Andre Perry has spent years researching majority-Black communities, and he’s reached a stark conclusion: “There’s nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.” His 2020 book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black lives and property in America’s Black cities , explores this idea and its ramifications for Black uplift, and more specifically the valuation of Black property. Why are homes in Black-owned neighborhoods undervalued and underappraised? What role can — or should — homeownersh...
Dec 28, 2022•58 min•Season 2Ep. 14
Much has been written about the history of racial segregation in America’s housing market — and for good reason — but less is known about the role of class-based segregation. Using early 20th century Los Angeles as a case study, Laura Redford discusses how developers used a combination of restrictive covenants, the judicial system, and advertising to build a divided city — one that not only separated white residents from Black residents and other people of color, but also maintained divisions by...
Dec 14, 2022•57 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Prior to 1980, per-capita income gaps between poor states and rich states were persistently shrinking, driven by the migration of lower-income, less skilled workers to higher-paying regions. Since then, this “regional income convergence” phenomenon has declined. What happened? As always, there’s a housing story to tell. Peter Ganong joins us to discuss his (and coauthor Daniel Shoag’s) research into the relationship between land use regulation, housing supply, household migration, and income. Th...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 12
In this episode we do a deep dive into the history of Atlanta’s public housing program, from its inception in 1934 to the eventual demolition and redevelopment of many sites in the 1990s and onward. But Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez’s focus isn’t the public housing developments themselves. Rather, it’s on the tenants — overwhelming Black, and disproportionately women-led — who called public housing communities home, organized and built political power within them, and used that power to make d...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Usually, cities with lots of vacant housing have slow rent growth (or low rents), while lower vacancy rates are associated with higher rents. But many Indian cities have an unusual, seemingly paradoxical problem: high vacancy rates and high rents. Why? According to research by Dr. Sahil Gandhi and Professor Richard Green, a major contributor is insecure property rights — specifically, very strict rent control regulations and an inadequate supply of judges to rule in tenant eviction cases. We dis...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 10
How do we respond when regulations intended to help vulnerable tenants end up disadvantaging them even further? Professor Meredith Greif joins us to discuss her research and new book, Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis , which explores how penalties levied against landlords can lead to stricter screening, harassment, and informal eviction of renters who may already struggle to find adequate housing. Far from proposing that we do away with tenant protections, Greif asks us...
Oct 05, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 9
When eviction cases go to court, it’s typical for more than 90% of landlords to have legal representation, but less than 10% of tenants. This puts tenants at a considerable disadvantage, and helps to explain why few renters win their eviction cases; many don’t bother showing up for court hearings at all. Advocates argue that providing free legal representation to tenants — a policy known as “right to counsel” or “universal access to counsel” — would reduce evictions, but there have been few oppo...
Sep 21, 2022•51 min•Season 2Ep. 8
In recent years, many cities have turned to real estate transfer taxes to capture a share of price appreciation and generate revenues for public purposes. Transfer taxes are relatively popular with voters, and they are easy to collect, but they also have disadvantages compared to property taxes and land value taxes. (Shane has also endorsed higher, more progressive transfer taxes in Los Angeles.) Professor Tuukka Saarimaa joins us to discuss one such drawback from his research in Helsinki, Finla...
Sep 07, 2022•57 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Starting in the 1970s, the Pinochet dictatorship overhauled its housing policies in an effort “to transform Chile from a nation of proletarios (proletarians) to one of propietarios (property owners).” To achieve that goal, and others, Chile adopted what the World Bank would later call an “enabling markets” policy — an approach that reduced the role of government in housing provision and delegated more authority to the private sector. These reforms had far-reaching consequences, not only within C...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Cities have lived with exclusionary zoning for decades, if not generations. Is inclusionary zoning the answer? Inclusionary zoning, or IZ, requires developers to set aside a share of units in new buildings for low- or moderate-income households, seeking to increase the supply of affordable homes and integrate neighborhoods racially and socioeconomically. But how well does it accomplish these goals? This week we’re joined by the Mercatus Center’s Dr. Emily Hamilton to discuss her research on how ...
Aug 10, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Skyscrapers! We can’t help but find them fascinating. Some cities are full of skyscrapers, and others have none. Developers built a 70-story tower on that parcel, but the proposed building just down the street is only 30 stories. How do developers decide where to build skyscrapers and how tall they should be? And are they really a profitable investment, or simply a monument to individual power and ego? Gabriel Ahlfeldt joins us from the London School of Economics to talk about his research on sk...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Landlords don’t have a great reputation. But despite the central role that landlords play in the housing market, there is surprisingly little research into how they operate. Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden interviewed more than 150 landlords in Baltimore, Dallas, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. in an effort to better understand the motivations behind their actions — in their own words. On the one hand, they see real problems with the actions of landlords. This includes frequent use of eviction thr...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 3
“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: 85% of Singaporeans own a public housing unit — on a 99-year lease, not permanently — and prices f...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 2
“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 parcel size for new homes from 5,000 to just 1,400 square feet per unit, and it’s produced tens of thousa...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 2Ep. 1
“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 are we going to do about it? In this final episode of season one, Shane is joined by Dana Cuff of UCLA...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 26
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 over time. We talk about what it would mean for every household to enjoy housing security, regardless o...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 25
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 into this question in Tijuana, Mexico, where hundreds of thousands of homes were built for low-income ...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 24
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 also declining housing production in affected cities. This “supply-equity trade-off,” as he calls i...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 23
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 — puts the question to bed. Taking advantage of San Francisco’s affordable housing lottery, Millard-Bal...
Mar 16, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 22
“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 family homelessness. The study compared long-term housing subsidies — primarily housing vouchers, w...
Mar 02, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 21
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 their social housing stock to 20%, and later 25%, of all housing. The law has been successful, espec...
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 20
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 countries. But for all its successes, the program is not without its drawbacks, raising difficult que...
Feb 02, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 19
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 “ghost dwellings” — houses that are vacant most of the year and primarily seasonal or recreational i...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 18
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 episode of 2022, Rob Collinson of the University of Notre Dame joins us to talk about how we can get ...
Jan 05, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 17
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 University of Tokyo joins us to talk about the unique demographic, economic, and geographic conditi...
Dec 08, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 16
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 yellow and red. These infamous maps are where we get the familiar term, “redlining,” and they he...
Nov 24, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 15
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 downtown specifically, its youth population nearly tripled. Louis Thomas, lecturer at Georgetown Universit...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 14
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 states mandating local planning processes to achieve similar ends. How is that going? Professor Nicholas ...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 13
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 Professor Elizabeth Delmelle of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who joins to discuss her r...
Oct 13, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 12
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 answers tell us about the local and national policy response to the threat of widespread eviction? Show ...
Sep 29, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 11
