Recent efforts to fix the housing market — including Thursday’s $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks — have focused purely on the financial aspects of the slump. A permanent solution, however, must go further than money to address issues that have been at the core of the crisis but have been wholly ignored: design and urban planning.

The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

Looking at the relative prices of buying and renting homes in Silicon Valley, Manhattan and a few other places is enough to make you wonder whether parts of the housing market are still due for a crash. To consider that question in more detail, the author had a conversation with Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, which provided much of the data for his column:

The file also shows that the occupants never paid any property tax, and that the completed building breached several guidelines.

The most ridiculous claim is that the very sight of student dorm windows is itself a grave offense that requires action from the zoning code:

Student residences should be built with windows that do not open to limit noise impacts on neighboring residents and with tinted windows that shield from residents' views the type of window hangings that are characteristically found in the windows of AU's student dorms.
At the University of Maryland, I found that the window hangings "characteristically found in the windows" of dorms are in fact window blinds. Does the ANC object to window blinds? Do they demand Roman shades, valances, velvet curtains or simply taupe window treatments?

Trulia has produced a remarkable map that shows how strong--or weak--the real-estate market is in every zip code of the country.

Colonias -- impoverished communities along the United States' southern border -- date back to the 1950s when ruthless property developers created unincorporated subdivisions on agriculturally useless land that usually lay in floodplains. They failed to put in any infrastructure and then sold the plots to people seeking affordable housing at hugely inflated rates of interest.

"Miss one payment," says Lionel Lopez who runs the South Texas Colonia Initiative, an advocacy group for residents, "and you have to start all over again."

Trulia's Q1 2011 Rent vs. Buy Index provides guidance to help you make a smart decision on whether it is better to rent or buy in each of America's 50 largest cities by population. The Rent:Buy Ratio is calculated by using the median list price compared with the median rent on two-bedroom apartments, condos and townhomes listed on Trulia.com.

Thirty-year mortgages at 4 1/2 percent require much less in monthly interest payments than do similar loans at 5 1/2 percent or 6 percent. Millions of homeowners who had been paying even higher rates than that have refinanced in the past year - the combined effect of which has been to reduce the estimated amounts of interest being written off now and for the next couple of years at least.

Here’s what Generation Y doesn’t want: formal living rooms, soaker bathtubs, dependence on a car.

In other words, they don’t want their parents’ homes.

Mortgage lenders including Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp., the two largest, have raised the minimum credit score on FHA-insured loans that they will buy to 640 from 620. About 6.3 million people fall within that range, according to FICO, which created the formula for the ratings.

One of the mortgages in Toxie was on a home bought for investment in Bradenton, Florida, and the team took a look at housing in the area. Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were "enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years". Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida.

How has the collapse of the housing market changed people's attitudes toward homeownership and their expectations for how they will live? Is the yearning for a McMansion on the edge of a corn field really dead?

Just 9 percent of the people surveyed by Trulia said their ideal home size was over 3,200 square feet. Meanwhile, more than one-third said their ideal size was under 2,000 feet.