More than a third of California cities and counties, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and fast-growing suburbs like Dublin and Irvine, require private home builders to set aside a portion of the homes they build at below-market rents…
Economists Put a Price on Obtaining a Building Permit in LA. It’s Not Small.
If you want to build something in Los Angeles County, waiting for a permit takes time — and now there’s a study estimating the cost of that wait. Researchers find that vacant land with an approved building permit sells for…
The Legal Trap That’s Making California Condos Unaffordable—And It’s Not What You Think
California’s construction defect liability system (the legal rules that let people sue builders for problems with new buildings) is adding up to $18,300 per unit to the costs of condominiums. What was supposed to protect consumers has become a barrier…
Construction Costs Should Predict Housing Prices Across Cities. They Don’t. Here’s Proof.
The “hard costs” of building new homes — materials, labor, and builder profit margins — have a weak relationship to home prices across American cities. New research analyzing 75 years of data reveals that the cost of building new housing…
Construction Costs Up: Time is Money in New Housing
In a report for the RAND Corporation, Jason M Ward looks at construction costs for permanent supportive housing funded by Los Angeles Measure HHH, a 2016 ballot initiative that required the use of Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for projects with…
When Wages Prevail: Assessing the Cost of Construction
In California, legislation to streamline housing production and to fund the construction of deed-restricted affordable housing often requires builders to pay “prevailing wages” to the construction workers who work on the resulting project. These requirements are based on the idea…
Sharpening the Pencil: How Smart Policy Can Reduce the High Cost of Homebuilding
How much does it cost to build new housing? And are these costs aligned with what the market will bear for rents, or broad goals of housing affordability? In the world of housing contractors and developers, the term for a…
The Price of Inclusion: Evidence from Housing Developer Behavior
Published: 2020 | Evan Soltas Abstract In many U.S. cities, incentives and regulations lead developers to build mixed-income housing. How cost-effective are these policies? I study take-up of a tax incentive in New York City using a model in which…
From Copenhagen to Tokyo
Published: 2020 | Sarah Karlinsky, Paul Peninger, Cristian Bevington | SPUR Abstract The selected case studies demonstrate a breadth of approaches that address both supply and demand challenges for housing in its entirety, as well as affordable housing more specifically.…
The Hard Costs of Construction: Recent Trends in Labor and Materials Costs for Apartment Buildings in California
Published: 2020 | Hayley Raetz, Teddy Forscher, Elizabeth Kneebone, Carolina Reid | Terner Center Abstract Against the backdrop of a statewide housing crisis, affordable and marketrate developers have seen increasing development costs, which can hinder the feasibility of new projects…