UK: Keeping Social Tenants Safe While Building Affordable Homes
Should we pick a fight with Octopus Real Estate, a United Kingdom firm eyeing profit from building much needed social housing, which aims to bring free market partners in...
Social Impact Bond Tackles Homelessness In Western Australia, Wins Big Time
The results are in for Aspire — the first Australian social impact bond to address chronic homelessness. Aspire provided three years of intensive treatment and support for 575 people...
Supportive Housing In Denver Helps Lift Homeless Towards Housing
'Supportive housing' has its supporters and its detractors. The article linked to this post is by supporters. In this case, the supporters are researchers from the Urban Institute. The...
30 Year LIHTC Wallpaper Bubble Bursts 15 Years Early!
Sure, LIHTC has always been a successful government housing policy, allowing officials to 'brag now because we'll all be dead by the time the shit hits the fan.'
There's a...
You Can’t Get There From Here – Learning From The UK’S Retrofit Journey
Four years ago a UK report advocated public housing as the optimal launch pad for a campaign to meet the committments to achieve decarbonization of homesBuilding decarbonization is a...
A Big-Bucks Seattle Plan To Shelter The Visibly Homeless
Businesses generally see visible homelessness as bad for business, sullying what might otherwise be 'beautiful downtown Seattle,' for example.
Is it possible for the public interest in ending homelessness to...
Community Land Trust Purchases 40-Unit Building With NO Public Funding
The San Francisco Community Land Trust recently purchased a 40 unit apartment building, which will operate as a housing co-operative providing permanently affordable housing.
The purchase is significant because it...
Are Tenants Subsidizing Home Ownership In The U.S.?
Don Layton is a Senior Industry Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. He has just published two papers about housing policy in the United States. His...
Investment Practices That Keep Money Away From Worthy Projects
A while back, affordablehousingaction.org reported on a credit union in Chicago. It was helping homeowners with low incomes to hang on to their homes in the aftermath of the...
Social Housing “Asset Recycling”: Privatization In Thin Disguise
There has been a hopeful inclusion of new kinds of "infrastructure" in Democratic proposals to shore up 21st century necessities. Beyond 19th and 20th century physical requirements for a...
Should Private Investment In Public Services Replace Public Spending?
A recent article in Forbes asked whether value capture could be used to fund intensive case management and other supports as a way to speed up initiatives to end...
Does COVID Spur Unexpected Partnerships?
In the United States, local community development agencies and large health care organizations have been teaming up to improve health outcomes for people living in disadvantaged communities. COVID has...
Updated – Private Hospitals Invest In The Health Benefits Of Housing
Hospitals in the United States were partners in housing developments before the pandemic. As we reported in a post in 2017, Dignity Health in Sacramento, California found that investing...
A Land Trust For Rooming Houses
Toronto's Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust is buying properties in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood with the goal of making sure that homes are available to people with very low incomes.
At...
A Treasure Trove Of Local Ideas For Building More Affordable Housing
Local Housing Solutions is a web site designed to help people who want to take action to help make housing more affordable to people with very low incomes. It...
Mixed Use, Mixed Income Housing By Accident
In the decades following World War II, many governments invested in civic infrastructure to keep their economies growing and wipe away the bombed neighbourhoods, which were visible vestiges of...
Housing Author Talks Political Anger And ‘Triangle Of Resistance’ To Affordability
The focus of the article linked below is the United Kingdom. But the problems it explores are mirrored in nations experiencing a housing crisis that national and regional governments...
Boston: New Affordable Housing Funding . . Or Very Old?
Riffing off the widely publicized 'gifts' from California tech companies, Boston's Mayor Walsh is calling for a new affordable funding stream from local businesses. Read more in the Boston...
Housing Has Always Been A Commodity, So What’s The Big New Deal?
Currently there's a great deal of hand-wringing about the 'commodification' of housing, in particular its link to exploding housing prices and to blossoming housing crises everywhere. Some go so...
Charlotte, NC Explores The Other Side Of The Affordable Housing Coin
In a free market, affordability is transactional. It makes sense only if there are two sides to the transaction. A seller's price (fixed) is only affordable if a purchaser's...
An Affordable Pox On All Your Tech Industry Charitable Housing
The headline seems a little churlish, doesn't it? Sneering at charitable contributions? We thought so. And yet it forms the core of a similar headline from the electronic publication:...
Getting More Affordable Bang From Your Rental Security Deposit Buck
If you are a renter, what use are you getting out of your security deposit?
None.
Your landlord is holding your security deposit as a trust. So, in theory at least, a...
Three Takes On California’s Housing Crisis: Part 1
Part One considers the current clash of legal responsibilities between the two levels of government actively involved — state and local — focusing on Pasadena.
Anchor Companies Forced To Address Affordable Housing Woes
A brief and so-called short feature presentation embedded at the beginning of the 1983 film The Meaning of Life takes corporate mobility to the absurd lengths only to be expected...
The Cost Burden Of Pursuing Distant Opportunity: Unaffordable Housing
Getting on the success bandwagon by upping stakes and moving to a new location has always been pricy. Whether it's anecdotal history from the gold rush, or more recent...
Can Unsubsidized Apartment Construction Rescue Struggling Middle Class Buyers?
For the past few years, the American housing industry has been open and unapologetic about the focus of its members, both corporations and individuals. The industry prefers to profit...
Affordable Housing Massaged By Technology: Benefits? Or Techno-nerd Hype?
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...
Free Market Affordable Housing: A Unicorn? IKEA & Padsplit Don’t Think So
In no small part, affordable housing is a victim of housing industry propaganda, not actual facts. The housing industry, by and large, sings a two-note song.
The high note: luxury...
World Survey of Affordable Housing Industry ‘Volunteerism’ = Raspberry Time
A vast, worldwide, low-end hotel/motel industry specializes in providing affordable housing. Should it voluntarily take charge of solving the affordable housing crisis internationally, or in any single country? We might ask the same question about the wildly successful internet-based B&B industry.
IRS Cranks Up The Curtain For Another Peek At The Land Of OZ
Back in the day, there was the plain not-so-old Opportunity Zone (OZ), which has now become a Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ) . . . doing so apparently 'just beQOZ.'
Not long...
Opportunity Zones: What Are They? Drawing Back The Curtains In The Land Of Oz
Opportunity Zones? What are OZs? How Do They Work? What can OZs do for the affordable housing crisis? Why it is that what they can do may not be...
Zig-Zags And Broken Field Running: Non-Profits Facilitate Housing Speculation Touchdowns
Scratch the surface beneath Microsoft's generous affordable 500 million dollar housing pledge to Seattle. Vague on details so far, Microsoft itself points to a California project that may be...
Housing Industry Analyst: The Sorry Scope of Affordable Housing Progress
An analysis of the growing affordable crisis in America is delivered in the article below by a housing industry executive, Bridge Capital Markets Group's Managing Director Inna Khidekel.
Of course...
North American Senior’s Housing: Stealing Humanity For Profit, Or By Government Neglect?
Population aging in a number of countries has shone a nasty new light on the limitations of public/private partnerships in fulfilling the promise of affordable housing.
Why? Because the affordable...
“Everyone Delivers Houses In days, Except Here. ” So What’s The Problem, America?
The problem? That would seem to be a cozy, profitable North American building industry, set in its ways. Winds of change blowing? No problem, propagandize rather than change.
An example?...
Owensboro KY: Historical Place Tax Credits Help Build Affordable Housing
Trendy condo projects often gobble up structurally sound disused warehouses and industrial buildings, particularly when they are close to downtown in a city with a hot housing market.
But in...
Free Market Land Leaseholds. Can They Work To Keep Owned Housing Affordable?
Owning a home on leased land? These days, most affordable housing discussions of this method of home ownership focus on community land trusts, where the home owner has a...
Triumph Of The Housing Also-Rans: Proving Private Enterprise Can Do Affordable
"Business done by government is invariably mediocre, inefficient and wasteful." That's the message of political touts for private-enterprise affordable housing. "Financiers, developers and the construction industry can run rings...
Risky Lending Practices In India: Deja Vu All Over Again?
Recent house financing developments in India make a case for looking beyond a country's borders when looking for best practices for financing and constructing affordable housing.
Risky lending practices, buying,...
World’s Third Largest Builder Plans Affordable Housing On A Crisis Scale: Huge!
Builders in western countries cry poor when it comes to building affordable housing. Without public support, the gap between development costs and reasonable profit margins are too great. Low...
Can Private Enterprise Ever Support Affordable Housing? Amazon Action Demonstrates Otherwise
Amazon, based in Seattle, Washington, and a seismic presence in that city, has taken issue with a new Seattle business tax. Naturally, that tax will cost one of the richest companies...
Wealthy, Isolated Whistler, BC Implements PLIMBY (Please, In My Back Yard)
Someone wants to build affordable housing in Whistler? There will be no NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) here. NIMBY doesn't work when there is only your back yard....
Miami Schools: A ‘Company Town’ Solution For Unaffordable Housing?
Lack of affordable housing has always been a straightforward problem for 'company towns.' Almost always built in support of resource-based industries such as mining or pulp and paper mills,...
Social Housing At War With Private/ ‘Affordable’: A View From Trenches
The Battle of social housing is all but lost in North America. One by one the remaining project towers fall, ill-advised 'socialist' political tendencies sharing the blame with drug-addicted,...
City Fees for Affordable Housing: Crisis Fix, Or Crisis Distraction?
School Fees, hospital fees, sewer fees, sidewalk fees: with limited options for funding to pay for new housing development infrastructure, American cities have turned to the revenue they can...
Dying For Attention: A Seattle Business Tax To Fight Homelessness
During recent Progressive Revenue Task Force public testimony, a homeless participant stopped breathing. Following many tense moments and an ambulance to hospital, his replacement explained that the recovering victim suffered...
Frank Gehry: Almost An Affordable Housing Prophet In His Own Country
Skeptical neighbours of a man hailed as "the greatest architect of our time" put Frank Gehry once again through the NIMBY wringer. He was promoting a revised Santa Monica urban...
Home Builders’ Solution: Higher Wages Can Make Our Products Affordable
A series of economic miracles that definitely do not depend on government interference is apparently due to occur. It will benefit young people as well as seniors with little...
The Repeal Of Net Neutrality: Communications Disaster Or Potential Benefit For Affordable Housing?
America's repeal of net neutrality has been greeted by much handwringing, and the spectre of giant telecom companies upping prices and limiting options for customers.
But there is another way...
Problem: Unaffordable Big Cities. Solution? New Big Cities
As long as speculation and investment are allowed to drive up housing prices in major cities everywhere, those in search of affordable housing may have only one sensible solution:...
Health Care Payers Begin Treating Ill-heath By Transitioning Clients To Affordable Housing
There has long been a reluctance to recognize housing as an important social determinant of health. Accepting the idea means facing the challenge of finding affordable housing for those...
Private Hospitals Invest In The Health Benefits Of Housing
In United States, where private enterprise holds sway in the healthcare system, it might be expected that a for-profit hospital would shy away from treating homelessness as a healthcare...