pAmong low-income homebuyers, a contract for deed (CFD) has been a widely used but risky and informal mechanism for purchasing a home or lot. This article examines a series of major consumer protections adopted by the Texas Legislature from 1995 to 2005 and whether this legislation shaped the behavior of sellers who historically relied on CFDs in Texas colonias. Tracking changes in the use of CFDs between 1990 and 2010, we show that developers responded to the legislative reforms by shifting away from CFDs and into other forms of seller financing. At the same time, developers have adopted a series of workarounds to the legislation (presumably legal), leaving low-income buyers vulnerable to rapid repossession by the developer. In contrast, the impact of the legislation on low-income residents selling their homes has been minimal. These consumer-to-consumer transactions remain highly informal, with ongoing reliance on the now illegal, unrecorded CFD.br /
nbsp;/p
pSince the first Habitat Conference in 1976 the primary focus for housing policy has been upgrading and regularization (tenure and services) directed towards informal settlements and are largely a conventional wisdom today. However, settlements that formed 20-40 years at the then periphery and which developed through self-building have been overtaken by subsequent decades of suburban growth and are today located in the intermediate ring of cities (i.e. the old periphery or the contemporary ldquo;innerburbsrdquo;). Now fully serviced and integrated into the urban fabric they are no longer considered a policy priority, yet they, too, need to be brought back into the policy focus for UN-Habitat 2016. Self-built, intensively used, high density, multi- and mixed-tenure and now containing second and third generations of residents who were raised in these settlements, there is an urgent need to shape creative policies for these second generation households, many of whom are inheriting the homes from their parents.br /
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This invited editorial paper presents findings from a path breaking comparative research in nine Latin American countries (eleven cities) where a common methodology has been applied to gather household, settlement and municipal data about consolidated settlements and the housing rehab needs and policies that can be applied to attend to the needs of these now often dilapidated housing as well as for renewal of the often now heavily deteriorated infrastructure of these neighborhoods (a href="http://www.lahn.utexas.org" title="www.lahn.utexas.org"www.lahn.utexas.org/a). It offers a spectrum of policies for housing and community rehab and retrofitting of the low income housing stock. Drawing upon tools and policy approaches of housing rehab and urban regeneration in the USA and Europe it proposes a new agenda of physical development, financing, legal regulation, and social mobilization policies to target housing and neighborhood rehab of the old established working class self-built neighborhoods of cities./p
pThe paper describes an innovative methodology developed as part of a major ldquo;mixed methodsrdquo; collaborative and multidisciplinary research project across several Latin American cities.nbsp; It offersnbsp; a systematic ldquo;hands-onrdquo; methodology about how to conduct multi-disciplinary and team-based intensive case studies of low income household dynamics and trajectories in self-help dwelling structures in (now) consolidated low income settlements of Latin America. The research project describes how to collect information about family genealogies, household organization and individual member mobility, and materials that allow for the construction of detailed housing plans and architectonic diagrams resulting from self-building in informal settlements over a thirty year period. The majority of the original ldquo;ownerrdquo; self-builders still reside in these (now) consolidated properties, and the methodology provides for cross generation analysis of household behavior in relation to the dynamics of dwelling construction and use of space, household organization, inheritance, and heirship.nbsp;nbsp;/p
This chapter presents the findings of a cross-national study of metropolitan arrangements and challenges in the six federal countries of the Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela). Using a comparative-case-study methodology, the key characteristics of the institutional and organizational forms and the principal policy arenas found in these initiatives and structures are described. Then the factors that shape the emergence and dynamics of these initiatives are identified. The chapter also assesses whether these forms are acquiring political legitimacy and offering opportunities for democratic governance.