Given the safeguards now in place, Mr. Salama said, it is highly improbable that the city will ever again see widespread housing abandonment.
It's worth remembering that there's a dark side to widespread housing affordability.
Rather than trigger national policy change, however, the discourse became the starting point for local action, epitomized in the efforts to address widespread housing abandonment through land banks and greening strategies, spearheaded by an informal alliance of local officials and both local and national sources of expertise, largely outside academia.
So widespread housing discrimination that confines many Muslims to separate slums may protect their children from increased exposure to the higher levels of waste in Hindu communities and, as a result, save thousands of Indian Muslim babies from death each year.
Since the economic crisis, Europeans has seen rising inequality; years of economic hardship and enforced austerity; a feeling of humiliation and hopelessness as the interests of big business have been promoted, time and again, at the expense of the people; 50 percent youth unemployment; and widespread housing evictions.
The American population is sometimes referred to as the "German sparrow", to distinguish it from both the native American tree sparrow species and the much more widespread "English" house sparrow.
The second cluster is the elite homeownership regime, where homeownership is still not universalistic, but mortgages are not much widespread and housing finance has to come from savings, family help or inheritance.
The city's housing was already overcrowded and in a poor condition but, in the days before widespread council housing, private landlords saw this extra demand as an opportunity to raise rents for the thousands of tenants.
But Section 8 discrimination remains a widespread problem, housing advocates, tenant lawyers and voucher holders say.
