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California's farmworkers are among the lowest-paid wage earners in the state. They often live in crowded or substandard housing. The Polanco Bill—state legislation enacted in the early 1990s—aimed to increase the supply of housing for farmworkers by encouraging the development of employee housing on land zoned for agriculture. This article discusses the implementation and effects of the Polanco Bill in the agricultural area of the eastern Coachella Valley. It finds, somewhat unexpectedly, that groups of farmworkers, often family members, have used the bill to collaborate and develop small, resident-owned, informal mobile home communities, called polancos, and focuses on one such case. Although the article's key contribution is to identify the informal approach and its key attributes, it also discusses whether a new housing model based on the collectively owned polancos is possible.

We focus on three nonprofit organizations developing mutual self-help housing and analyze their projects to examine how they are addressing cost increases. We find that instead of using simpler designs, they are developing more elaborate homes through intricate financing. We are critical of this evolution. First, we suggest that the original modest house design of mutual self-help housing allowed for more affordable housing through post-occupancy improvements and de facto incremental development. Second, after the modest design was replaced with a larger model, development costs increased. Despite financial innovations, including longer loan terms and secondary financing, participation by poor households dropped. Third, we urge a return to the modest housing idea. Fourth, we call for policymakers to better integrate design-based thinking in housing policy.

In this article, we compare colonias in Texas and California and evaluate the federal policy relating to them. In Texas, designated colonias are recently subdivided but unregulated housing settlements that lack infrastructure. California's designated colonias are old communities, with varying demographics, infrastructure needs, and jurisdictional authority. Because subdivisions are strongly regulated in California, we did not expect to find designated colonias there. In actuality, there are over 30.However, federal policy is based on Texas colonias, and we argue that it is too broad because it fails to distinguish between inherently distinct areas and investment needs. Paradoxically, the federal criteria for defining colonias are also too narrow. Many locally designated colonias in California do not qualify for funding because they are not close to the Mexican border or exceed the population ceiling. Ironically, some of the colonias that fail to qualify have the worst housing conditions.

This paper analyses the evolution of Mumbai's unorthodox strategy of demolishing existing slums and resettling slum-dwellers in new, cross-subsidised, on-site housing. The strategy is facilitated by government intervention in land development regulations. This paper argues that the strategy evolved in response to competitive electoral politics and high property values in the city. Secondly, although the strategy provides beneficiaries with an opportunity to own valuable real estate assets, more slum-dwellers would gain from a deregulation of the specified benefits. Deregulation and flexible benefits can lead to innovation in housing improvement projects. Moreover, the deregulation of benefits might be the only politically feasible alternative. This paper, nonetheless, supports government intervention in land development regulations.