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Today's Post has an article, "The new housing market: Why it’s so hard to find a cheap apartment in Washington, D.C.," with this line about strategies for producing more and lower cost housing : In D.C., you could even ditch the large historic districts that make it extremely difficult to build anything substantial in many desirable neighborhoods. Too bad it's wrong.  (The article doesn't say all that much considering.) The reason that it's hard to find cheap apartments in DC, is that relative to demand, there is lack of inventory. But it's not because of historic districcts. It's because historically, DC had been a small city relatively speaking, and not an industrial city, which would have led to the construction of more and higher capacity apartment buildings and tenements. Instead, especially in the late 1800s and into the early part of the 1900s, mostly single family housing (rowhouses) was constructed in those inner city neighborhoods th...

Damonte Ranch area is a sign of the city's need for housing in Reno, Nev. The recent influx of new workers combined with near-zero residential development during the recession gave birth to a classic supply-and-demand scenario that saw the cost of housing skyrocket in the Biggest Little City. (Andy Barron/The Reno Gazette-Journal via AP) Photo: Andy Barron, AP / The Reno Gazette-Journal" class="landscape" /> residential development during the recession gave birth to a classic supply-and-demand scenario that saw the cost of housing skyrocket in the Biggest Little City. (Andy Barron/The Reno Gazette-Journal via AP) Photo: Andy Barron, AP / The Reno Gazette-Journal" class="landscape" src="src" /> Damonte Ranch area is a sign of the city's need for housing in Reno, Nev. The recent influx of new workers combined with near-zero residential development during the recession gave birth to a classic supply-and-demand scenario that ...

Michelle Labra and her daughter, Daphne, live in an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in their landlord's backyard. Portland has among the most permissive rules for ADUs in the country. Last year, the city issued building permits for about one a day. Amelia Templeton/OPB hide caption toggle caption Amelia Templeton/OPB Michelle Labra and her daughter, Daphne, live in an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in their landlord's backyard. Portland has among the most permissive rules for ADUs in the country. Last year, the city issued building permits for about one a day. Amelia Templeton/OPB Earlier this year, Michelle Labra got a notice that the rent on her family's two-bedroom apartment was doubling, from around $620 a month to more than $1,300. She worried she was being priced out of Portland and would have to move to the suburbs. But Labra, her husband and their two children didn't get pushed out of Cully, their North Portland neighborhood . They were able to stay by m...

Rich and Poor. Credit: Flickr/Sandra Cohen Rose and Colin Rose. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Originally published on  Everyday Feminism . The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities – the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.” Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range. “It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained. Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then,  I thought, doing the math in my head. At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my tak...

If you’ve ever had a landlord, you probably don’t dream of being one: Fielding calls about oversize bugs and overflowing toilets doesn ’t seem like the most glamorous job. But done right, real estate investment can be lucrative, if not flashy. It can help diversify your existing investment portfolio and be an additional income stream . And it doesn’t always require showing up at a tenant’s every beck and call. The trouble is that many new investors don’t know where or how to invest in real estate. So here are five options, ranging from high maintenance to low. 1. Invest in rental properties Tiffany Alexy didn’t intend to become a real estate investor when she bought her first rental property at age 21. Then a college senior in Raleigh, North Carolina, she planned to attend grad school locally and figured buying would be better than renting. “I went on Craigslist and found a four-bedroom, four-bathroom condo that was set up student-housing style. I bought it, lived in one bedroom a...