Quirky & Different

"We saw guests vomiting in the pool and rat droppings on the sun loungers . . . after sickness outbreakl" Do the above words reflect any details of this particular...

Tess Wilkinson-Ryan studies the psychology of legal decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work contributes to our understanding of our fear of being a taken for a fool....

There's always a good reason to check out the successes on the homelessness scene on North America's west coast, a region with more than average numbers of homeless people....

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...

Buried in the bad news about the state of commercial real estate in America is a hint of why 'landlordism' will fight tooth and nail to maintain healthy profits...

Move on, move on. Nothing to see here except vegetation. Unless, of course, you're in the market for yummy organic veggies. A mini-miracle comes courtesy of a modicum of farming...

"Who will rid me of this meddlesome prince?Words originally attributed to King Henry II and resulting in the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury." Those words might well have...

Good heavens, of course we can learn stuff from social media! Millions use it. Surely those millions must know something useful they can pass on? But . . . how...

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...

Nothing like a little high-tech homeless help to provide a brightener for the day. This post features a modern day Buck Rogers . . . Wait, you've never heard...

Courage, mon brave! This is affordablehousingaction.org's sympathetic advice to all AmericansWhat a delightfully reassuring French phase we've offered up to start the post! It is completely understandable, even when...

Advice to the world on dealing with homelessness seems to be harnessed to a grand scale. When a bunch of folks become homeless, it becomes a community issue, a...

At affordablehousingaction.org, we've succumbed to 'Mission Creep.' We began with a focus on affordable housing, refined that to focus attention on 'truly affordable' a.k.a. public/social housing. Surviving and prospering in...

A national Brainfart Ombudsman might only need to be a part-time job. The title-holder would toil in the fields of bureaucracy. Authority would trigger automatically upon evidence of particularly...

Gather round, public housing poor folks with toothpaste money to invest. Skip the rinse and spit and put those hard working cavity-prevention pennies into the black magic of cryptocurrency!...

Introducing Atlanta's Mad Housers, a name birthed from a really bad joke . . . that stuck. It all began with architectural students from Georgia Tech who designed some...

A study by the Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies of Barcelona has identified some 355,000 citizens who spend at least a portion of their time caring for the...

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...

What's in a Metaphor? Addison Del Mastro, the author of the following article, favours the elephant (not the Republican one, but the enormous presence that occupies space and which...

A good way to think of property porn . . . property porn? Yes, property porn, known more formally as property pornography . . . is not to imagine...

Pogo? Revered by a generation in North America, that comic book anti-hero some 50 years ago predicted the alleged culprit causing the current United Kingdom housing affordability crisis — at...

One of the most distressing features of the financialization of housing is the disdain that investors hold for housing as anything other than a potential investment bonanza. How do...

Leftie, bleeding heart publications such as ourselves just know that the globe's problems, like homelessness, arise from rampant, unrepentant financializers who profit on the backs of the little guys. Well,...

In North America, we're accustomed to Police Associations as reactive. Defending this officer or that from allegations of this or that. Lobbying this jurisdiction or that to prevent reduction...

Never mind the practicality, what about the optics? Marijuana magnates have apparently been blowing befuddling smoke into the face of New York's rookie Mayor Eric Adams. Public Housing is America's...

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...

In a more ideal world, we'd be celebrating Robodogs as they snuffled, pawed and electro-piddled their way from corner to corner through public housing hallways, growling at apartment doors...

Reporting from the well-known winter hell-hole that is Hawaii . . . Yes indeed, toys for the boys. But could that fascination preclude becoming a police officer? The purchase by...

What is the magic ingredient that has made Singapore's public housing such a success, while around the world, so much of public housing has been branded either a flat-out...

Well-built Singapore public housing can last a lifetime and more. With its social housing predominantly designed for home ownership, this is a city-state in which tenant dreams of owning...

Apparently the poor (particularly those living in social housing) cannot control themselves when it comes to pokies, unlike "normal" people, who apparently can. Otherwise the Wyndham, Western Australia council...

Should such a headline as the one above reflect some radical New York City makeover policy, the outcry would be truly global, given the mythical status in world imagination...

Leaving aside weak Canadian punsSorry, the compulsion is irresistible: "Iron Road" was the title of a film about building a railway across the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the 1880's,...

Under the bed? You know. That uniquely American hangout of Reds, Commies, Socialists, Cold War Boogymen, World Domination Ambitions, Nuclear Holocaust Dreams, Back Garden Bomb Shelters. And Bernie Sanders. Having...

NIMBY — Not In MY Back Yard — has become a common term for the seemingly inevitable push back by neighbourhoods against any influx of housing and housing agencies...

Why read a fictional account of homelessness? Surely the facts speak for themselves and are sufficient. Keith Oatley, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has studied...

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And Cain said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? Many don't realize that one famous Hollywood...

So you're homeless, broke, and need clothing. What to do? Fortunately for many in this situation, charities collect all kinds of useful clothing and pass them on to the...

Can high-tech imagination-tickling 3-D house-printing out-wrestle factory-based cookie-cutter modular homes and solve international housing affordable housing crises? Straight from the 3-D horse's mouth (a 3-D printing mag), the answer is...

What follows is a New Zealand article with all the sharp-edged whimsy of Irishman Johnathan Swift's 1729 anonymous publication of A Modest Proposal.Here is a summary of this satirical...

"Affordable," "Missing Middle," "Workforce". . . are you up to date on your housing labels? Knowing how housing is described can help navigate the fog of manufactured confusion that...

Can flexibility added to brutalism be enough to make concrete walls into cozy homes? When the contest is fictional architecture,See: FICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE a real-life answer is not as important...

Just when you think you've heard the last word about shipping containers, along comes a new story. Iron panels have worked very well as exterior cladding on houses in Iceland....

A daring architectural experiment in Greater Manchester in the 1970's is a cautionary tale for those looking towards a new era of social housing. At a time when shoddy...

It has been said quite recently that only the wealthy can afford to invest in climate change. The rest of the world is too busy trying stay alive. Or,...

The writer of this blog article really needs some help here. It seems that Spiderman — the comic book hero who has now graduated to over-the-top computer generated almost...

In the market for a 'parasitic' home? It might be a tough sell with such a name. People tend to think of parasites as bad, even though everyone is...

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...

Tired of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)? Tired of NIMBYites? (NIMBY warriors who defend their neighbourhood battlements with fierce devotion). Well, Vancouver, British Columbia brings you relief in the form...

Company towns have a special relationship with their citizens. They are usually, though not always, born out of necessity: their remote location. Why create a town in the middle of...

A ham-fisted opinion about bewildering, as well as bewildered, American conservatives.

Many people (well, those of us at affordablehousingaction.org anyway) were amazed at the visionary audacity of the 'Seastead' movement. Seagoing citizens-of-nowhere would drift aimlessly about the world's oceans in...

The owners of a multi-outlet collection of California baking co-ops couldn't turn its back and just shrug at the plight of its employees commuting long distances from barely affordable...

'A Prairie Home Companion' radio show survived and prospered for 42 years in our age where mainstream story-telling has short-circuited the beauty of the human imagination by force-feeding imagery...

The movie Naked Gun created an absurdist meme with a huge, affectionate following: 'Nothing to see here, please disperse': a bland statement delivered in foreground while in background burns an...

April 1, 2019 has come and gone, but a small town joke endures as a symbol of civic indifference towards both unaffordable housing and homelessness. Pranksters delivered ten new tiny...

After 9/11, post-apocalyptic America is slowly crumbling into a sea of fears (no thanks to the nation's current administration). And not just new fears, the embers of old worries...

Yacht racing has been likened to 'standing in a cold shower, ripping up hundred dollar bills.' Still, there's always the opportunity to save a dollar or two by living...

An enormously successful computer game, SimCity, has provided such a useful hands-on experience of juggling complex city-building issues that it has become a teaching tool for budding planners. However, when...

Question for cruise affectionados: where do you get to enjoy the sea air, the company of hundreds if not thousands, guarantee of no waves large enough cause motion sickness,...

In a natural world of a gazillion beautiful curvy shapes, one in particular stands out: wombat poo, or poop if you prefer. We'll pause here while you revert to late-preadolescence...

Neighbourhood? Somebody has improved on that name to call it an Agrihood. For those looking for a home in a new housing development with green space focus, there's a...

Are you concerned about Affordable Housing? Start a blog — we did. Stage a protest — many have. Or, you could make a piñata . . . .? ....