Housing Perspectives (from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies) The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies advances understanding of housing issues and informs policy.
“… We’re finally seeing the record growth in renters slow down, but while the market has responded to rental housing needs for higher-income households, there are alarming trends that suggest a growing inability to supply housing that is affordable for middle- and working-class renters, let alone those with very low incomes. Addressing these challenges will require bold leadership and hard choices from both the public and private sector.”
“In this brief, [Jessica A. Carson and Marybeth J. Mattingly] use interview and focus group data to describe some of the ways that restricted rural housing stock affects working families in two rural New England counties, and explore solutions proposed by rural residents and experts to make housing affordable …
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“Subsidies and publicly funded programs can play a part in alleviating the challenges of affordable rural housing, but addressing the issue of affordable housing in rural places will require a variety of approaches. For instance, at the local level, residents can encourage local zoning and planning boards to align town regulations with “inclusionary zoning” practices, such as requiring a certain percentage of housing units to meet affordability standards and offering incentives to developers for constructing affordable dwellings. Municipalities might also loosen or alter zoning restrictions to reduce lot size requirements and allow construction of structures other than traditional single-family
dwellings, including duplexes, in-law apartments, backyard cottages, townhouses, or bungalow courts.”
Building homes for extremely low-income people allows other homes to filter up to people in need—a better bet than waiting for luxury units to trickle down.
Author, Miriam Axel-Lute – November 2, 2017
“There’s a lot of talk about how homes will “filter down.” The argument goes that building new luxury housing will allow the wealthiest people to move into new housing, and (if the supply outstrips demand), eventually what had been high-end housing will command less money and will “filter down” to be affordable to lower income levels. Just how well this works, for whom, and how quickly is the subject of muchdebate, which I won’t wade into right now.”
“But here’s the thing we don’t talk about enough: developing affordable housing in a tight, high-cost market also increases overall affordability through filtering! Just in the other direction—it trickles up.”
The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies advances understanding of housing issues and informs policy.
