2012 The Big Idea: Global Spread of Affordable Housing - Ashoka

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Foreword
By Scott Anderson
Affordable housing.
It’s hard to find a topic more complex, and
yet more relevant, to the poverty alleviation
puzzle. From homeowner financing to land
rights, from new home construction to
rehabilitation of dilapidated dwellings,
to models that ensure sustainable, ethical
and profitable development in coordination
with low-income customers, affordable
housing is confounding in its intricacies.
But above all of these seemingly intractable
complexities, there’s one constant: Where
we live is the most personal of economic
subjects. It touches every other part of our
financial lives: our livelihoods, our families
and our communities.
To say this issue is wide in scope is a drastic
understatement. So to help home in on the
true innovations, breakthroughs and leading
thinkers/doers in affordable housing through
enterprise, we at NextBillion turned to
our Content Partner, Ashoka. Specifically,
we teamed up Ashoka’s Full Economic
Citizenship (FEC), which brings years of
global experience and knowledge through its
Housing for All initiative. FEC has managed
three intense pilots in India, Brazil and
Colombia to demonstrate the effectiveness
of its signature business model: the Hybrid
Value Chain.
Working closely with Rochelle Beck,
communications/media director for FEC
global initiatives, we identified a diverse
cross-section of leaders in low-income
housing. The result was a lineup of strong
posts from diverse authors – both topically
and geographically – whose cutting-edge
information, experience and openness led
to a rich online exchange.
We put these posts together on The Big
Idea page, which concentrates on subjects
we know to be important to NextBillion’s
readership. Past series have included
innovations in impact investing, improving
microfinance and mobile health care
applications.
But the nearly two dozen posts in this
affordable housing series constituted one
of the most intensive examinations of an
issue in NextBillion’s history. Indeed, the
feedback we received from our readers
was equally impressive. Over the six-week
period of this series, from October through
early December 2011, we saw intense
reader traffic and heard from a wide range
of experts, both inside and outside of
affordable housing.
The feedback has been so positive, we
decided to compile the entire series into this
ebook. Thanks to the ongoing support and
hard work of our partners at Ashoka FEC, I’m
proud to offer you this ebook of The BIG IDEA:
Affordable Housing series.