robert

To stimulate housing production, many California cities have experimented with loosening their restrictive land-use regulations. Yet not all of these reforms have been equally successful in producing housing. Indeed, Gabbe et al. (2021) find evidence that San Jose’s “urban villages”…

It’s not enough to merely build subsidized affordable housing — housing location matters at least as much as availability; in addition to secure, affordable shelter, humans need access to quality transit, walkable neighborhoods, minimal exposure to health and environmental risks,…

The results are in: The City of Los Angeles’ Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) program of permitting new housing “by-right” has helped build more below-market rate affordable housing, faster, than housing proposals in the city that are still subject to discretionary…

A new policy brief from Garcia et al (2022) at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation explores “Unlocking the Potential for Missing Middle Housing.” This qualitative study identifies important barriers to building more affordable, smaller-scale, multifamily housing for middle-income…

A new Job Market Paper by Tianfang Cui at the University of Pennsylvania studies the impact of exclusionary zoning through one specific and under-examined variable: minimum lot sizes. Key takeaways: “From 1940–1970, the rise in central city Black composition in…

While research has shown that new homebuilding can bring an immediate benefit to local housing affordability, a new survey study by University of California scholars Clayton Nall, Chris Elmendorf, and California YIMBY alumni Stan Oklobdzija finds that people tend to…