Publications on Housing & Land Markets

This Baltimore Examiner commentary explains how government agencies and elected officials can make informed decisions about when or whether to sell property and how to set a fair price.

With more cities and states looking to reap new funds from the sale or lease of assets, two experts discuss strategies governments can use to get the most out of each deal.

National, regional, and local governments are by far the largest owners of real property; even Western governments may control a third or more of all property assets. A new book from the Urban Institute Press -- Managing Government Property Assets: International Experiences, edited by Olga Kaganova of the Urban Institute and James McKellar of the Schulich School of Business at Toronto's York University -- comprehensively examines the management of these assets from an international perspective.

Governments own a vast array of real property—from large stretches of land to public housing projects, from water distribution systems and roads to office buildings. Typically, management of public property is highly fragmented, with responsibility for each type of asset falling within a different agency or bureaucracy. In almost all countries, different classes of property are managed according to their own rules, often following traditional practices rather than any assessment of what type of management is appropriate. Over the past decade, however, a new discipline has emerged that examines this important component of public wealth and seeks to apply standards of economic efficiency and effective organizational management. Managing Government Property Assets reviews and analyzes this recent wave of activity. The authors draw upon a wide variety of national and local practices, both in countries that have been leaders in management reforms and in countries just beginning to wrestle with the problem. This comparison reveals that the issues of public property management are surprisingly similar in different countries, despite striking differences in institutional contexts and policy solutions.

For Gulf Coast residents who survived Hurricane Katrina but no longer have homes, finding somewhere to live is an immediate concern. Steve Anlian, the Urban Institute's senior associate in Yerevan, Armenia, says housing vouchers are the answer. "As officials figure out how to respond to under- or uninsured home owners who are eligible for aid, experience abroad, in developing countries, argues strongly for multi-state housing-purchase vouchers."