"What if there were one single way we could significantly improve the American economy, public health, and offer attractive investment opportunities, while also providing more homes for American families and workers? The American Dream has always been built on the notion that no matter where you come from, you can be successful. For the past century, housing has played a major role in making the American Dream a reality for millions of individuals....

Get ready to have everything you've ever believed about housing and homeownership challenged.
In Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home, authors Jack Ryan and John Tamny make a powerful case that the purchase of a home slows wealth attainment—rendering owners immobile in ways that further restrain their wealth chances—and that the act of homeownership deprives owners of the time and ability to do what they do best,...

"The last, acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination, which is hard to see because it is much more subtle than raw racism. While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary...

Given the rapid urbanization of the world's population, the converse phenomenon of shrinking cities is often overlooked and little understood. Yet with almost one in ten post-industrial US cities shrinking in recent years, efforts by government and nonprofit anchor institutions to regenerate these cities are gaining policy urgency, with the availability and location of affordable housing a key concern. This is the first book to look at the reasons...

"In September 2008, beset by mounting losses on high-risk mortgages and mortgage securities, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation teetered on the brink of insolvency. Fearing that confidence in the housing market would collapse completely if Freddie Mac and its competitor Fannie Mae failed, the US government made the difficult decision to place the two firms into conservatorship, taking control away from shareholders. Although the taxpayer commitment...

In this accessible and passionately argued book, Bob Colenutt goes to the roots of the long-term crisis in housing and planning in the UK. Providing a much-needed, in-depth critique of the nexus of power of landowners, housebuilders, financial backers, and politicians that makes up the property lobby, this radical book reveals how this complex, self-serving and intimidating network perpetuates a cycle of low supply, high prices, and poor building...

A narrative history of council housing—from slums to the Grenfell Tower

Urgent, timely and compelling, Municipal Dreams brilliantly brings the national story of housing to life.
In this landmark reappraisal of council housing, historian John Boughton presents an alternative history of Britain. Rooted in the ambition to end slum living, and the ideals of those who would build a new society, Municipal Dreams looks

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"The Coveted Westside explores the middle-class African American-led movement to challenge housing discrimination, gain equal access to twentieth-century Los Angeles, and ward off resegregation. Black professionals, from actors to entrepreneurs to doctors, made the city's distinguished neighborhoods of West Adams Heights in the 1940s and the Crenshaw area, View Park, View Heights, and Windsor Hillsin the postwar era hubs in the fight for fair housing"--...

The so-called housing problem is not national; it is local. Municipalities practice exclusionary zoning that prevents cheap, multifamily housing from being built. Municipalities initiate strict building-code enforcement campaigns that often result in the closing of single-room-occupancy hotels and other cheap housing in inner cities. And municipalities impose rent control - the surest way to produce a housing crisis. William Tucker examines the history...

"The story of the rise of the segregated suburb often begins during the New Deal and the Second World War, when sweeping federal policies hollowed out cities, pushed rapid suburbanization, and created a white homeowner class intent on defending racial barriers. Paige Glotzer offers a new understanding of the deeper roots of suburban segregation. The mid-twentieth-century policies that favored exclusionary housing were not simply the inevitable result...