New Book: Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis

New Book: Charles Marohn & Daniel Herriges, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis (2024). Overview below:

Housing is an investment. Investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people experience distress.

This is the housing trap. It’s time to escape. In Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Solution to the Housing Crisis, renowned urbanists Charles (Chuck) Marohn and Daniel Herriges introduce a first-of-its-kind discussion of the tension between housing as a financial product and housing as shelter. This is the key insight that’s been missing from the Housing Crisis Conversation; and the insight that can help cities fight back against the crisis from the bottom-up.

This book offers a serious, yet accessible, history of housing policy in the United States and explains how it led us to this point in time: where we face a market that is rigged against people who, only a few decades ago, could have been homeowners or stable, long-term rentals.

Only local change, on a neighborhood or city-wide scale, can begin to restore balance to the housing market.

New Article: Assessing the Performance of Place-Based Economic Development Incentives: What’s the Word on the Street?

New Article: Matthew J. Rossman, Assessing the Performance of Place-Based Economic Development Incentives: What’s the Word on the Street?, Washburn Law Journal (forthcoming). Abstract below:

Although politically popular, place-based economic development incentives have had limited success and proven difficult to evaluate. Unlike most legal scholarship on this topic, this article takes a qualitative approach in examining them. It studies the performance of four distinct types of development incentives intended to alleviate economic distress, using insight gathered from interviews with business owners, development professionals, and community members in six adjoining neighborhoods, where past efforts at revitalization have failed despite locational advantages.

The challenges faced by economically distressed places are typically varied and complex. The qualitative sampling techniques employed in this article’s research generated nuanced, ‘on the ground’ insight that is a critical addition for understanding what features of economic development incentives actually influence business decisions and the community impact these decisions make. This contrasts with past studies that focused on changes in secondary data points (e.g., neighborhood median income, commercial property values) as the primary indicators of whether an incentive works. Both qualitative and quantitative information are necessary to get the full picture.

Significant takeaways from this study include a clear consensus among interviewees that incentives that are carefully tailored and only selectively or competitively available generate greater community benefit than widely available incentives that reward any business activity within a community. Interviewees criticized inefficiencies caused by what they viewed as unnecessary red tape associated with certain types of incentive programs. Additionally, and of particular note, interviewees emphasized the value of long-standing incentive programs that are periodically evaluated and can be adapted to work out design flaws and to reflect changing circumstances. These takeaways hopefully spark interest and innovation among legislators and policymakers in crafting economic development incentives with greater potential to successfully revitalize distressed communities.

News Coverage: How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers

News Coverage: Vishaan Chakrabarti, How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers, N.Y. Times (Dec. 30, 2023). With good graphics.

Newish Book: The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

Newish Book: Nicholas Dawidoff, The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City (2022). Overview below:

A landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class, and violence, told through a murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American neighborhood.

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity.

In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy—victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby—Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Foremost are the unique challenges confronted by children like Major and Bobby coming of age in their “forgotten” neighborhood, steps from Yale University. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society and, writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, make this “the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America.”

The Other Side of Prospect is a reportorial tour de force, at once a sweeping account of how the injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations, and a beautifully written portrait of American city life, told through a group of unforgettable people and their intertwined experiences.

New Blog Post: Post-Pandemic Poverty is Rising in America’s Suburbs

New Blog Post: Alan Berube & Elizabeth Kneebone, Post-Pandemic Poverty is Rising in America’s Suburbs, SF Fed. Blog (Oct. 12, 2023).

News Coverage: Fighting for Anthony: The Struggle to Save Portland – New York Times

Source New York Times: Fighting for Anthony: The Struggle to Save Portland.

New Article: Checked Out: How LA Failed to Stop Landlord From Turning Low-Cost Housing Into Tourist Hotels – ProPublica

Checked Out: How LA Failed to Stop Landlord From Turning Low-Cost Housing Into Tourist Hotels – ProPublica.

New Article: Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

New Article: Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Peter Bergman, Stefanie DeLuca, Lawrence Katz, & Christopher Palmer, Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice, forthcoming Am. Econ. Rev. (June 2023) (note, link includes link to full paper as well as slides, supplemental material). Abstract below:

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An alternative explanation is that they do not move to high-opportunity areas because of a lack of information or barriers that prevent them from making such moves.

We test between these explanations using a two phase randomized controlled trial with housing voucher recipients in Seattle and King County. We first provided a bundle of resources to facilitate moves to high-upward-mobility neighborhoods: information about high-opportunity areas, short-term financial assistance, customized assistance during the housing search process, and connections to landlords. This bundled intervention increased the fraction of families who moved to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% in the control group to 53% in the treatment group.

To understand the mechanisms underlying this effect, we ran a second phase with three arms: (1) information about high-opportunity areas and financial assistance only; (2) reduced support services in addition to information and financial assistance; and (3) full support services, as in the original bundled intervention. The full services had five times as large a treatment effect as the information and financial incentives treatment and three times as large an effect as the reduced support intervention, showing that high-intensity, customized support enables moves to opportunity.

Interviews with randomly selected families reveal that the program succeeded by relaxing families’ bandwidth constraints and addressing their specific needs, from identifying suitable units to providing emotional support to brokering with landlords. Families induced to move to higher opportunity areas tend to stay in their new neighborhoods in subsequent years and report higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction after moving. Our findings imply that many low-income families do not have a strong preference to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers in the housing search process are a central driver of residential segregation by income.

New Article: Housing Trusts and Resilient Cities: Hierarchy, Resources, and Resilience

Marc Lane Roark, Housing Trusts and Resilient Cities: Hierarchy, Resources, and Resilience, Chapter in RECONCEIVING EQUALITY AND FREEDOM: VULNERABILITY, DEPENDENCY, AND THE RESPONSIVE STATE (Edward Elgar Publishing 2023). Abstract Below:

Cities, as a part of the state, are vulnerable human institutions that seek out their own self-serving needs for resilience while also doling out resilience to others. Housing is an area that presents multiple threats to cities. The failure to adequately address housing needs in the face of growing affordability challenges can manifest in political legitimacy challenges by social movements. Additionally, the link between housing precarity, poverty and criminal activity can spur critiques from property owners that the city isn’t doing enough to protect their values. Finally, cities always face legitimacy questions around city finance, access to resources for large-scale problems, impacts of taxation on local owners and residents.

In that context, the housing trust originated as a way for the city to address ongoing challenges around housing that emerged as the Federal Government withdrew funding for local housing programs – namely public housing. The housing trust emerged as a way for cities to fund important initiatives around affordable housing (such as homelessness services, maintenance of housing infrastructure, and local housing programs) while remaining revenue neutral in city budgets. The housing trust thus allowed cities to protect certain lines of revenue dedicated to housing initiatives, while tapping resources that facially did not amount to increased tax burdens on local citizens. This chapter unpacks how the housing trust was born under these constraints, responding to the resilience needs of the city in the wake of threats to its political legitimacy around housing.

New Article: The Failed Promise of Installment Fines

New Article: Beth A. Colgan & Jean Galbraith, The Failed Promise of Installment Fines, U of Penn. L. Sch., Pub. L. Rsch. Paper No. 23-08, Univ. Penn. L. Rev. Forthcoming (SSRN 2023). Abstract below:

In the 1970s, the Supreme Court prohibited the then-common practice of incarcerating criminal defendants because they lacked the money to immediately pay off their fines and fees. The Court suggested that states could instead put defendants on installment payment plans. As this Article shows, this suggestion came against a backdrop of impressive success stories about installment fines—including earlier experiments in which selected defendants had reliably paid off modest fines through carefully calibrated payment plans. Yet as this Article also shows, installment fines practices of today differ significantly from those early experiments, as lawmakers have increased fine amounts, added on fees, surcharges, and restitution, and penalized nonpayment through additional costs and other sanctions. This has turned installment fines into tools of long-term oppression. Further, the early experiments were only ever limited solutions that left behind people in the most precarious financial circumstances, widened the government’s net around only those of limited means, and raised the risk that crime policy would be driven by revenue generation aims rather than justice. Those problems continue today. For all too many, installment fines are unaffordable, endless, and arbitrarily administered—and applied instead of better and more equitable solutions. We close the Article by arguing that the present-day uses of installment fines merit both constitutional challenge and policy reform.