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August 11, 2025

Texas Just Provided a Housing Lifeline—Dallas-Fort Worth Cities Should Grab It

This op-ed was originally published by The Cannon. You can read the original piece here. Large Texas municipalities have just been handed an enormous opportunity by the legislature. They should seize it….

July 17, 2025

Why HUD Was Right to Roll Back PAVE Rules

This op-ed originally appeared in National Mortgage News. The recent decision by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of Management and Budget to roll back key policies of the…

June 30, 2025

America’s Six Million Home Shortage: Why California Is at the Epicenter

A growing body of research estimates that the US faces a severe housing shortage, with missing homes numbering between 3.8 million and 8.2 million. Using the midpoint—approximately six million missing homes—new AEI Housing…

June 26, 2025

Does Building Light-Touch Density Housing Lower Single-Family Home Values? Evidence from Seattle, WA and Charlotte, NC

Summary: Opponents of Light-touch Density (LTD) infill argue that it will lead to outright home price declines or, at the very least, slower home price appreciation (HPA). However, evidence from…

June 23, 2025

Boston’s Backward Housing Policy: More Demand Will Only Exacerbate the Supply Crisis

Boston’s housing policies keep treating symptoms while ignoring the disease. Last month, the city proudly unveiled its Co-Purchasing Housing Pilot Program, offering $50,000 in zero-interest, deferred-payment loans to help lower-income households…

May 27, 2025

The Surprising Role of Large Developers in Solving the Housing Crunch

Against the odds—and conventional wisdom—the nation’s largest home builders have engineered a dramatic shift toward serving first-time homebuyers (FTBs). New data from the AEI Housing Center show that in 2024,…

May 7, 2025

Displacement by Design: How Bad Policy Made Housing Scarce, and How We Can Fix It

Musical chairs is one of the first games we play as children. The rules are simple: there are fewer chairs than players. When the music stops, someone ends up standing….

March 24, 2025

Tax Abatements: The Best-Kept Secret to Revitalizing Struggling Communities—Without Spending Taxpayer Money

A well-designed property tax abatement program can dramatically shift project economics by temporarily reducing tax burdens, making new housing development financially viable—without requiring government subsidies. Philadelphia’s 10-year tax abatement is…

March 18, 2025

Low-Rise Multifamily and Housing Supply: A Case Study of Seattle

Abstract We provide an in-depth case study of land use reforms in Seattle to highlight how redevelopment of aging single-family housing to townhomes can lead to a significant increase in…

January 21, 2025

Calling DOGE: HUD’s Costly Hunt for Answers the Market Already Has

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) new grant opportunity of $250,000–$500,000 for research on “Increasing Missing Middle Housing Supply” highlights yet another instance of government inefficiency and waste. While the…