Climate disasters are mounting across the Golden State. While wildfires are currently raging from north to south, our neighbors are also contending with worsening heat waves and floods — and unless we act urgently, things will only get hotter in…
Progressive Transfer Taxes Can Help Fix Housing Inequality
Shane Phillips of UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies has a bold new proposal to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing in Los Angeles by taxing real property sales. Key to this proposal is a formula…
Inventing Facts to Support NIMBYism: Academics Called Out for Unethical Research in Urban Studies
As the old saying goes, when you’re stuck in a deep hole, stop digging. This would be sound advice for Andres Rodrigues-Pose and Michael Storper, geographers at the London School of Economics and UCLA respectively, who recently wrote a bizarre…
Making ADUs Pencil: Opening Up New Sources of Funding
California has made great progress in enabling more homebuilding by removing barriers to the construction of backyard cottages, also known as “Granny Flats” or Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). However, more work remains to be done, particularly to incentivize their construction…
A failure of leadership derailed housing reform in 2020
On Monday, we were on the cusp of passing SB 1120 — a bill which would have made it legal to build duplexes on single-family properties throughout the state. Despite vigorous opposition from affluent homeowners in exclusive communities, SB 1120…
How do other cities provide housing?
A globetrotting new whitepaper from SPUR looks at policy regimes in other countries that manage demand for housing with measurably more success than California. Three city profiles help give a sense of the bigger picture. Key takeaways: Vienna funds, builds,…
How Legalizing Homes Can Integrate the Bay Area
In an early installment of The Homework, we covered the first few research briefs in a new series from UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) on the Bay Area’s deeply entrenched residential segregation. In this final episode of the…
This One Cool Trick Turns One Home Into Four
Last month, we covered an impressive new study from UCLA showing the market potential for over 1 million new homes in California simply by allowing fourplexes as the minimum density for every residential lot statewide. Now UC Berkeley’s Terner Center…
“Local Control:” 5 Decades of Segregation
We know local land-use regulations can produce racial segregation as an outcome, but how strong is the effect? In a new paper, UC Merced scholar Jessica Trounstine finds empirical evidence that impact and intent are strongly linked when it comes…
Opinion: We Must Plan Racial Justice In Our Cities
Read the full article here … “The very people who support progressive change elsewhere use local control of land use to prevent structural changes in their communities that would advance the cause of racial justice. These changes are essential if…