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Inclusionary Zoning: Are Goals and Outcomes Aligned?

Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) is a policy that requires developers to set aside some of the new homes they build as income-restricted housing, affordable to renters or buyers who make less than a defined amount (typically determined as a percentage of…

A Comprehensive Study of Rent Control

Few economic policies have been studied as extensively as rent control, which is an umbrella term for policies regulating when and how much a landlord may raise the rent for a home or apartment. In “Rent control effects through the…

Smaller Lots, Smaller Prices: Evidence from Houston

In recent years, pro-housing reformers around the country have successfully changed state and local land use policies to allow greater density on residential lots zoned exclusively for one house. Most of these efforts have focused on adjusting regulations such as…

How a Boom in Market-Rate Housing Would Help Section 8 Tenants

The United States largely abandoned building new public (i.e., publicly-owned and operated) housing in the 1970s, replacing it with the Housing Choice Voucher program to provide low-income families with federally-funded rent subsidies for use in privately-owned buildings. Colloquially known as…

FAR Away from Home

In addition to the use of zoning regulations to control the location, density, and types of housing, many jurisdictions use similar regulatory tools to limit the total floor space a building can have. These limits, which typically take the form…

Exclusionary By Design: The History of Zoning in Boston Suburbs

While popular scholarship has extensively documented the racially exclusionary effects of low density and single family zoning, particularly in its earliest forms, there is less agreement on whether it was adopted for the explicit purpose of segregating by race and…