Small-scale developers are an important part of building strength and prosperity. If anything, that’s more true now than it was before COVID-19.
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A lot of older folks have more house than they need. A lot of single people need an affordable to live. A Colorado nonprofit is helping solve both these problems at once…but not only these problems.
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The special tax districts used to finance suburban expansion have been big trouble in past recessions. They’re worth watching now too.
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A strong town is one that can adapt incrementally over time. Here’s how a group of climbing enthusiasts helped a Michigan college town do just that.
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The way we grow our cities today produces a few winners and many losers. Here's how to get back to places that serve all of us.
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A wealthy Bay Area suburb is resisting new development. This is raising questions not just about California’s housing crisis, but about who gets to decide a city’s housing future.
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How do you solve a problem like the housing crisis? And who’s to blame? The answers probably aren’t as simple as we’d like them to be.
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California has the nation’s worst housing crisis. It’s also the place mired in the worst gridlock when it comes to how to respond to it.
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More research from the Upjohn Institute, following an attention-grabbing study last year, helps us understand the cause-and-effect chains that result when a new apartment building opens in a low-income area.
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Investing in a supposedly “smart” future won’t overcome the failure to get the “dumb” stuff right. The former mayor of Seattle explains.
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If you want to see more homes built in your city, good urban design isn’t your enemy. And neither are those who insist on it.
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Are we treating the symptoms of the housing crisis, or the underlying disease?
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Three housing stories that got our attention in 2019, and the lessons we should take from each one.
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Don’t underestimate the power of small-scale development—if undertaken at a large scale, by many hands—to transform our cities for the better.
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Affordable housing shortages in California (and other states) are worsened by a go-big-or-go-home model of development: we throw up so many barriers in the face of incremental change that the only building projects that remain viable are huge, complicated ones with many possible points of failure.
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California recently passed a bill that is supposed to help tenants facing soaring rents. Here’s how it could have the opposite effect—not only hurting renters but making the state’s housing crisis even worse.
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Making big developers “give back” to the community by running a gauntlet of concessions and fees seems like it should weaken their clout. Here’s why it actually does the opposite.
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We used to have a different name for the modest dwellings that now get labeled “tiny houses.” For most of history, this was simply a house—a low-cost way for people to put down roots in a place and begin to grow some wealth for themselves and the neighborhood.
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Think tanks and government agencies aren’t solving our housing crisis nearly as fast as our cities need. Should we let the public have a shot—and give the person with the winning idea a big prize if they can make a dent?
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California recently passed a statewide rent control bill. Will it protect tenants, alleviate the housing crisis, and strengthen communities? Or is it another massive #california intervention that will do little to clean up the mess made by the LAST massive intervention?
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