Publications
-
Gentrification and Fair Housing: Does Gentrification Further Integration?
This paper explores the long-term trajectory of predominantly minority, low-income neighborhoods that gentrified over the 1980s and 1990s. On average, these neighborhoods experienced little racial change while they gentrified, but a significant minority became racially integrated during the decade of gentrification, and over the longer term, many of these neighborhoods remained racially stable. That said, some gentrifying neighborhoods that were predominantly minority in 1980 appeared to be on the path to becoming predominantly white. Policies, such as investments in place-based, subsidized housing, are needed in many gentrifying neighborhoods to ensure racial and economic diversity over the longer term.
-
Implementing New York City’s Universal Access to Counsel Program: Lessons for Other Jurisdictions
This Policy Brief gives a brief summary of the history of advocacy efforts to establish a “right to counsel” in eviction cases, which led up to the city’s UAC legislation. It provides an overview of the Furman Center’s observations of the first year of the program roll-out and suggests how the city’s experience might help other jurisdictions shape the design and implementation of their programs. Recognizing that every jurisdiction differs, and the importance of local context to understanding and learning from another jurisdiction’s experiences, Section II of the paper details the context in which the city’s UAC was designed. Section III then describes how the city has implemented UAC. Finally, Section IV discusses what can be learned from the city’s experience implementing the program, and highlights issues that other
jurisdictions need to consider in implementing a universal or expanded access to counsel program. -
Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability
Growing numbers of affordable housing advocates and community members are questioning the premise that increasing the supply of market-rate housing will result in housing that is more affordable. This article is meant to bridge the divide, addressing each of the key arguments supply skeptics make and reviewing what research has shown about housing supply and its effect on affordability. It ultimately concludes, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families. It also emphasizes that new market-rate housing is necessary but not sufficient, and that government intervention is critical to ensure that supply is added at prices affordable to a range of incomes.
-
Neighbors and networks: The role of social interactions on the residential choices of housing choice voucher holders
This study considers the role of information and social influence in determining the effective set of potential housing choices for participants in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. It finds that pairs of voucher participants in close proximity are 40% more likely to move to the same neighborhood than pairs that live more than 1,000 feet apart, and that the neighborhoods selected by close proximity pairs are likely to be more economically disadvantaged by several measures. These findings were magnified in tight rental markets, and in highly segregated cities.
-
Housing and Educational Opportunity: Characteristics of Local Schools Near Families with Federal Housing Assistance
This report focuses on access to neighborhood elementary schools, highlighting disparities between families living in subsidized housing and those who do not. It describes the characteristics of the local public elementary schools to which children living in subsidized housing have access, including their student demographics, teacher characteristics and relative proficiency rates. The report shows that that families receiving all four major types of federal housing assistance lived near lower performing and higher poverty schools than other poor families with children as well as other renters with children.
-
City NIMBYs
This article published in the Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law explores the growing trend of opposition to development in cities. It describes the academic discussions to date focused on growing opposition to development in cities, reviews the known impact of opposition and regulatory barriers to development, explores the potential impact of creating additional barriers to development, and proposes factors that may explain the growing opposition to development in cities. In conclusion, the report discusses what the underlying causes of opposition to development reveal about the differences between suburban and city-focused Nimbyism, and suggests research and policy analysis that might help land-use decision makers respond more effectively to opposition to development in cities.
-
Making Dirty Land Clean: An Analysis of New York City’s Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP)
A new policy brief by the NYU Furman Center examines how New York City’s Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP) is being used to redevelop hundreds of brownfield sites in the city. The VCP is the city’s primary brownfield remediation program, providing oversight and support for developers to clean up properties with actual or potential contamination. The policy brief released today, Making Dirty Land Clean: An Analysis of New York City’s Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP), sheds light on this city program to incentivize remediation and redevelopment of contaminated sites.
-
What Do We Know About Housing Choice Vouchers?
The Housing Choice Voucher Program provides assistance to approximately 2.2 million households each year, making it the largest low-income housing subsidy program managed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This paper reviews what we know about the program. In brief, experimental research shows that vouchers help to reduce the rent burdens of low-income households, allow them to live in less crowded homes, and minimize the risk of homelessness. Research also shows, however, that the program has been far less successful in getting recipients to better neighborhoods and schools. And perhaps the greatest disappointment of the program is its limited reach. Families typically wait for years to receive a voucher, and only one in four households eligible for a voucher nationally receives any federal rental housing assistance. Another issue is that a significant share of households who receive vouchers never use them, in part because of the difficulty of finding willing landlords with acceptable units. Thus, as effective as the program is, there is still room for improvement.
-
State of New York City’s Subsidized Housing in 2017
This brief reviews major programs used to develop and preserve affordable housing in the city, and provides the number and location of properties benefitting from a subsidy or incentive in 2017. It also discusses when affordability restrictions on some of those properties will expire unless renewed by the owners and the housing agencies.
-
Does segregation matter for Latinos?
We estimate the effects of residential racial segregation on socio-economic outcomes for native-born Latino young adults over the past three decades. Using individual public use micro-data samples from the Census and a novel instrumental variable, we find that higher levels of metropolitan area segregation have negative effects on Latino young adults’ likelihood of being either employed or in school, on the likelihood of working in a professional occupation, and on income.
