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November 19, 2025
A telling new analysis of rising home maintenance costs from the real estate listing service Zillow, in conjunction with Thumbtack, which tracks the cost of local services, should remind those promoting the virtues of homeownership that it’s key for new buyers to be prepared and capable owners. At the same time, the findings tell yet another story…
September 25, 2025
If Americans have any shared image of public housing, it is one of dilapidated and even dangerous “projects” and locations of concentrated poverty. But there was a time—a brief shining moment—in which public housing was new and attractive and working married couples with children were glad to live in government-owned and -managed apartments. What might…
September 24, 2025
In 1983, Harvard scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood sought to determine the length of time participants in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) spent in the program. Their report, titled The Dynamics of Dependence, revealed that the average participant could be expected to remain in AFDC for 10 years — a figure that increased to…
September 8, 2025
We hear a great deal about what’s called the black-white wealth gap. It’s not an inaccurate phrase. According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the “racial wealth gap” stands at $240,120 — the difference between the assets of the median white and median black household. Median white assets are $285,000;…
May 10, 2025
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
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
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…
February 28, 2025
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
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 7, 2025
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…