MPHA Leads The Way With ‘Deeply Affordable’ Neighbourhood Housing
The following Youtube video created three years ago explains how Minneapolis became the first major North American city to break the ironclad, almost universal bylaw 'protection' of single-family neighbourhoods....
Introducing Affraudable Housing — Affordability Based On At Least One Piggy Bank
Affraudable housing is becoming more common these days. All that is needed is a bad attitude, some small math skill, and a willingness to pull the wool over hopeful...
YIMBY Triumphs! But Will More YIMBY Housing Add Up To More AFFORDABLE Housing?
The YIMBY breakthrough that everybody is buzzed about has delivered results to the City of Aukland, New Zealand. Unlike other major New Zealand cities, Aukland bit the YIMBY bullet...
Building More U.S. Deeply Affordable Housing . . . Without Ongoing Support?
North America, like so many corners of the world, is facing a critical lack of deeply affordable housing.
Much more needs to be built, but building costs are rising, and...
How Canada’s Housing Crisis Affects Newcomers
Canada made a big deal of welcoming refugees from Syria in 2015. Settlement services and communities geared up as the country prepared for a host of new children in...
The Rise Of The Land Economy. It’s Shaping Your Future
You are a young person who has done all the right things. You've got a good education and a job that pays well. You're living with your parents to...
Finding Money To Build Housing For People Who Are Homeless
It takes a lot of money to fund a housing project for people who are homeless. Where does it come from? In the U.S., there are consultants who specialize...
Inclusionary Housing Policies and International Connections
Miriam Maina is a researcher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She previously worked at the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa and is interested...
Skip The Fiddly Bits And Just Send Cash: A Poverty Fix Proposal
When a major U.S. news outlet proposes that the best antidote to poverty is "cold, hard, cash" it's worthy of a read. There's a certain irony in the followingAXIOS article,...
There’s Really No Room For Mr. Pea In This Housing Shell Game
Featured below, a no-doubt well-meaning article about the American housing, long and earnest, explains why that country can only manage its affordable housing crisis by building so-called "luxury" market...
Cuckoo Funds: Why YOU May Be Making Housing Unaffordable
There's a new term on the block, folks: Cuckoo Funds. Let's begin to describe it using a more mature and widely known "ugliness" — Vulture Capitalism. Vulture Capitalists are...
Mapping Inequity In The United States
People looking for evidence of racial inequity in the United Sates need look no further than the National Equity Atlas. Data is organized using 31 indicators, of which three...
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...
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...
Laws Against Housing Segregation? Not Anymore, If HUD Gets Its Way
Some decades ago, The U.S. federal government outlawed overt segregation. The Veteran's Affairs directive that forbade government housing assistance to returning black WWII veterans is one example.For more about...
King County, Washington Faces Up To The Real Cost Of Truly Affordable Housing
Two years ago, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company delivered a controversial report to King County, Washington. It called for spending a quarter of a billion dollars a year...
Dallas Provides A Megacity View From The ‘Burbs: Past, Present And Future
A report from Dallas Texas enumerates some of the pros, cons, and one-day-hopeful pros again in a city that is a giant festival of sprawl.
The report focuses on the...
Watch Out, Politicians! The Housing Crisis Is Coming To Bite Your Ass!
During the 2016 American Federal Elections, we called Affordable Housing the 'Elephant in the Room'.See: The Elephant In The US Election Room: Affordable Housing For all that it was...
Trickle Up: A Watery Metaphor for Housing Price Change That Defies Gravity
'Trickle-down' is the process that is touted to solve affordable housing crisis. It is the favourite viewpoint of the American housing industry and supported by the YIMBY (Yes in...
US Affordable Housing Supply — Sabotaged!
A recent study by two U.S. economists demonstrates how national homebuilders can effectively sabotage the free market, building fewer homes to their great convenience and profit.
In response to cries...
War On Affordable Housing: UK Government Still Leading From The Rear?
For a good chunk of the twentieth century, national governments in the UK and the US recognized a responsibility for ensuring that lowest-income citizens had adequate housing.
Over the last...
Housing Literally Under Water Might Burst A Housing Bubble, Trigger Recession
The housing market collapsed in 2008 and caused an economic recession in the United States, which spread to other countries. It was triggered when new homeowners found themselves 'under...
Just Build More Housing? These Days, The Idea Rules, But Without Clothes
As a child, I attended a live production of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The Emperor met up with weavers who promised cloth of the finest quality and lightest weight....
How Housing Investment By Criminals Can Jack Your Own Home Payments
North American boom towns are experiencing a new kind of crime wave that is almost completely invisible to the general public and to authorities as well. If you live...
Housing Crisis Solution? Govt Subsidies Do Nothing Except Sooth Politician Slumber
To elaborate the headline of this post somewhat, the article linked below calls into question virtually the entire foundation of the U.S. government's contributions to municipal affordable housing subsidy...
Australia’s Housing Prices Sink While Housing Hopes Sink With Them
For Australians, a national decline in housing prices is bringing new hope for affordable home ownership. Unfortunately, standing between hope and a new house are the banks.
Housing industry pundits...
Affordable Housing Details You Might Not Have Considered: Parking
Affordable housing is not just a collection of construction material and land costs. It's a purse that must stretch to cover a rental or purchase . . . after...
In Toronto, Affordable Housing Christmas Joy, But Only For A Privileged Few
I am standing 40 floors up at the window of Toronto’s few modern(-ish) rental apartment buildings. My host is a venerable and nationally respected financial expert.
We are gazing out...
Not Only Is The ‘Missing Middle’ Missing, It’s Quite Likely To Stay That Way
" . . .no smart, successful, profit-making venture knowingly would dare to commit all-too scarce resources of time, talent, and capital to the 'missing middle." — John McManus, vice...
Affordable Housing, Seattle & Toronto. The Tale of Two Cities
What tail? Why that stunted, useless appendage that abounds in all cities: unused, under-utilized 'lazy' land that has by design or by accident become the property of the city....
‘Affordable’ Expiry Dates: The Ticking Time Bomb Under US Affordable Homes
"Public-private partnerships can build American affordable housing more cheaply and more effectively than the failed 3/4 century experiment in public housing."
Is it possible that the above premise was on...
The Affordable Housing High Jump Dilemma: Lower the Bar, or Raise the Ground?
Hand-wringing about the rising cost of affordable housing is by far the most common way of identifying 'the target' of the affordable housing crisis.
But housing is almost always paid...
Young, And Want To Climb Aboard The Housing Ladder? How Long Before You Reach The First Rung?
You know those big multi-storey fire escapes on old buildings? The ones where the last ladder has to be lowered to the ground from above?
If you're young and planning...
Tempe AZ Squanders Affordable Housing To Coddle Wealthy Students
Let's place our housing future in the hands of private enterprise, shall we? Let's all live in a housing industry's pipe dream of what homeowners truly want and deserve.
Tempe,...
The Affordable Housing Dilemma: The Irresistible Force IS The Immovable Object
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Modern free-market capitalist-based society fervently wishes the answer to be two: the angel of affordable housing, and the...
Joliet’s Affordable House: Microcosm Of A Mega-Problem
Hats off to a number of well-meaning citizens, bureaucrats and politicians in Joliet, Illinois. Not so much praise to those carping and foot-dragging, as well as suggesting the money...
Middle Income Unaffordable Housing: All About Need? Or All About Choice?
Middle class families in New York City may qualify for affordable housing while making as much as $180,000 a year in income. The affordable houses for which they window...
Builder Mag Dishes On Who’s Who Affordability-Wise
From Builder, a magazine catering to the building industry, a recent article purports to provide THE REAL DATA ON ENTRY-LEVEL HOME BUYING AFFORDABILITY (link below).
For affordable housing advocates, one might...
Loudon County And The Rise Of ‘Please, In My Back Yard’
Not NIMBY, but PLIMBY. Please in My Back Yard is becoming a social concern for the simple reason that the 'sense of unreasonable entitlement' underclass is growing beyond the...
Slum Or Affordable Housing Resource? Two Lenses View An Inner City
More and more growing cities are facing an affordable housing crisis brought on by gentrification — accommodating their population expansion by renovating or replacing poorer quality urban houses. The...
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:...
