.         Rental is always disfavored in political resources. 
 
You wouldn’t find the answers in a 1922 booklet by M. W. Folsom, “The Facts about Home Owning“, from A Home of Your Own.
 

Rental always wishes it got as much political love as […]

Throughout my professional career, I’ve dealt with a curious prejudice – against rental housing generally, and against affordable rental in particular.
 

 
In country after country, situation after situation, I’ve found that when people think of housing, they instinctively equate it with homeownership, and when making distinctions, ownership is seen as good, rental as bad.  A great […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
“Two other forms of lending.”  Having had a blog break to refresh himself after describing consumer lending and project finance, Holmes repacked his pipe and lit it, sending up contented clouds of blue smoke.
 

To understand lending, you have to read a lot of mortgage documents
 
“Those are indeed the only forms available […]