On Our Radar

WMUR, March 25, 2024, New Hampshire Mayors Say Housing, Homelessness Are Top Issues For Cities In Franklin, Mayor Desiree McLaughlin said the pressure on low- and fixed-income residents is getting worse. “We have a lot of seniors who’ve been priced out of their homes or their apartments,” she said. Cities are scrambling to add capacity […]

Gothamist, March 21, 2024, A Wealthy NJ Town Is Resisting Affordable Housing Plans. Its Defiance Could Be Costly. Millburn Township officials have defied multiple court orders to move forward with development of a 75-unit, 100% affordable housing complex in the heart of their upscale downtown — and last month, the Millburn Township Committee unanimously voted

The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2024, Windowless Rooms And Town-Gown Battles: How Student Housing Got Expensive The boom in private student housing has set off fights in communities surrounding campuses that have been overwhelmed with private developments. At least five have moved to temporarily ban or regulate student apartments. Housing costs for students living on

The Real Deal, March 25, 2024, Good Cause, Bad Cause: Albany’s Recipe For Failure The Empire State has been losing this battle for a while. New York once had 45 House of Representatives members. It now has 26. Population shifts have shrunk the delegation by 42 percent. As Gov. Kathy Hochul keeps saying, we have

Aspen Institute, March 18, 2024, Same Income, Same 401(k), Different Account Balance: The Critical Role Of Retirement Plan Design In Addressing Racial And Gender Retirement Savings Gaps To realize the promise of inclusive retirement savings, we have work to do. First, we have to expand access to the 57 million workers—disproportionately workers of color, women, and workers

AP, March 21, 2024, Micro-Apartments Are Back After Nearly A Century, As Need For Affordable Housing Soars Boarding houses that rented single rooms to low-income, blue-collar or temporary workers were prevalent across the U.S. in the early 1900s. Known as single room occupancy units, or SROs, they started to disappear in the postwar years amid

The Conversation, March 19, 2024, How Ghost Streams And Redlining’s Legacy Lead To Unfairness In Flood Risk, In Detroit And Elsewhere As the planet warms, severe rains – and the flooding that follows – may become even more intense and frequent in cities like Detroit that have aging and undersized stormwater infrastructure. These extreme events

Phys.org, March 20, 2024, ‘Modern-Day Redlining’: Research Investigates Wall Street-Backed Rental Market Carol Camp Yeakey, the Marshall S. Snow Professor of Arts & Sciences and founding director of Washington University in St. Louis’s Center on Urban Research & Public Policy, is leading a two-year national study to examine the surge of corporate investors in the

The New York Times, March 20, 2024, The Bombshell Case That Will Transform The Housing Market For decades, an invisible hand has been guiding and controlling the American real estate industry, dictating how much buyers and sellers pay to their agents and how homes are sold. A few days ago, after a stunning legal settlement,

Politico, March 30, 2024, DOJ Escalates Price-Fixing Probe On Housing Market The Justice Department is expanding its probe of the rental housing market, opening a criminal investigation of a top developer of property pricing software and some of its customers, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. The DOJ is looking into the

ARL Now, March 19, 2024, A New Era Of Housing Questions For Arlington One Year After Passing Missing Middle A year after the passage of Arlington’s “Missing Middle” ordinance last March, the jury is out on the long-term implications of the zoning change. Challenges include a substantial slowdown in Missing Middle applications and continued opposition

WHYY, March 19, 2024, Rise In Residential Development In Germantown Sparks Optimism–And Caution Over the last few years, Germantown has experienced a wave of residential construction that’s seen at least a dozen developers enter the market, a multimillion-dollar shift that’s become a hot topic of conversation among residents. While some think the influx has the

The Washington Post, March 7, 2024, Biden To Propose New $5,000 Tax Credit For First-Time Home Buyers President Biden will propose a set of new housing initiatives in Thursday’s State of the Union address, including tax credits to offset high mortgage rates for first-time home buyers and encourage people to move out of starter homes and

NPQ, February 29, 2024, The Economic Case Against Work Requirements Work requirements for public benefits programs have roots in the long history of slavery and its afterlife in the United States. But they are not just racist—they are ineffective and bad for the economy. Modern work requirements imposed through welfare reform in 1996 have now