UCLA Housing Voice

Ep 10: Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices with Daniel Kuhlmann

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 Kuhlmann of Iowa State University ran the numbers for the first major city in America to end single-...

Ep 09: Neighborhood Perceptions with Prentiss Dantzler

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 conditions, and how that affects their ability or willingness to stay. What do we miss when we overlo...

Ep 08: Exactions and Value Capture with Minjee Kim

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 Florida State University joins us to talk about Seattle and Boston’s very different approaches to valu...

Ep 07: Residential Mobility with Kristin Perkins

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 an experimental setting? We welcome Kristin Perkins of Georgetown University to the podcast to talk ...

Ep 06: Financialization with Martine August

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 to talk about the “financialization” of rental housing in Canada, which is on a similar trajectory t...

Ep 05: Market-Rate Development and Neighborhood Rents with Evan Mast

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 Institute joins Mike and Shane to discuss two recent papers he’s worked on that help shed light on t...

Ep 04: Fair Housing with Katherine O'Regan

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, joins Mike and Shane to talk about the legacy of the Fair Housing Act, the changing nature of neighbor...

Ep 03: Bundled Parking with Michael Manville

As a general rule, more parking means more vehicle ownership and more driving in cities. However, how people pay for that parking (or if they pay at all) also affects travel behavior: when parking is included in the price of housing — when it is “bundled” — people also drive more and use transit less than when the price of parking is “unbundled” from housing costs, even when households own cars in both situations. Planners have long known that reducing parking makes housing more affordable, tran...

Ep 02: Mortgage Discrimination with José Loya

Most of us are familiar with how subprime loans were disproportionately (and predatorily) targeted at Black and Latino households during the 2000s housing bubble leading up to the Great Recession. Less well known is that disparate treatment in mortgage lending is making a comeback alongside the recovery of the housing market. José Loya of UCLA joins Shane and Mike to talk about ethnic and racial disparities in access to mortgage credit in the years following the housing crash. Show notes: Loya, ...

Ep 01: Evil Developers with Paavo Monkkonen

Which arguments against new housing are most effective? Residents were asked how they felt about a hypothetical housing development proposed nearby, then told about the concerns of some of their neighbors: traffic congestion, neighborhood character, strained services, or developer profit. Surprisingly, the developer profit argument was the most effective at reducing support for new housing, although opposition declined when residents were informed that the developers also provided community bene...

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