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…
Paying the Ultimate Price for Housing: The Case for Affordability
Housing has long been studied as a social determinant of health, but past studies have mostly looked at housing quality (for example, lead paint, indoor air pollution) and neighborhood effects (such as segregation) – with less attention paid to rent…
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…
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…
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…