Research Archive

July 9, 2025

Housing Plan Falls Short

This op-ed was originally published in Your Observer. You can read the whole piece here. Recently, the Florida Housing Coalition, along with the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, Barancik Foundation, Patterson Foundation and the Community Foundation of Sarasota released a Sarasota Housing Action Plan diagnosing the county’s housing crisis and recommending some approaches to fixing it.  The report…

By Edward J. Pinto | Jeffrey Brandes | Adrian Moore

July 3, 2025

A Republican Bailout for Blue Cities? The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Trap Explained

The Republican Party’s much-touted “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes a $14 billion bailout for some of America’s worst-run cities, all thanks to the proposed expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Doing so would funnel billions more into a program that props up a fundamentally broken housing system without adding the new supply desperately needed…

By Tobias Peter | Edward J. Pinto

July 2, 2025

Have You Heard the Good News?

A quick look at some recent headlines shows that we have problems. The nation sharply and angrily divided along political lines. Rioters in the streets of Los Angeles. A destructive trade war. Debt and deficits at unsustainable levels.    Those are real and serious problems (and not close to an exhaustive list). But the tenor of…

By Michael R. Strain | Cliff Asness

July 2, 2025

Holding Colleges Accountable: From Graduation to Gainful Employment

Event Summary On July 2, USA Today education reporter Zachary Schermele moderated a web event with AEI Senior Fellow Beth Akers and Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. This week, the Senate passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which contained several provisions regarding…

By Beth Akers

July 2, 2025

Congress Could Rein In Graduate Student Loans

Congress is on the verge of eliminating Grad PLUS—the program which extends effectively unlimited taxpayer-funded loans to graduate students—and imposing caps on graduate loans for the first time since 2006. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a budget reconciliation bill ending the program, which has fueled tuition hikes, exploded student debt, and padded the budgets of wealthy universities….

July 1, 2025

More Information Sharing Means Fewer Taxpayer Losses to Fraud

Last month, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) introduced a resolution of inquiry objecting to the Trump administration’s development of a “centralized database” that “compiles American citizens’ personal information across federal agencies and departments.” The resolution states that personal information includes “confidential taxpayer, identity, wage, child support, bank account, student loan, health, medical, financial, or other information.” Left unsaid…

By Matt Weidinger

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 Center analysis shows where this shortage is most acute and why about two million missing homes can be traced back to California and its neighbors….

By Tobias Peter | Edward J. Pinto

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 Charlotte and Seattle shows that the construction of LTD housing—such as duplexes and townhomes—does not adversely impact HPA of single-family detached (SFD) homes in the…

By Tobias Peter | Edward J. Pinto

June 25, 2025

De-Skilling the Knowledge Economy

Key Points Introduction As David Veldran and I examined in our 2024 report, The Age of Uncertainty—and Opportunity: Work in the Age of AI, forecasts of how artificial intelligence will affect jobs and skills are remarkably uneven and often contradictory.1 This is less a matter of poor methodologies or lack of investigation than it is…

By Brent Orrell

June 25, 2025

Yes, there’s still a shared American story. If we’re to live in freedom, we need to embrace and defend it.

A year and a half ago, I wrote an essay in The Social Breakdown arguing the need for a revived civic national story and the existential consequences for the country not having one. Even more so today, protecting our liberal democratic experiment requires that Americans set aside their partisan or policy differences. But we need…

By Colin Woodard