Tuesday housing eclectica

A few more housing-related items:

- Tax credit approvals may be suspended in Dallas, but some are going ahead in Brownsville, TX.

- The sharp regional SocketSite weblog thinks San Francisco house prices have peaked, and it has been posting items all month suggesting similar conditions elsewhere in California.

- This Wednesday's NLIHC press call on the Hurricane Katrina housing response will feature some of the smartest experts around on both low-income housing policy and homelessness policy. (Odd that housing and homelessness should be two separate specialties, but somehow they are.) With such a lineup, this should be one highly erudite stemwinder of a gripe session.

- And here's an urban planning lesson from two Dutch cities, which the NYT's Christopher Caldwell says have done better than in the riot-riven French suburbs. He suggests that the best approach is always to build mixed-income housing of mixed types, as opposed to uniform "machines for living," because it allows people who move up economically, or who simply change their tastes as they get older, to find new kinds of homes within their own neighborhoods without feeling trapped.