Month in review: March
[Previous months in review: Feb, Jan, Dec-05.]
March came in like a lion, with a post asking the provocative question, are Democrats zoning themselves blue in the states?
Maybe I’ve lived too long in the People’s Republic of Cambridge [You have! — Ed.], where rent control was the defining local issue until its 1994 statewide repeal, but it sure seems to me (speculation alert!) that high-priced residential property has a political spillover.
The full post articulates how, when it comes to voting and zoning, correlation and causation are intertwined.
Everything is connected to everything else
In
Housing is where jobs go to sleep at night, and where the unemployed vent their rage.
“It’s always better to earn one franc than nothing,” said Sophia Lamri, 23, a law school graduate interning at a law firm. [So create jobs! — Ed.] “The government is just about to get rid of a social policy that took over a hundred years to build. Change shouldn’t mean regression.”
Unfortunately, for
So far the unlikely alliance of underclass Muslims and sloganeering university students has mainly limited its escalation to the rhetorical, but no one knows what will be the sum of 68 + 93.
Now Josephine, little Napoleon can’t help you with this.
In New New Orleans, after somewhat fancifully presenting a ghost of New Orleans yet to come? in the guise of a town that died nearly a thousand years ago, I buckled down to a more quantitative projection: Part 1, diagnosis, Part 2, prognosis, and Part 3, prescription, concluding with this piece of advice:
The Old New Orleans was a sick city: declining population, high unemployment, very high poverty (23%), a shrinking economy, failing local government, and a wretched public housing authority. The rising phoenix, reborn, could and should be healthier.
Fannie Mae’s laundry continues to be hung out piece by piece, as noted in Warnings, what warnings?
So we are to believe that, up to $20 million in annual compensation on the line, and earnings that are hitting bonus targets with impressive precision, Messrs. Raines and Howard were not curious?
I’ve previously posted about the complexities of co-op living, and the curious mix of pressures — legal, social, societal, and snobbish — that results. The complexity redoubles when to the stew is added rent stabilization, with its political distortive tenacity, wealth transfer from owners to residents, and arrogation of righteousness.
Is freedom of speech at issue here? Do the owner/ shareholders of a co-operative — a voluntary association, a ‘living club’ as it were — have the same obligations as a government? Is co-operative space public space, or is it private space? The answers are by no means clear, and they are legally significant.
With property taxes the principal source of local government revenue, how they are raised is critical: among the lessons from the past is that roughly right may be superior to precisely wrong.
In the arena of housing theory, we choreographed the waltzes between capital and property, and between inelastic supply and elastic housing demand.
- Because consumers have a much faster market OODA loop than producers, rents can suddenly fall, and quite quickly. (Home prices fall much more slowly than rents because the people who move in to a smaller house are usually moving out of a bigger house that they have to sell.)
- Declining household size is a good indicator that housing is costing a smaller share of income and thus that real housing costs are declining.
One of us leads, the other follows.
London’s foremost housing consulting detective bestirred himself to counsel a very worldly philosopher in Economic hostage: the problem of the noble benefactor, and then explored the ominous message of credit decisions: the five denying pips, for credit is not black and white, but green and red.
Please, gentlemen of the Fourth Estate, do not get your eyes crossed on this:
You are conflating racial minority (a visual aspect) with credit risk (a financial aspect). They correlate but one does not cause the other. Instead the distinction is “newly accredited” (and probably lacking in assets) versus “credit established” (with available additional collateral).
On the lighter side, following up February’s post on the discovery of the oldest continuous tenancy extant, we got slightly more serious in the earliest apartments: Roman insulae, rewarded an attentive reader’s wry epitaph for Portland in Portland land use: the third city, and encouraged other readers to send me story links!
