Kayla Acosta-Galvan

Movin’ On Up: How Costly New Homes Create Affordable Old Homes

In housing policy, a common theory of how to provide the maximum number of affordable homes to the greatest number of people is known as “filtering:” the process through which aging homes depreciate, and become less costly as higher-income residents…

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…

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…

How an Oil Spill Backlash Caused High Housing Prices – and More Oil Consumption

Following a catastrophic oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969, in 1972, California voters passed Proposition 20, the “Save Our Coast” ballot initiative. The initiative rode a wave of voter anger over the horrific damage done by…

Episode 15

In this episode, Nolan Gray and Ned Resnikoff chat with Danielle Allen. Allen is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard University, and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. She is also the author of the recent book, Justice By Means of Democracy.

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…