UCLA Housing Voice

“The government and its housing agency are thus constantly, indeed permanently, engaged in acts of balancing competing demands.” This is the situation that the Housing & Development Board, which builds public, owner-occupied housing for the vast majority of Singapore’s citizens and permanent residents, has created for itself. And they’ve been phenomenally successful at maintaining that balance...

“Find ways to give vocal minorities opt-out mechanisms where they can have some of the land use rules that they want, but they don’t get to drag the whole city down with them.” That’s one of Nolan Gray’s primary lessons from the success of minimum lot size reform in Houston, and a prescription for land use reform more generally. Houston’s reform, which took place in 1998, reduced the minimum parce...

“We are at a point in Los Angeles and California, where we are seeing the population plateau or even decline for the first time since the 18th century. That is not only a statistical change it is a shift in how we define ourselves and our civic identity.” So says Christopher Hawthorne, one of many housing experts interviewed for a recently report published by the California 100 initiative. What ar...

Is housing a human right — or should it be? What obligations would that place on government, and on each of us, to ensure that everyone has access to adequate housing? Casey Dawkins addresses these and many other questions in his new book, Just Housing . Dr. Dawkins traces the history of land and housing reformers across American history, and how our conceptions of housing justice have shifted ove...

How do developers choose where to build? We need to know the answer to make good policy, and our policy choices may determine whether housing developments advance economic and racial integration, access to opportunity, and sustainability, or they exacerbate segregation, stagnation, and environmental destruction. Dr. Dinorah González of Universidad Iberoamericana joins us to discuss her research in...

How does the structure of political representation affect housing production, both in quantity and spatial distribution? And what does that mean for social and economic equity for traditionally disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities? Michael Hankinson joins us to discuss his research into how a shift from at-large to district-based elections has led to increased political representation but...

Do people drive less because they live in buildings that don’t provide parking, or do they live in buildings that don’t provide parking because they drive less? That question has huge implications for how we build and rebuild our cities, yet researchers have struggled for decades to answer it conclusively. UCLA professor Adam Millard-Ball joins us to discuss new research that finally — we hope — p...

“We have the resources, as a society, to prevent and end homelessness. And the knowledge,” according to Beth Shinn, professor at Vanderbilt University and co-author of In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What To Do About It . So what would that look like? In this conversation, we discuss the Family Options Study, a randomized-controlled trial that evaluated different strategies for addressing...

Social housing — homes reserved for lower- and middle-income households — has recently become something of a cause célèbre among left-leaning North American housing advocates. Given that, where better to look for guidance than in France? The SRU Law (Loi Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain, or Solidarity and Urban Renewal) was adopted 20 years ago, requiring many French municipalities to increase...

The international tour continues! This week we interviewed Hayden Shelby, Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, about her research into the Baan Mankong (“Secure Housing”) program in Bangkok, Thailand. Built on the principles of community organizing, finance, and ownership, Baan Mankong has been celebrated as a global model of participatory slum/settlement upgrading for developing c...

Vacant houses are often pointed to as a symptom (or cause) of the housing crisis, but what do we really know about them? Where are they located; who lives in them; how many are there? In this conversation we explore foundational, data-driven research on the nature of vacancies in cities and neighborhoods across the U.S. with Professor Jake Wegmann of the University of Texas at Austin. We focus on...

Every year, more than two million low-income households receive rental assistance through the Housing Choice Voucher program, a federal program that helps renters afford housing on the private market. Currently, only about one-quarter of those eligible for vouchers receive them due to lack of program funding, though Democrats and the Biden administration have proposed expanding it. For our first e...

For this episode, we take a trip to Tokyo to learn from the successes and shortcomings of Japanese housing policy. Known for high rates of production — Tokyo builds five times more housing than California, per capita — and relatively affordable housing, Japan also struggles with poor maintenance and rapid degradation of its buildings. Professor Jiro Yoshida of Pennsylvania State University and the...

In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created to protect households from foreclosure and in some cases repurchase homes they’d already lost. As a part of its efforts, HOLC created “residential security maps” to categorize neighborhoods by lending risk, with low-risk neighborhoods shaded in green and blue, and high-risk neighborhoods colored...

In most of the U.S., cities are for singles, roommates, and childless couples, and the suburbs are for raising kids. That’s not true of much of the rest of the world, and perhaps the nearest example of family-friendly urbanism can be found just a few miles to the north, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver’s under-15 population fell by one percent citywide between 1996 and 2016, but in downto...

Cities across the country have dropped the ball when it comes to planning for and building housing at all income levels — especially housing affordable to low-income residents. In response, many states have intervened. The form these interventions take varies from place to place, however, with Northeastern states relying on legal appeals by developers to deliver low-income homes, and Western state...

When major public investments are proposed in lower- and middle-income neighborhoods, it’s common to hear concerns about gentrification and displacement: Will the new rail line, park, or bike lane benefit the people who currently call the neighborhood home, or will it only lead to the displacement of existing residents and their replacement by higher-income households? Our guest this week is Profe...

We know that the COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on many renters, with job and income losses piled on top of mental stress and the physical threat of deadly infection. Then add housing insecurity to the mix. The UCLA Lewis Center’s Mike Manville and Paavo Monkkonen join us as guests to talk about two recent surveys of LA County renters: How have they weathered the pandemic, and what do their answ...

Many cities — and the entire state of California — are considering ending single-family zoning, or apartment bans, to improve housing affordability and address historic injustices in housing and land use. Opponents of these reforms argue that “upzoning” for higher-density housing will do the opposite, raising housing prices and harming lower-income communities and communities of color. Dr. Daniel...

Institutions like the U.S. Census Bureau offer us a wealth of statistics about the places people live: household incomes; demographics like race, ethnicity, age, and gender; how many people own or rent their homes, how much they pay, and where they moved from. We know much less about how people perceive their neighborhoods — how they feel about the places they live, regardless of their objective c...

Many local governments seek to extract public benefits, such as open space and low-income housing units, from new development. These benefits are often negotiated during the project approval process, or they may be tied to local zoning changes that allow for taller or denser development. How best should cities go about this process of “value capture”? Should they do it at all? Dr. Minjee Kim of Fl...

Past research has shown that moving to a better neighborhood can improve life outcomes for children and adults, at least under certain conditions. However, these studies do not examine how impacts differ by race and ethnicity, and they tend to focus only on a narrow slice of the population, such as public housing residents. How does moving impact different households in the real world, outside of...

In the not-too-distant past, most multifamily rental housing was owned by small or midsize landlords. But over the past few decades the share of units owned by large, well-capitalized, shareholder-driven institutions has increased dramatically. What’s driving this change, and what does it mean for housing affordability and household stability? Martine August of the University of Waterloo joins us...

We’ve known for many years that building more homes helps keep prices in check at the regional or metro area level, but what about the house down the street? When a new apartment building goes up nearby, does the “supply effect” of more homes lower rents, or does the “demand effect” send a signal to nearby property owners and potential residents that causes rents to go up? Evan Mast of the Upjohn...

The federal government passed the Fair Housing Act more than 50 years ago. In that time considerable progress has been made at reducing discrimination in the housing market, but the law’s mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing” and reverse patterns of segregation has been only lightly enforced. Katherine O’Regan of NYU, and formerly of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, jo...