It is a little known fact that manufactured housing—homes built in factories to meet the HUD Code, the only national building code in the world—represents the largest unsubsidized affordable housing stock in U.S. While efficient manufacturing reduces production costs and high-density, low impact development promotes smart growth, newer homes often outperform site-built housing in both quality and design. Almost 8 million families, with a median income of $29,000, reside in manufactured homes. And yet, with a few notable exceptions, affordable housing practitioners remain ignorant of, or are openly hostile toward, this housing stock—instead of embracing it as a potential solution to affordable housing challenges. George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, will report on the work of a group of plucky social entrepreneurs who embarked on a Quixotic effort to transform the manufactured housing sector — and the unexpected results of their efforts to preserve and expand this essential component of the national affordable housing stock.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. His areas of expertise include housing and housing finance, global urbanization, economic forecasting, program evaluation, and regional planning. Before leading the Lincoln Institute beginning in July 2014, he was director of Metropolitan Opportunity at the Ford Foundation, seeking to reduce the social and spatial isolation of poor and disadvantaged populations within metropolitan areas. Before that he administered a Ford Foundation program that focused on using homeownership to build wealth for low-income families and their communities. He has been a senior research associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an associate professor of economics at Bard College, a resident scholar at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute, a visiting scholar and member of the High Table at King’s College of Cambridge University, a visiting scholar at the University of Naples, Italy, and a research associate at the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a master’s degree in economics from Duke University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Montana.

In recent years, the idea of vacant land has acquired great importance within the definition land policy. As housing programs require the use of vacant land, the demand for such land grows, resulting in elevated values that often make these programs unfeasible. This course, offered in Spanish, takes a closer look at alternatives for vacant land management in land policy.

The course, offered in Spanish, provides a space to discuss new theoretical perspectives and practical experiences that seek to challenge and overcome some weaknesses of traditional technocratic planning, and the need to make visible the state’s role in building the city and the impact that planning decisions have on land markets.

This week-long professional development course offers students the opportunity to assess and challenge their understanding of fundamental topics related to urban informality. Participants will examine tools on informal economic analysis, land markets and pricing, as well as the development of informal settlements in Latin American cities. Students will deepen their knowledge on different intervention tools and land tenure regularization processes by means of case studies from Latin America, the Caribbean and other regions.

Various countries have long used mechanisms to mobilize value increments as a fundamental component of urban policy in order to finance urban development, social housing, and public spaces, and also to conserve natural resources and heritage. This course, offered in Spanish, discusses the main instruments used in a variety of countries for the recovery/mobilization of value increment, assessing their objectives, scope, limitations and alternatives to finance urban projects.