Housing

Small changes in British Victorian homes yield big changes in energy consumption, and help debunk the stereotype that 'green equals ugly' where architecture is concerned.

Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has designed a floating city with the noble goal of housing displaced peoples who's homelands have been destroyed.

Decades of hard-won community revitalization work in America's cities is being undone by the mortgage crisis, and the Federal government is at odds over how to stop the decline.

The Wall Street Journal reports that middle-class African-Americans are leaving America's major cities in droves, leaving remaining African-American cultural and religious institutions struggling to adjust to this new demographic reality.

A non-profit group in Chicago wants to open a museum dedicated to American public housing in the Former Public Housing Authority Building.

Residents of Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood are complaining about plans to redevelop nearby Fort Lawton which includes housing for seniors and homeless.

The New York Times profiles Marathon, a tiny town in Texas with no jobs to speak of but a growing number of second-home buyers looking for the quiet life.

Nassau County, NY has released a plan to end homelessness using strategies such as developing a database to track homeless people, assist people at risk for homelessness with landlord/mortgage issues, and build significant new affordable housing.

The Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae crisis is resurrecting the debate over the role the federal government should play in the housing market.

Almost 200 New Jersey mayors have joined together to oppose new affordable housing requirements that they say their cities can't possibly comply with.

With less than a month left before the start of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, residents in the Chinese metropolis are still being evicted to make way for event-related construction.

As foreclosures increase throughout the country, more cities are looking to solve the problem of abandoned and dilapidated houses with demolition.

With their share prices dropping and prospects for fresh capitalization remote, there are growing concerns that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be heading for failure, and with it grave repercussions for the entire U.S. economy.

Residents of Austin, TX are risking violation of city ordinances forbidding loud animals to raise chickens in their central city neighborhood backyards. It's partly a way to cut out-of-pocket expenses.

Long considered the source of California's fiscal and land use woes, Proposition 13, passed by voters in 1978, limits increases in property tax. However, it may prove to be an 'economic stabilizer' during the current housing slump.

The number of retirement communities is growing rapidly. Author Andrew D. Blechman warns about the social cost of age-segregation.

The Chicago Tribune examines what became of an ambitious city project, led by Mayor Daley, to revolutionize public housing. Private developers received public funding to tear down old projects and replace them with mixed-use neighborhoods.

With housing prices out of reach for many immigrants in the U.S., more and more are investing in houses in their home countries -- and their governments and local lenders are doing all they can to encourage it.