Today's legal landscape for home building contributes to the crisis in affordable housing. As cities, counties and states cope with their own mounting fiscal shortfalls, the robust housing sector looks like a fruitful feeding ground for new sources of ..

From four lots to 40,000 green acres, the fundamentals of land acquisition apply long before the buy

By tracking residential building permits issued in a city, county, metropolitan area or state and comparing trends, a builder can learn a lot for free.

Think twice before developing large, controversial parcels.

Building higher-density communities with tighter infrastructure designs and community services can save significant costs, according to The Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Traffic can delay or doom a community plan, but a report by the American Highway Users Alliance, 'Unclogging America's Arteries: Effective Relief for Highway Bottlenecks (1999-2004),' gives a handy heads-up to developers scouting for residential locati..

High Desert, a community in Albuquerque, N.M., maintains design and building guidelines - and a mechanism for inspection and enforcement of them to reduce conflicts between developer, builder and home buyer.

Whether you’re charging a million-dollar premium for a custom home on the ocean or $10,000 for a cul-de-sac production home, that premium could be too low.

What can builders do when faced with opposition from anti-growth groups and a governor's unfriendly smart growth policy?