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…
By-Right Approvals: The Better Part of Housing Valor
Most housing and commercial developments in California cities go through a series of reviews by various government bodies before they are approved for construction, or “entitled” – and those processes differ dramatically. In many cases, projects are approved “by right”…
Lot Sizes: When the Bare Minimum is Way Too Much
Minimum lot size requirements are a common tool used by cities across the United States to ensure that homes are not built on parcels that are deemed aesthetically “too small” for housing. Available evidence suggests that these requirements also drive…
Small is Beautiful … and Expensive: Removing Barriers to “Middle Housing” in California
When Senate Bill 9 passed in 2021, it represented a sea-change in California state housing policy. By allowing up to four units on all single-family zoned parcels statewide, SB 9 represented a significant step toward achieving housing abundance. But some…
How to Save Money: Give People Money
In response to rising rates of homelessness, city and state governments have introduced many different programs aimed at providing various forms of shelter and permanent housing to the unhoused. In a new study, a team of researchers in British Columbia,…