The Unexpected

When it comes to so-called drugs, America has had an up and down history of familiarity with them. From 1937 to 2018, growing hemp was banned because regardless of...

Hard to forget my lawyer-father's most successful DIY (Do It Yourself) project — a wired and lightbulbed flat biscuit tin. Most first time viewers to choked back their laughter....

So you want to build an apartment tower and you've borrowed the bucks to cover construction . . . you think. Of course you've been hopeful in your budgeting,...

The stories that sell news are the disasters and things gone wrong. As someone said elsewhere, "it's not news when a plane lands safely." In the housing business this means...

Consider this: a remote population, limited employment but a willing workforce. Add a desperate need for affordable housing, but an absence of affordable building materials. Any number of situations...

Here's a meander towards an unexpected quirk in the news. In some countries, the local press tends to be infected by NIMBYNIMBY = Not In My Back Yard hostility....

The United Kingdom is currently preoccupied with asylum-seekers. Thousands of them arrive yearly, crossing the channel from Europe to instantly swell the UK's homeless population, already of crisis proportions. The...

COVID has created an unexpected crisis facing the commercial real estate market. Worker flight to the relative safety of the home office has hollowed out the insides of shiny...

With a surfeit of downtown empty office high-rises, a lightbulb has winked on the brains of developers who see a way of cashing in by converting office buildings to...

Move over tempeh, truffles and psilocybin! A business in the United States is planning to build a 300 unit housing project with mushrooms. Of course it's not quite that...

In June of 2018, Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi announced an extravagantly ambitious national housing scheme  — a home for every Indian by 2022. India is a populous country....

A picture is often worth a thousand words of fun and fancy. When it comes to truly affordable housing we know this because, over the past few years, one...

The original Bauhaus MovementRead more at My Modern MET: Bauhaus: How the Avant-Garde Movement Transformed Modern Art in the early twentieth century explored ways 'to bring art back into...

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is currently exploring the "bad and ugly" aspects of racist architecture as a prelude to a celebration of the "good"...

The face of a Second Coming in today's modern world might be that of a man more effectively able to preach by what he practices, rather then practice his...

Influenced perhaps by its physical location in North America, affordablehousingaction.org finds itself in constant pushback against a simple-minded housing industry view: if governments would only eliminate regulations, builders would...

The saga of Essex Crossing began in the 1950's with the demolition of some of New York's historic gateway slums — the squalid welcome to America for waves of...

1931 was a good year for vivid imagination in Tokyo. It was the year that kicked off future-proofing in that city, now the most congested urban space in the...

With housing becoming increasingly unaffordable, ingenious ways of reducing shelter costs abound. One trending fad featuring in the news media: co-living. A boon? A bust? There are two sides to...

This modular housingHouses, or components of houses, that are constructed at an off site factory and transported to their final destination. initiative intrigued and impressed us here at affordablehousingaction.org....

A scramble to protect ourselves and our environment from climate change will almost certainly spawn geographic and technological benefits that will can make housing more affordable. A recent article in...

A fear looming ever bigger and nastier on the horizon is the possibility that affordable housing demands will clash head on with steps necessary to prevent an environmental catastrophe...

Can government or charitable grants and subsidies fuel a housing revolution and overcome today's affordability crisis? If so, it's sure not happening yet, if ever. Alternatives? Turns out they're popping...

Nations already struggle to provide affordable shelter for all. How does this objective fare in the face of a new worldwide urgency to find green solutions in all aspects...

What do you put on a triangular handkerchief of city land that has been vacant for decades? If New York City finds the right design, it will be affordable...

According to the National Trust for Canada, faith groups are the largest property owners in the country — not counting the federal government. But participation in organized religion is declining. Fully...

The Challenge: More governments, both local and national, are coming to grips with an affordable housing crisis using the fashionable tools of the day. They are finding those tools wanting....

These are not easy times for big box store realtors. Some of the biggest users of box store space are switching to Amazon and other buy-from-your living-room internet retailers. The...

Imagine a home that builds itself. Not only that, when brought to a site as a packed container, it is capable of unpacking itself without any power source, using...

3D printing, a catchy idea, is already proving to have applications in a number of fields. Particularly catchy for cash strapped governments as well as innovative construction companies is...

Have you ever owned an electronic watch with 3 tiny buttons pressed simultaneously or in sequence to produce a hundred functions you can't remember or access? Welcome to Multi-Function...