The Drum Major Institute's Marketplace of Ideas event this morning featured Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and his reforms to turn vacant buildings into affordable housing. Menino, who is now serving his fourth mayoral term, has reformed Boston's housing market in some pretty amazing ways. During the past decade, abandoned residential properties declined 77% as abandoned buildings were turned into viable housing.

The panel discussion featured Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Pratt Community Development Center Director Brad Lander, and Executive Director of the Parodneck Foundation Carlton Collier. DMI Executive Director Andrea Batista Schlesinger moderated the panel.

Cross posted from the DMI blog.

In 1999, Boston had a housing crisis. The waiting list for public housing units had 15,000 people on it, and rent prices had gone up 47% in the past four years. More than 50,000 Bostonians were spending more than half of their income on housing, and the number of homeless people in Boston was at a record high.

But just four years later, the statistics told a different story. Almost 8,000 new housing units had been created, and 1,000 housing units were made accessible to the homeless. The new units represented about $2 billion in public and private housing investment. The number of abandoned buildings in Boston dropped by 66% -- from 1,044 in 1997 to only 350 in 2005, and by the end of 2003, 1,079 vacant public housing units had been renovated. Suddenly, housing in Boston was on its way to becoming available and affordable.

There is a whole process to vlogging that I find totally unsatisfying. I hate editing and I hate compressing files for better streaming because it takes too long and I want to put thing up on the web NOW! The upside of editing and going through frames is that you get to crack yourself up with the body language of your subjects.

Case in point : I could spend hours watching Christine Quinn talk ... with the volume off. Check her out. She looks like she's singing --although I suggest she get a voice coach because she strains her voice during speeches. Girlfriend, breathe!

Then it's not even anything they're doing.

I happen to like the camera perspective on these photos
of Sylvia Friedman and Al Doyle.

And then, there is Mark Green...

More after the jump.