A well-researched, user-friendly introduction to the importance of affordable housing.
Bertoldi makes the case for the broader social value of affordable housing in this debut nonfiction book.
“To have the American dream come true,” Jeffrey Whiting writes in the book’s foreword, “there must be help along the way.” As co-founders of CREA, a limited liability company that claims to have benefitted around 230,000 people in need of affordable housing, Whiting and Bertoldi have long advocated that housing not only provides a better life for families but is an essential engine of a thriving economy. Seeking to “destigmatize” and “depoliticize” the topic, Bertoldi begins the book with a series of chapters that introduce readers to the current housing crisis’ impact on local and national economies and the basics of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), hoping to “remove the mystery” surrounding a misunderstood industry often greeted by a NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard”) mindset. The book’s middle chapters note the ways in which affordable housing benefits all Americans (including those who have already secured reliable housing) by highlighting its impact on healthcare (“home and health go hand in hand”), business (more than 40% of the consumer price index “is driven by housing costs”), and important ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) standards for increasingly socially conscious corporations. The book concludes with nonpartisan, workable solutions that the author believes policymakers, investors, and voters across ideological lines could support. With an MBA in finance from Boston University and decades of experience with LIHTC, Bertoldi does an admirable job of acquainting neophytes with the basics of the housing industry while also backing his claims with a wealth of data and dozens of footnotes for those who need to see the underlying research. This emphasis on accessibility is further reflected by the book’s concise writing style, which delivers an engaging narrative in less than 130 total pages and is accompanied by an ample assortment of charts, graphs, and other visual aids.
A well-researched, user-friendly introduction to the importance of affordable housing.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798887500911
Page Count: 208
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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