UCLA Housing Voice

Many cities — and the entire state of California — are considering ending single-family zoning, or apartment bans, to improve housing affordability and address historic injustices in housing and land use. Opponents of these reforms argue that “upzoning” for higher-density housing will do the opposite, raising housing prices and harming lower-income communities and communities of color. Dr. Daniel Kuhlmann of Iowa State University ran the numbers for the first major city in America to end single-family zoning, Minneapolis. The prices of some single-family homes do indeed go up, but as Professor Kuhlmann argues, the price of some parcels must rise in order to encourage redevelopment and produce more affordable housing options for the city as a whole. Show notes:Kuhlmann, D. (2020). Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices: A (Very) Early Analysis of the Minneapolis 2040 Plan. Journal of the American Planning Association, 1-13.Manville, M., Monkkonen, P., & Lens, M. (2020). It’s time to end single-family zoning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(1), 106-112.99% Invisible, “Stuccoed in Time.” February 2, 2021.Einstein, K. L., Palmer, M., & Glick, D. M. (2019). Who participates in local government? Evidence from meeting minutes. Perspectives on politics, 17(1), 28-46.Einstein, K. L., Glick, D. M., & Palmer, M. (2019). Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis. Cambridge University Press.Freemark, Y. (2020). Upzoning Chicago: Impacts of a zoning reform on property values and housing construction. Urban Affairs Review, 56(3), 758-789.Andersen, M. (Jun 21 2019). This is what a street looks like 39 years after legalizing fourplexes. Sightline Institute.Andersen, M. (Aug 1 2021). We ran the rent numbers on Portland’s 7 newly legal home options. Sightline Institute.

Institutions like the U.S. Census Bureau offer us a wealth of statistics about the places people live: household incomes; demographics like race, ethnicity, age, and gender; how many people own or rent their homes, how much they pay, and where they moved from. We know much less about how people perceive their neighborhoods — how they feel about the places they live, regardless of their objective conditions, and how that affects their ability or willingness to stay. What do we miss when we overlook these subjective feelings and impressions? Dr. Prentiss Dantzler of the University of Toronto joins us to discuss his work on this subject, and to share some of the surprising ways that neighborhood perceptions relate to residential mobility.Show notes:Jones, A., & Dantzler, P. (2021). Neighbourhood perceptions and residential mobility. Urban Studies, 58(9), 1792-1810.Ciorici, P., & Dantzler, P. (2019). Neighborhood satisfaction: A study of a low-income urban community. Urban affairs review, 55(6), 1702-1730.Leventhal, T., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2003). Moving to opportunity: an experimental study of neighborhood effects on mental health. American journal of public health, 93(9), 1576-1582.Sampson, R. J. (2017). Collective efficacy theory: Lessons learned and directions for future inquiry. In Taking stock (pp. 149-167). Routledge.DeLuca, S., & Rosenblatt, P. (2017). Walking away from The Wire: Housing mobility and neighborhood opportunity in Baltimore. Housing policy debate, 27(4), 519-546.DeLuca, S., Wood, H., & Rosenblatt, P. (2019). Why poor families move (and where they go): Reactive mobility and residential decisions. City & Community, 18(2), 556-593.Korver-Glenn, E., Dantzler, P., & Howell, J. (2021). A critical intervention for urban sociology.Rodriguez, A. D. (2021). Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing. University of Georgia Press.Sharkey, P., & Faber, J. W. (2014). Where, when, why, and for whom do residential contexts matter? Moving away from the dichotomous understanding of neighborhood effects. Annual review of sociology, 40, 559-579.

Many local governments seek to extract public benefits, such as open space and low-income housing units, from new development. These benefits are often negotiated during the project approval process, or they may be tied to local zoning changes that allow for taller or denser development. How best should cities go about this process of “value capture”? Should they do it at all? Dr. Minjee Kim of Florida State University joins us to talk about Seattle and Boston’s very different approaches to value capture and “public benefit exactions,” and what lessons they hold for planners and advocates in other cities.Show notes:Kim, M. (2020). Negotiation or schedule-based? Examining the strengths and weaknesses of the public benefit exaction strategies of Boston and Seattle. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), 208-221.Kim, M. (2020). Upzoning and value capture: How US local governments use land use regulation power to create and capture value from real estate developments. Land Use Policy, 95, 104624.Manville, M. (2021). Value Capture Reconsidered: What if L.A. was Actually Building Too Little? UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.Nasar, J. L., & Grannis, P. (1999). Design review reviewed: Administrative versus discretionary methods. Journal of the American Planning Association, 65(4), 424-433.Explainer: Residual land value, how it can be changed by rezoning, and the rationale for tying value capture to zoning changes. (See especially the first 3 pages.)

Past research has shown that moving to a better neighborhood can improve life outcomes for children and adults, at least under certain conditions. However, these studies do not examine how impacts differ by race and ethnicity, and they tend to focus only on a narrow slice of the population, such as public housing residents. How does moving impact different households in the real world, outside of an experimental setting? We welcome Kristin Perkins of Georgetown University to the podcast to talk about her work, and the difficult (but perhaps unsurprising) finding that moving is more harmful to the wellbeing of Black and Latino children than white children.Show notes:Perkins, K. L. (2017). Reconsidering residential mobility: Differential effects on child wellbeing by race and ethnicity. Social science research, 63, 124-137.Chetty, R., Hendren, N., & Katz, L. F. (2016). The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children: New evidence from the Moving to Opportunity experiment. American Economic Review, 106(4), 855-902.Menendian, S., Gailes, A., & Gambhir, S. (2021). The Roots of Structural Racism: Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States. Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley.Perkins, K. L. (2007). Roosevelt and Rexford: Resettlement and its Results. Berkeley Planning Journal, 20(1).Perkins, K. L. (2017). Household instability during childhood and young adult outcomes (Doctoral dissertation).Perkins, K. L. (2017). Household complexity and change among children in the United States, 1984 to 2010. Sociological Science, 4, 701-724.

In the not-too-distant past, most multifamily rental housing was owned by small or midsize landlords. But over the past few decades the share of units owned by large, well-capitalized, shareholder-driven institutions has increased dramatically. What’s driving this change, and what does it mean for housing affordability and household stability? Martine August of the University of Waterloo joins us to talk about the “financialization” of rental housing in Canada, which is on a similar trajectory to many U.S. housing markets.Show notes: August, M. (2020). The financialization of Canadian multi-family rental housing: From trailer to tower. Journal of Urban Affairs, 42(7), 975-997.“Housing, Equity and Community Series: Making Rental Housing ‘Home’,” Nov. 20 Lewis Center event with Michael Lens, joined by Chancela Al-Mansour, executive director of Housing Rights Center, and Robert Galardi, chief inspector with the LA Housing + Community Investment Department. https://youtu.be/cEBXQzXQ5wg

We’ve known for many years that building more homes helps keep prices in check at the regional or metro area level, but what about the house down the street? When a new apartment building goes up nearby, does the “supply effect” of more homes lower rents, or does the “demand effect” send a signal to nearby property owners and potential residents that causes rents to go up? Evan Mast of the Upjohn Institute joins Mike and Shane to discuss two recent papers he’s worked on that help shed light on this important and controversial question.Show notes:Asquith, B., Mast, E., & Reed, D. (2019). Supply shock versus demand shock: The local effects of new housing in low-income areas. Upjohn Institute WP, 19-316.Mast, E. (2019). The effect of new market-rate housing construction on the low-income housing market. Upjohn Institute WP, 19-307.Li, X. (2019). Do new housing units in your backyard raise your rents. Working paper.Guerrieri, V., Hartley, D., & Hurst, E. (2013). Endogenous gentrification and housing price dynamics. Journal of Public Economics, 100, 45-60.Phillips, S., Manville, M., & Lens, M. (2021). Research Roundup: The Effect of Market-Rate Development on Neighborhood Rents. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.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.Liu, L., McManus, D. A., & Yannopoulos, E. (2020). Geographic and Temporal Variation in Housing Filtering Rates. Available at SSRN.“Opportunities and Obstacles for Rental Housing Registries,” Jan. 20 Lewis Center event with Assembly member Buffy Wicks and Catherine Bracy. https://youtu.be/vaDTWHxk-I8 

The federal government passed the Fair Housing Act more than 50 years ago. In that time considerable progress has been made at reducing discrimination in the housing market, but the law’s mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing” and reverse patterns of segregation has been only lightly enforced. Katherine O’Regan of NYU, and formerly of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, joins Mike and Shane to talk about the legacy of the Fair Housing Act, the changing nature of neighborhood segregation and opportunity in America, and recent efforts to proactively foster inclusive communities using fair housing laws.Show notes:O’Regan, K. (2018). The Fair Housing Act Today: Current Context and Challenges at 50. Housing Policy Debate.O’Regan, K., & Zimmerman, K. (2019). The Potential of the Fair Housing Act's Affirmative Mandate and HUD's AFFH Rule. Cityscape, 21(1), 87-98.Kerner Commission Report, including a summary by UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute.

As a general rule, more parking means more vehicle ownership and more driving in cities. However, how people pay for that parking (or if they pay at all) also affects travel behavior: when parking is included in the price of housing — when it is “bundled” — people also drive more and use transit less than when the price of parking is “unbundled” from housing costs, even when households own cars in both situations. Planners have long known that reducing parking makes housing more affordable, transit more appealing, and cities more environmentally sustainable and walkable, but what do the different impacts of bundled and unbundled parking have on cities, and how should planners and advocates think about it? Michael Manville of UCLA joins Shane and Mike to talk about parking requirements, travel behavior, and the many ways we all end up paying for a place to store our cars.Show notes:Manville, M., & Pinski, M. (2020). Parking behaviour: Bundled parking and travel behavior in American cities. Land Use Policy.Manville, M. (2017). Bundled parking and vehicle ownership: Evidence from the American Housing Survey. Journal of Transport and Land Use.Manville, M. (2018). Transition costs and transportation reform: The case of SFpark. Research in Transportation Business & Management.Manville, M., (2020). Roads, Prices, and Shortages: A Gasoline Parable.

Most of us are familiar with how subprime loans were disproportionately (and predatorily) targeted at Black and Latino households during the 2000s housing bubble leading up to the Great Recession. Less well known is that disparate treatment in mortgage lending is making a comeback alongside the recovery of the housing market. José Loya of UCLA joins Shane and Mike to talk about ethnic and racial disparities in access to mortgage credit in the years following the housing crash.Show notes:Loya, J., & Flippen, C. (2020). The Great Recession and Ethno-Racial Disparities in Access to Mortgage Credit. Social Problems.Noble, Safiya Umoja. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press. Phillips, Shane. (February 2, 2021). A “Rental Pension” Program to Compete with Homeownership. Better Institutions.Phillips, Shane. (March 11, 2021). Renting is Terrible. Owning is Worse. The Atlantic.

Which arguments against new housing are most effective? Residents were asked how they felt about a hypothetical housing development proposed nearby, then told about the concerns of some of their neighbors: traffic congestion, neighborhood character, strained services, or developer profit. Surprisingly, the developer profit argument was the most effective at reducing support for new housing, although opposition declined when residents were informed that the developers also provided community benefits with their projects. Paavo Monkkonen of UCLA joins us to discuss these and other findings from his research.Show notes: Monkkonen, P., & Manville, M. (2019). Opposition to development or opposition to developers? Experimental evidence on attitudes toward new housing. Journal of Urban Affairs, 41(8), 1123-1141.Hankinson, M. (2018). When do renters behave like homeowners? High rent, price anxiety, and NIMBYism. American Political Science Review, 112(3), 473-493.Piecing it Together: A Framing Playbook for Affordable Housing Advocates. Enterprise Community Partners.Whittemore, A. H., & BenDor, T. K. (2019). Exploring the acceptability of densification: How positive framing and source credibility can change attitudes. Urban Affairs Review, 55(5), 1339-1369.Paavo’s CV!