Publications
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Reforming Housing Assistance to Better Respond to Recipient Needs
This paper reviews evidence on the effectiveness of the three main federal vehicles for providing housing assistance to low-income families, lays out current challenges and potential improvements to each program, and proposes further research to fully inform future policy initiatives. Changes are recommended for current federal housing assistance programs to more effectively serve people living in poverty. These include improving how programs take into account regional and state-level variations in the cost and availability of housing, reassessing the level and duration of assistance and to whom it should be targeted, and broadening the set of homes available to recipients of housing assistance beyond those located in areas that are low-income and predominantly Black or Hispanic.
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Regulatory Barriers to Housing Development in the United States
Nothing provides as much material for comparative legal study as the great variety of rule-making that characterizes land law. Land law is perhaps the only legal area in which the leveling march of globalized uniformity has had to yield to the progressive development of local customary law.
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Renovating Subsidized Housing: The Impact On Tenants’ Health
Many public and subsidized housing developments in the US are aging and in need of significant repairs. Some observers worry that their poor condition threatens the health of residents. This study evaluated a recent renovation of public housing that was undertaken through the transfer of six housing developments from the New York City Housing Authority to a public-private partnership. It examined whether the renovation and transfer to private managers led to improvements in tenants’ health over three years, as measured by Medicaid claims. While it did not find significant improvements in individual health outcomes, it found significant relative improvements in overall disease burden when measured using an index of housing-sensitive conditions.
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Rental Housing Policy in the United States
In this volume of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s policy development and research journal, Cityscape, guest editors Vicki Been and Ingrid Gould Ellen bring together seven innovative proposals from leading housing researchers calling for changes in government policies to benefit renters and their communities. This collection of articles propose reforms, such as the elimination of the mortgage interest deduction, which could serve as viable alternatives to traditional federal rental programs. These perspectives offer U.S. policymakers ways to potentially adapt international housing assistance models to reform the domestic housing market.
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Renting In America’s Largest Metropolitan Areas
The renter population grew in both central city and suburban areas while more renters struggled to find affordable housing in the 11 largest metropolitan areas in the US, according to the NYU Furman Center/Capital One National Affordable Rental Housing Landscape report, which was released in March 2016. The Landscape examined rental housing affordability trends in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC and San Francisco from 2006 to 2014 and identified the impact these trends had as the renter population increased while affordable housing rates continued to decline. “Affordable” rent should comprise less than 30 percent of a household’s income. Read more >>
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Renting in America’s Largest Cities: NYU Furman Center/Capital One National Affordable Rental Housing Landscape
The NYU Furman Center/Capital One National Affordable Housing Landscape examines rental housing affordability trends in the central cities of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, Atlanta and Miami) from 2006 to 2013 and illustrates how these trends affected renters as more households chose to rent amid rising rental costs. See the press release, or view the key findings of the report as an infographic.
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Reversal of Fortunes? Low Income Neighborhoods in the US in the 1990s
This paper offers new empirical evidence about the prospects of lower-income, US urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. Using the Neighborhood Change Database, which offers a balanced panel of census tracts with consistent boundaries from 1970 to 2000 for all metropolitan areas in the US, evidence is found of a significant shift in the fortunes of lower-income, urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. There was a notable increase in the 1990s in the proportion of lower-income and poor neighbourhoods experiencing a gain in economic status. Secondly, in terms of geographical patterns, it is found that this upgrading occurred throughout the country, not just in selected regions or cities. Finally, it is found that the determinants of changes in lower-income, urban neighbourhoods shifted during the 1990s. In contrast to earlier decades, both the share of Blacks and the poverty rate were positively related to subsequent economic gain in these neighbourhoods during the 1990s.
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Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable, Racial Integration
Instead of panic and “white flight” causing the rapid breakdown of racially integrated neighborhoods, the author argues, contemporary racial change is driven primarily by the decision of white households not to move into integrated neighborhoods when they are moving for reasons unrelated to race.
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Siting, Spillovers, and Segregation: A Re-examination of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program
As of the end of 2005, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program had allocated $7.5 billion in federal tax credits and supported the development of more than 1.5 million units. A growing number of advocates and observers worry that the LIHTC program, by failing to monitor the siting of developments and, more directly, by giving priority to developers building housing in high-poverty areas, is furthering poverty and racial concentration. Yet, many community development organizations see the tax credit program as a central tool in their efforts to revitalize these high-poverty, urban neighborhoods. In this chapter, the authors try to inject some empirical evidence into this debate by examining the extent to which the tax credit program may have contributed to poverty concentration as well as to neighborhood revitalization.
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Spatial Stratification within US Metropolitan Areas
In most metropolitan areas, central cities and older, inner-ring suburbs tend to have lower-skilled and less affluent populations, lower tax bases, as well as more deteriorated housing stocks and infrastructures, than their newer, outer-ring suburban neighbors. And the segregation becomes even more apparent if comparisons are made across individual neighborhoods within these jurisdictions. The first section, in order to set the stage, documents the magnitude of the spatial and jurisdictional disparities within the average metropolitan area and determines how these have changed in recent years. Many researchers go no further and thus overlook the surprising diversity found across different metropolitan areas in the magnitude of disparities. This paper, however, makes this variation its central concern. To this end, the second section classifies metropolitan areas on the basis of the magnitude of their central-city-suburban disparities and identifies certain metropolitan-area characteristics (such as population size, the degree of racial segregation, and the elasticity of the central-city boundaries) that are correlated with greater and lesser disparities. The third section then estimates a simple, cross-sectional regression that tests which, if any, of these correlations persist after controlling for other factors. Although more definitive conclusions regarding the precise causes of the jurisdictional disparities would be desirable, they would require further statistical analysis that lies outside the scope of this particular project.
