March 10, 2026
Don’t Tax the Public Housing Poor Like They’re Rich
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed the most dramatic low-income housing policy change in…
February 13, 2026
What Harvard’s Raj Chetty Overlooks About Upward Mobility
The Harvard economist Raj Chetty, justly famous for his studies of the factors that enable upward mobility…
February 10, 2026
Trump Houses Are a Good Idea—If
Facing public concern about high home purchase prices, the Trump Administration is said to be…
September 25, 2025
The Golden Age of Public Housing—and Why It Didn’t Last
If Americans have any shared image of public housing, it is one of dilapidated and…
September 24, 2025
Subsidized Housing and Upward Mobility
In 1983, Harvard scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood sought to determine the length…
September 8, 2025
A Hidden Explanation for the Wealth Gap on Racial Lines That Emerges in the Push to Promote Public Housing
We hear a great deal about what’s called the black-white wealth gap. It’s not an…
April 19, 2024
The New Deal’s Failed Kibbutz in the Desert
At the height of the New Deal, with the Social Security Act, the Securities and…
November 13, 2023
How The IRS Discourages Boomer Charity
Americans like to call ourselves the most generous nation on earth — but charitable giving is…
October 12, 2023
Blue States Are Getting More Federal Money Than They Should
The late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan long complained — and commissioned data — about…
October 12, 2023
Blue-State Benefits: How Federal Grants Fail to Consider Population Shift
The federal government annually awards hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to states. In this report, I examine funding for the largest federal grant programs for 2020–22, focusing on grants-in-aid that do not fully adjust for population change. For states losing population, I calculate “avoided reductions,” the difference between the grants a state received in 2022 and what it would have received had grant funding been reduced proportionate to population loss. I find that the sums of avoided reductions differ greatly among states, with California, Illinois, and New York spared the most.
July 25, 2023
Not Just Tulsa
Earlier this month, an Oklahoma judge ruled that the City of Tulsa cannot be held legally or…