Affordable Housing Institute : US

There are times when being right is no consolation, it merely makes you angry.
 

Sometimes you wish you hadn’t been so right
 
A year ago, in a post entitled 3% altruistic, I wrote about the FHA’s ‘non-profit-donated’ down-payment program
It sounds like a misprint — a non-profit that gives low-income borrowers money for the down payment on […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Yesterday’s post laid out as a hypothesis, and then proved as a syllogism, that: 
Urbanization implies Formality

Und it has been proofen!
 

 
In today’s global south, cities expand because slums – whether you call them favelas, gecekondu, shanty towns, squatter settlements, informal settlements, or spontaneous communities – create housing that rapidly outgrows the […]

I had finished up my presentation at GYODER’s Turkish national real estate summit, and was listening to a well-reasoned statement from Faruk Goksu on the necessity for Turkey developing a policy to tackle the formalization of gecekondu (informal housing), when what should have been obvious to me years ago struck me with full force: urbanizing […]

[Continued from the previous Part 2 and Part 1.]
 
The idea is as old as the Roman army, as American as the Homestead Act, and as timely as formalizing slums in the global south via urban homesteading.
 
Now for a little more fun: could you use it to stimulate private colonization of the Moon? 
 

See any […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s interplanetary riff about potentially sell land rights on the Moon, stimulated by a provocative Drake Bennett article in The Boston Globe, suggested that pre-selling future rights would stimulate not only investment but also exploration with a view to investment.  Hernando De Soto and numerous others (including me) believe that ownership […]