It’s always interesting to read about the “urban housing crisis” or whatever you want to call it.
Basically, the question is, how do you best provide safe, affordable housing to poor people who live in urban areas? Well, how does government provide this, is the real question. If you don’t buy into the idea [...]

Couple of stories in yesterday’s Globe that you probably saw, but in case you didn’t.
Broker’s clients detail web of dashed dreams – By Kimberly Blanton, The Boston Globe
Over the past couple of years, a lot of people bought homes they can’t afford. You may have heard about that. In some cases, the buyers [...]

Toward the end of the year, everyone’s out with data on just about everything.
Today I read about the number of murders going down in many major US cities, this year.
Year-to-date, at least.
Unfortunately, some cities have experienced increases.
Historic low in NYC, Chicago homicides – By Colleen Long, Associated Press
City — 2007 — 2006
Boston — 66 murders [...]

I’ve always wanted to visit Buffalo.
Friends say I shouldn’t bother.
I can see why they say that.
From a story in today’s Times:
Vacant Houses, Scourge of a Beaten-Down Buffalo – By Ken Belson, The New York Times
Gangs, squatters and teenagers [in Buffalo] have been burning down hundreds of houses a year, straining the meager resources of the [...]

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about old Boston neighborhoods being “reconnected” to the city. The North End was cut off from the rest of Boston by the Central Artery, built in the 1950’s. Now, the depression of the Artery allows for the “stitching” of that neighborhood with downtown Boston.
Likewise, parts of [...]

The Boston Globe’s new columnist gets all teary-eyed about the changes the North End has undergone over the past twenty-four years.
Same Place, Different Time – By Kevin Cullen, the Boston Globe
When Jerry [Angiulo] and his brothers were arrested [1983], about 70 percent of the people who lived on the blocks surrounding Prince Street were either [...]

A rather boring and somewhat irrelevant essay today in the Globe:
Urban puzzle – by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, The Boston Globe
The gentrification of rundown city neighborhoods conjures an image of well-off whites displacing poor minorities. What’s actually going on is far more complex, and the winners and losers can be hard to predict.
I lost interest after [...]

If you know anything about public housing in America, you’re familiar with Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project. Even if you don’t (like me), you probably know it’s something bad.
What happened at Cabrini-Green happened in other cities in the 1950’s and 1960’s, including, of course, Boston.
What steps to take next, to mitigate this disaster, is controversial, [...]

This is not a real estate story so much as it is about history. (Great, I just lost most of my readers.)
It’s about a housing development (not “project”) down in Brooklyn, New York, originally called Starrett City, now called Spring Creek Towers.
If you’re into urban renewal, you know all about it – the “social [...]

The third (and final?) article of interest from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine is a profile of Dr. Edward Glaeser, economist and professor at Harvard University.
This guy is great!
Here I was thinking I had all these original ideas about public housing (such as, selling it all off), and then I go and read a [...]