In recent years, the story of residential segregation and discrimination — and especially the practice of redlining — has gained well-deserved prominence in U.S. housing discourse. Equally important, the federal government has been directly implicated in the development and institutionalization of redlining and similar practices. A key early player in this history is the Home Owners Loan Corporation, or HOLC, which commissioned the infamous “residential security” maps that separated residential neighborhoods into four categories, from green (best) to red (worst), based in no small part on racist assumptions about Black residents and homeowners — this is the origin of the word “redlining.” But while HOLC unquestionably has culpability in the racial disparities of the U.S. housing market, Todd Michney argues that the connection between HOLC and the institutionalization of redlining isn’t as direct or uncomplicated as is usually claimed. He shares the findings of historical research into the early days of HOLC’s housing market rescue efforts, and casts doubt on the commonly-told story about the origins of redlining.Show notes:Michney, T. M., & Winling, L. (2020). New perspectives on new deal housing policy: Explicating and mapping HOLC loans to African Americans. Journal of Urban History, 46(1), 150-180.Winling, L. C., & Michney, T. M. (2021). The roots of redlining: academic, governmental, and professional networks in the making of the new deal lending regime. Journal of American History, 108(1), 42-69.Michney, T. M. (2021). How the City Survey’s Redlining Maps Were Made: A Closer Look at HOLC’s Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division. Journal of Planning History, 15385132211013361.Michney, T. M. (2017). Surrogate Suburbs: Black upward mobility and neighborhood change in Cleveland, 1900–1980. UNC Press Books.Surrogate Suburbs bus tour route!Jackson, K. T. (1987). Crabgrass Frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press.Hillier, A. E. (2003). Who Received Loans? Home Owners’ Loan Corporation lending and discrimination in Philadelphia in the 1930s. Journal of Planning history, 2(1), 3-24.Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.Glock, J. E. (2021). The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939. Columbia University Press.

Social housing — housing built for limited or no profit, often with government support — came to account for huge portions of the housing market in many Western European countries following World War II, but its prominence has declined since the 1980s, when many governments began to shift their housing investments away from construction and toward direct financial support for renters. This shift is arguably one cause of the housing affordability crisis many cities find themselves in today, but in the face of opposing trends, two cities stand out for maintaining and even growing their social housing stock: Vienna and Helsinki. In this episode, Justin Kadi shares the history, policies, and politics that have contributed to the “remarkable stability” of these two cities’ social housing programs, and offers an incredible overview of how social housing is planned, financed, built, and operated in the places it’s been most successful.Show notes:Kadi, J., & Lilius, J. (2022). The remarkable stability of social housing in Vienna and Helsinki: a multi-dimensional analysis. Housing Studies, 1-25.Eliason, M. (2021). Unlocking livable, resilient, decarbonized housing with Point Access Blocks. Larch Lab.Housing Voice ep. 32 with Diego Gil, on Chile’s shift toward a more neoliberal and demand-side housing policy framework.Housing Voice ep. 28 with Chua Beng Huat, on Singapore’s highly centralized public housing program.A brief history of “Red Vienna,” a product of the political victory of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1900s which led to tax reform and heavy public investment in housing.

Shared-equity homeownership programs help low- and moderate-income people afford buying a home, but they come with a catch. In exchange for help with your loan or a discount on your purchase, you need to pay back the government when you sell. That leaves them with less money to buy their next home, so many who participate in shared-equity programs end up stuck in place or back on the rental market. As William Cheung and Kelvin Wong put it, these programs provide great “entry affordability,” but participants struggle with “exit affordability” when they want to move out of subsidized housing and buy on the private market. We discuss their research into shared-equity ownership programs in six different countries, including the U.S., and how reforms might help more homebuyers or improve household mobility — but probably not both.Show notes:Cheung, K. S., & Wong, S. K. (2019). Entry and exit affordability of shared equity homeownership: an international comparison. International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis.Read here about the San Francisco Downpayment Assistance Loan Program (which is now discontinued).Cheung, K. S., Wong, S. K., Chau, K. W., & Yiu, C. Y. (2021). The Misallocation Problem of Subsidized Housing: A Lesson from Hong Kong. Sustainability, 13(4), 1855.

Andre Perry has spent years researching majority-Black communities, and he’s reached a stark conclusion: “There’s nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.” His 2020 book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black lives and property in America’s Black cities, explores this idea and its ramifications for Black uplift, and more specifically the valuation of Black property. Why are homes in Black-owned neighborhoods undervalued and underappraised? What role can — or should — homeownership play in closing America’s massive racial wealth gap? And how much can housing policy achieve when, as Dr. Perry puts it, “Property is not devalued; people are.” We discuss the book, the research that informed it, and his subsequent work identifying the keys to success for majority-Black cities and neighborhoods.Show notes:Perry, A. M. (2020). Know Your Price: Valuing Black lives and property in America’s Black cities. Brookings Institution Press.The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (aka The Moynihan Report).Perry, A., Rothwell, J., & Harshbarger, D. (2018). The devaluation of assets in Black neighborhoods: the case of residential property. Brookings Institution.Read more about the Valuing Homes in Black Communities challenge.…and the challenge winners.Hamilton, D., & Darity Jr, W. (2010). Can ‘baby bonds’ eliminate the racial wealth gap in putative post-racial America? The Review of Black Political Economy, 37(3-4), 207-216.The Black Progress Index.

Much has been written about the history of racial segregation in America’s housing market — and for good reason — but less is known about the role of class-based segregation. Using early 20th century Los Angeles as a case study, Laura Redford discusses how developers used a combination of restrictive covenants, the judicial system, and advertising to build a divided city — one that not only separated white residents from Black residents and other people of color, but also maintained divisions by class: poor with poor, middle class with middle class, and rich with rich. Several idiosyncrasies led to Los Angeles pioneering this model, with many of its practices soon exported to other cities and towns across the nation. And while racial discrimination in the U.S. has been illegal (but not eliminated) for more than 50 years, class-based discrimination lives on more explicitly in present-day housing policies, with implications for both economic opportunity and racial segregation.Show notes:Redford, L. (2017). The intertwined history of class and race segregation in Los Angeles. Journal of Planning History, 16(4), 305-322.Weiss, M. A. (2002). The Rise of the Community Builders: The American real estate industry and urban land planning. Beard Books.Some background on the term “curbstoning” (by the Realtors’ trade group).Fennell, L. A. (2006). Exclusion's attraction: Land use controls in Tieboutian perspective. U Illinois Law & Economics Research Paper No. LE06-006, NYU, Law and Economics Research Paper, (06-12).Culver City “Racist Santa” real estate advertisement from 1913.Kwak, N. H. (2015). A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid. University of Chicago Press.

Prior to 1980, per-capita income gaps between poor states and rich states were persistently shrinking, driven by the migration of lower-income, less skilled workers to higher-paying regions. Since then, this “regional income convergence” phenomenon has declined. What happened? As always, there’s a housing story to tell. Peter Ganong joins us to discuss his (and coauthor Daniel Shoag’s) research into the relationship between land use regulation, housing supply, household migration, and income. Their troubling finding: it no longer makes sense for many lower-income households to move to states with higher-paying jobs — after accounting for housing costs, some are actually worse off when they do so. This “skill sorting” of high-wage workers into expensive metro areas and low-wage workers into cheaper metros has worrying implications for accessing better opportunities, and much of it is driven by sharp restrictions on homebuilding in the highest-income states.Show notes:Ganong, P., & Shoag, D. (2017). Why has regional income convergence in the US declined? Journal of Urban Economics, 102, 76-90.Hsieh, C. T., & Moretti, E. (2019). Housing constraints and spatial misallocation. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 11(2), 1-39.Jackson, K. (2016). Do land use regulations stifle residential development? Evidence from California cities. Journal of Urban Economics, 91, 45-56.Saiz, A. (2010). The geographic determinants of housing supply. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(3), 1253-1296.Bazelon and Yglesias blog post on Secret Congress.

In this episode we do a deep dive into the history of Atlanta’s public housing program, from its inception in 1934 to the eventual demolition and redevelopment of many sites in the 1990s and onward. But Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez’s focus isn’t the public housing developments themselves. Rather, it’s on the tenants — overwhelming Black, and disproportionately women-led — who called public housing communities home, organized and built political power within them, and used that power to make demands of the government. It’s a complex history without clear or consistent “good guys” and “bad guys,” and it complicates the narrative which argues that housing vouchers (or “Section 8”) are a complete substitute for the decline in public housing across the country. Whatever your connection to Atlanta or your knowledge of the US public housing program, there’s a lot to be learned from this case study on the politics of public housing in Atlanta.Show notes:Rodriguez, A. D. (2021). Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing. University of Georgia Press.Pritchett, W. E. (2010). Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer. University of Chicago Press.Parson, D. C. (2005). Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles. University of Minnesota Press.The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (documentary).Ingram, H., Schneider, A. L., & DeLeon, P. (2019). Social Construction and Policy Design. In Theories of the Policy Process (pp. 93-126). Routledge.W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study of the Atlanta University Federal Housing Area, 1934.Chaskin, R. J., & Joseph, M. L. (2015). Contested space: Design principles and regulatory regimes in mixed-income communities in Chicago. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 660(1), 136-154.70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green (documentary).

Usually, cities with lots of vacant housing have slow rent growth (or low rents), while lower vacancy rates are associated with higher rents. But many Indian cities have an unusual, seemingly paradoxical problem: high vacancy rates and high rents. Why? According to research by Dr. Sahil Gandhi and Professor Richard Green, a major contributor is insecure property rights — specifically, very strict rent control regulations and an inadequate supply of judges to rule in tenant eviction cases. We discuss how policies that increase risk and reduce profits — beyond a certain point, anyway — can lead some landlords to keep their units vacant rather than rent them out, with negative consequences for the entire housing market. We also explore the differences between “first generation” and “second generation” rent controls, and the reasons many cities across the world have shifted from the former to the latter.Show notes:Gandhi, S., Green, R. K., & Patranabis, S. (2022). Insecure property rights and the housing market: Explaining India’s housing vacancy paradox. Journal of Urban Economics, 131, 103490.Tandel, V., Patel, S., Gandhi, S., Pethe, A., & Agarwal, K. (2016). Decline of rental housing in India: The case of Mumbai. Environment and Urbanization, 28(1), 259-274.Diamond, R., McQuade, T., & Qian, F. (2019). The effects of rent control expansion on tenants, landlords, and inequality: Evidence from San Francisco. American Economic Review, 109(9), 3365-94.Phillips, S. (2020). Does the Los Angeles region have too many vacant homes? UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.Arnott, R. (1995). Time for revisionism on rent control? Journal of economic perspectives, 9(1), 99-120.Sims, D. P. (2007). Out of control: What can we learn from the end of Massachusetts rent control? Journal of Urban Economics, 61(1), 129-151.Another conversation on video between Sahil Gandhi and Paavo Monkkonen on rent control in India (click the tab “India: Rent Control” on the left).

How do we respond when regulations intended to help vulnerable tenants end up disadvantaging them even further? Professor Meredith Greif joins us to discuss her research and new book, Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis, which explores how penalties levied against landlords can lead to stricter screening, harassment, and informal eviction of renters who may already struggle to find adequate housing. Far from proposing that we do away with tenant protections, Greif asks us to consider the trade-offs inherent in many policy decisions. Before we can come up with better solutions, we first need to grapple with these unintended (but often predictable) consequences — and recognize how our policies and regulations may be producing exactly the behaviors we say we want to discourage.Show notes:Greif, M. (2018). Regulating landlords: Unintended consequences for poor tenants. City & Community, 17(3), 658-674.Greif, M. (2022). Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis. Russell Sage Foundation.Background on the expansion of criminal nuisance laws and their disparate racial impacts in California: Dillon, L., Poston, B., & Barajas, J. (Nov 19 2020). Black and Latino renters face eviction, exclusion amid police crackdowns in California. Los Angeles Times.Mead, J., Hatch, M., Tighe, J. R., Pappas, M., Andrasik, K., & Bonham, E. (2017). Who is a nuisance? Criminal activity nuisance ordinances in Ohio. Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city. Crown.Our earlier episode on landlords with Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden.

When eviction cases go to court, it’s typical for more than 90% of landlords to have legal representation, but less than 10% of tenants. This puts tenants at a considerable disadvantage, and helps to explain why few renters win their eviction cases; many don’t bother showing up for court hearings at all. Advocates argue that providing free legal representation to tenants — a policy known as “right to counsel” or “universal access to counsel” — would reduce evictions, but there have been few opportunities to study it in an experimental setting. Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU joins us to talk about the impacts of the policy in New York City, the first U.S. city to adopt a right to counsel, starting with 10 ZIP codes in 2017 and expanding in subsequent years. We learn how the program has affected eviction filings, the share of tenants who receive legal representation, and the number of evictions executed by the court, and we discuss the wider context of housing instability and eviction — including the limitations and harder-to-measure benefits of a lawyer-based eviction reduction strategy.Show notes:Ellen, I. G., O’Regan, K., House, S., & Brenner, R. (2021). Do lawyers matter? Early evidence on eviction patterns after the rollout of universal access to Counsel in New York City. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 540-561.The New York City Tenement Museum website.UCLA Housing Voice episode 29 on landlords, discrimination, and serial eviction filings with Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden.Abramson, B. (2021). The Welfare Effects of Eviction and Homelessness Policies. Job market paper.Cassidy, M. T., & Currie, J. (2022). The Effects of Legal Representation on Tenant Outcomes in Housing Court: Evidence from New York City's Universal Access Program (No. w29836). National Bureau of Economic Research.Collinson, R and Reed, D. (2018). The Effects of Evictions on Low-Income Households. Hoffman, D. A., & Strezhnev, A. (2022). Longer Trips to Court Cause Evictions. U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 22-29.Lens, M. C., Nelson, K., Gromis, A., & Kuai, Y. (2020). The neighborhood context of eviction in Southern California. City & Community, 19(4), 912-932.Nelson, K. R. (2022). Litigating the Housing Crisis: Legal Assistance and the Institutional Life of Eviction in Los Angeles. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Nelson, K., Gromis, A., Kuai, Y., & Lens, M. C. (2021). Spatial concentration and spillover: Eviction dynamics in neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, 2005–2015. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 670-695.2021 press release on NYC program expansion: New York City's First-in-Nation Right-to-Counsel Program Expanded Citywide Ahead of Schedule.