affordable housing

Happy new year everyone. Hope you enjoyed the holidays and the recent amazing weather (while staying safe). A lot of you probably had out-of-town family and/or friends visiting. Next time nonlocal friends or family say Houston is too hot, floods too often, or gets too many hurricanes, here's my recommended reaction: politely agree with them that Houston is not a city for the soft or irresilient - they should probably choose somewhere like California. Texas welcomes the tough.  read more »

The big news this week is all the different tech companies announcing their moves to Texas.  read more »

Over 200 attendees joined our panelist for a webinar hosted by Urban Reform Institute on December 4. If you missed the event, you can watch the video below:  read more »

I’m happy to share our new George W. Bush Institute report, “Cities and Opportunity in 21st Century America.” This report is the first in our new Blueprint for Opportunity series, which aims to explore the challenge of expanding opportunity and economic mobility in America  read more »

A new report authored by Joel Kotkin, Ali Modarres, and Wendell Cox examines how California's planning policies are contributing to the affordable housing crisis.  read more »

Australia’s Grattan Institute has included former World Bank principal planner’s Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities on its annual “Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List” (Summer starts in just a couple of weeks there). It is a good recommendation. We reviewed the book earlier this year.

Some excerpts from that review follow:  read more »

Analyst Phil Hayward of Wellington, New Zealand provides a provocative perspective on why urban intensification (densification in the urban cores) is incapable of compensating for the huge house price increases attributable to urban containment boundaries.  read more »

Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund cited the need for housing market reform at the conclusion of discussions with the government of the United Kingdom on Friday, June 6.  read more »

The Economist reminds readers of the economics of housing (or for that matter, oil or any other good or service): constraining the supply of a good or service in demand raises its price. In a 14-page feature on London, The Economist decries the high cost of housing in London.  read more »

Our 8th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey included the Saginaw, Michigan metropolitan area, which we noted had the lowest Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income) among the included 325 metropolitan areas. This made Saginaw the most affordable metropolitan market, principally due to depressed economic conditions.  read more »