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March 28, 2025

Unfreezing New York’s Projects

The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…

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 a powerful example: a simple policy that helped reverse decades of decline by unlocking private investment and spurring the construction of tens of thousands of…

March 20, 2025

Homesteading 2.0: A Proposal to Make Housing Affordable Again

Across the Western US, rising home prices are slowing economic growth and stripping first-time homebuyers and middle-class families of homeownership opportunities. Commonsense, market-driven solutions to expand the housing supply are urgently needed. The Homesteading 2.0 proposal is one such approach. By unlocking 0.3 percent (850 square miles) of Bureau of Land Management land, the West…

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 market-rate housing that promotes affordability. The key is to allow market forces to use by-right zoning to drive small-scale development, when also supported by clear…

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 13, 2025

Housing Roadblocks: Paving a New Way to Address Affordability

Thank you, Chairman Scott and ranking member Warren. Thank you, committee members. I am gratefuland honored to have the opportunity to speak to you today. I am an economist who has spent much of the last quarter-century studying what has gone wrong withAmerica’s housing markets. Initially, I worried mainly about the high costs and limited…

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 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…