Month in review: December 2005
While many of you were away celebrating holidays familial, religious, or pagan, I was slaving over a hot keyboard,
“Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog …”
writing insightful [Who sez? — Ed.] witty well-punctuated posts on a variety of topics. Here are December’s highlights:
Keeping you up to date on housing-related news. Aside from documenting the GSE’s struggle in GSEs: Fierce competition. Fierce, I spoke skeptically of French urban policy: watch the feet, not the hands, cynically of legislation to restrict Eminent domain: I’ll huff and I’ll puff. I also commented on New New Orleans: decision vacuum and the curious incident of HUD at the hearing, as well as providing a New New Orleans posting archive. Representative snarky quote:
A small word of advice, [Fannie Mae CEO Daniel] Mudd: be careful with that argument. If it’s true that customers move for ten basis points, and you aren’t capturing big market share, then you aren’t delivering rates below your competition, and thus not really benefiting low-income households, and if that’s so …
Just why do you receive $6-10 billion a year in implicit Federal subsidy?
“The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it.”
– Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, page 191
“Take that, you mainstream media.”
Urban policy and land use. Sherlock Holmes, new urbanist, offered insights, although he has so far declined to comment on Tax credits in the UK? Value for money (VFM).
Housing markets, home prices, and workforce housing. Aside from distinguishing among One house, two house, row house, town house, I have called the market top in US housing markets: the miner’s canary, and contrasted Beantown and Sin City in Workforce housing: every silver lining has a cloud, which includes this nugget:
If you live in an affluent community, then you have one of three economic choices in your approach to workforce housing:
1. Accept poor quality and high turnover. Because you’re hiring the worst who have few choices.
2. Pay top-of-market prices. To lure the best.
3. Provide affordable housing. To make it worth their while and increase their love of (and therefore loyalty to, and longevity in) the community.
Theory of administration and enforcement. The long quiet stretches gave me a chance to expound on The data paradox, Part 1 and Part 2: who pays for free data? I took advantage of Terrell Owens’ recent misfortunes to offer an Aesop’s fable
“Blind, a slave, wouldn’t you tell fables?”
on Enforcement most sublime: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, do’s and don’ts, which was serendipitously followed by a geopolitical parallel in Enforcement: the Chad pipeline, Part 1 and Part 2 … and that led to a significant New Year’s theoretical post on Pay Before Performance: the enforcement conundrum.
Program design and the hierarchy of specifications. I also claimed that, even as one moves through The four levels of program definition: Part 1 and Part 2, a principle critical in designing affordable housing programs is that People value only what they pay for.
And how do you pay for these fine intellectual products? You pay with your attention, your roving eyeballs.
“Friends, spambots, blogophiles, lend me your eyeballs …”
