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June 24, 2025

Public Housing and Rental Subsidies

Since the 1930s, the federal government has subsidized local housing projects aimed at uplifting the poor. The specific policies have evolved, but the theory has been that federal aid is needed because the states cannot solve their own housing problems and private markets fail to invest in affordable housing. Federal housing efforts are led by…

June 24, 2025

Why Do Republicans Support the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit?

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” aims to avert the tax increases that would result from the expiration of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it’s drawn criticism for not doing enough to reduce the debt or deficit. Earlier in June, The Washington Post reported on publicly funded homes in some cities costing taxpayers more than…

May 10, 2025

How Single Room Occupancies Could Be the Answer to NYC’s Housing Crisis

It was another local tragedy attracting passing notice before being overtaken for our attention by the latest stray bullet homicides and subway assaults. But those concerned with “affordable housing” have much to learn from the Easter morning deaths of three Queens residents and the displacement of perhaps a dozen others in a fire in an…

March 31, 2025

Tom Cotton Should Go Further: An Endowment Tax Should Not Exclude Big Foundations

Pressure in Congress is rapidly growing to respond to the Left-leaning tilt of universities by increasing the excise tax on their endowments. There’s no doubt that for legislators concerned about both the quality of education and looking for a way to raise revenue without increasing tax rates, endowments such as Harvard’s $50 billion or Yale’s $40 billion…

March 17, 2025

Trump Should Put an End to Rent Control

We are in a time when what would have seemed to be unimaginable domestic policy changes — from the abolition of the Department of Education to cutoffs of federal support for universities — are on the table.  The Department of Housing and Urban Development is involved in this creative destruction — having pulled back a Biden-era program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which tied federal assistance for…

March 3, 2025

It’s Time for Time Limits on Public Housing

Like other Cabinet agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving quickly to undo long-standing progressive policies. New HUD Secretary Scott Turner has asserted that the agency is now “DEI-free.” Perhaps even more significantly, the agency is considering implementing time limits and work requirements for tenants of public and subsidized housing.  Although we should expect howls of protest from tenant…

February 28, 2025

Trump Stopped Biden’s Plan to Force DEI on Local Communities

The pullback from diversity, equity and inclusion programs — in government agencies and business — has focused on their impact at the individual level — on hiring, or college admission. But an under-the-radar initiative of the Biden administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development planned DEI for communities across the country. It would do so through required “equity…

February 27, 2025

How Progressive Policy Distorted the Housing Market

For more than a century, American progressives have argued that the costs and conditions of American housing prove that the private market has failed. In the early twentieth century, the often-rough tenements of New York’s Lower East Side were deemed the work of rapacious “slumlords,” while small single-family or duplex homes that sprouted in cities…

February 18, 2025

Family-Friendly Policies for the 119th Congress

Key Points Read the PDF. Introduction America is in a baby bust, with birth rates hitting record lows and still falling. Young Americans are getting married later and less. Meanwhile, parents face rising stress, and children suffer an epidemic of anxiety. The family is the fundamental building block of a society, as the cell is…

February 7, 2025

Follow Elon Musk’s USAID Model to Free Tenants from Public-Housing Hell

The willingness of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to take on sacred cows is stunning Washington, as tenets long unquestioned suddenly fall like idols destroyed by Abraham.   The same creative destruction should be focused on a bad idea that has harmed cities and fostered dependency for nearly a century: public housing.   Instead of tinkering…