Affordable Housing Institute : US

 
Where do slums go to die?  And what kills them?
 
That question is raised by a provocative new book, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise.  Although not yet published in the States, and hence unavailable to Your Humble Blogger, it’s the subject of an interesting review in The […]

[Continued from Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we began our journey into the population of a slum, a descent through spiraling rings of the economic underworld, with those who need a slum – extremely poor renters – and those who gain direct benefit – landlord of illicit structures, chiefs and headman, and protection rackets.  They’re reprehensible, but there […]

Why are slums so hard to eradicate? 
 

Partly because we fight back!
 
As I’ve previously written, slums are economically rational, they are a wealth-extraction machine, and they are places where private investment (usually in housing) has outpaced municipal infrastructure.  They cannot be bulldozed out of existence, much though some try.  That they are durable proves that […]

[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]
 
Correlation, as we have drummed into our heads in logic class, is not causation, though it definitely has meaning.  Hanna Rosin’s lengthy Atlantic article about the correlation between increased inner-ring suburban crime and the dispersal of formerly public housing residents via vouchers after demolition assembles […]

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
 
So far, in deconstructing the lengthy Atlantic article about deconcentrating poverty by demolishing public housing and giving residents economic mobility, an article whose premises I find somewhere between flawed and offensive, although they are unstated, indirect, and hard-to-pin-down. 
 

Cough up that theory now, there’s a good […]