Law Commons^™

The Failed Federalism Of Affordable Housing: Why States Don't Use Housing Vouchers, Noah Kazis

Articles

This Article uncovers a critical disjuncture in our system of providing affordable rental housing. At the federal level, the oldest, fiercest debate in low-income housing policy is between project-based and tenant-based subsidies: should the government help build new affordable housing projects or help renters afford homes on the private market? But at the state and local levels, it is as if this debate never took place. The federal government (following most experts) employs both strategies, embracing tenant-based assistance as more cost-effective and offering tenants greater choice and mobility. But this Article shows that state and local housing voucher programs are …

Tiny Homes: A Big Solution To American Housing Insecurity, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

“There’s no place like home,” said Dorothy. Yet, millions of people in the United States may face eviction, foreclosure, or homelessness in 2021 and beyond. America is on the brink of an unprecedented housing crisis in the wake of Covid-19. The federal government, and various states and localities, have taken actions to avert a housing crisis in the aftermath of Covid 19. While these actions have undeniably helped mitigate widespread foreclosure and eviction crises, they do not fully address the more fundamental American housing challenge—an inadequate supply of affordable housing at all income levels, a longstanding problem that Covid-19 has …

Equitable, Affordable And Climate-Cognizant Housing Construction, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The almost universal sentiment by a growing body of physical and social scientists is that climate change--with its floods, drought, heat, and cold-- portend losses of life, communities, property, and the rhythms of living. Some are more vulnerable to these impacts than others: individuals and the poor, who through official government policy and self-interest in the housing markets, have been relegated to live in poorly-constructed and poorly-placed structures--in the wake of ocean surges; in the path of strong winds; near hazardous and noxious facilities; stranded in urban heat islands. Failing to heed climate change omens will lead to a world …

Challenges And Opportunities For Hotel-To-Housing Conversions In Nyc, Noah Kazis, Elisabeth Appel, Matt Murphy

Other Publications

As the country continues to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath, policymakers in New York City and Albany have debated how to support the conversion of hotels into housing—and especially affordable housing—as part of a solution to the city’s ongoing housing crisis. The basic intuition is compelling. COVID has forced the shuttering of many commercial establishments, especially in hard-hit New York City. In certain sectors, the effect has been particularly large: these include hotels devastated by shutdowns in tourism, international travel, and business travel. At the same time as these spaces are sitting empty, though, Americans have faced …

Market-Anticipatory Approaches To Rural Property Vacancy, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Towards A Law Of Inclusive Planning: A Response To “Fair Housing For A Non-Sexist City”, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Noah Kazis’s important article, Fair Housing for a Non-sexist City, shows how law shapes the contours of neighborhoods and embeds forms of inequality, and how fair housing law can provide a remedy. Kazis surfaces two dimensions of housing that generate inequality and that are sometimes invisible. Kazis highlights the role of planning and design rules – the seemingly identity-neutral zoning, code enforcement, and land-use decisions that act as a form of law. Kazis also reveals how gendered norms underlie those rules and policies. These aspects of Kazis’s project link to commentary on the often invisible, gendered norms that shape …

The Pieces Of Housing Integration, Kristen Barnes

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding the enactment of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, accomplishing racially-integrated housing across the United States remains an unattained goal. The costs associated with this failure are innumerable. Black Americans have endured harms in many areas, including health, education, wealth, and employment. More broadly, the nation has incurred considerable socioeconomic and political costs. In the interdisciplinary book, Moving Toward Integration, authors Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff analyze why the promise of racially-integrated housing remains unfulfilled and identify noteworthy strategies for changing course. Engaging with their arguments, this article highlights several structural impediments to altering racial housing …

The Costs And Benefits Of Affordable Housing: A Partial Solution To The Conflict Of Competing Goods, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, I extend a prior inquiry into the costs borne by society due to the lack of enough decent, affordable housing units. I previously outlined those costs and suggested a combination of public cost savings and public and private benefits that would accrue by providing that housing. I posited that the savings and benefits, in the aggregate, could at least substantially offset the costs and might even exceed them. If that is so, I queried, why has society not produced the needed units? In answering that question, I offered several possible responses: inadequate resources, racism, and public choice …

Community In Property: Lessons From Tiny Homes Villages, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

The evolving role of community in property law remains undertheorized. While legal scholars have analyzed the commons, common interest communities, and aspects of the sharing economy, the recent rise of intentional co-housing communities re-mains relatively understudied. This Article analyzes tiny homes villages for unhoused people in the United States, as examples of co-housing communities that create a new housing tenure—stewardship—and demonstrate the growing importance of community, co-management, sustainability, and flexibility in con-temporary property law. These villages’ property relationships challenge the predominance of individualized, exclusionary, long-term, fee simple ownership in contemporary property law and exemplify property theories such as progressive property …

The Right To Housing: Possessing Home In California, Golden Gate University School Of Law

GGU Law Review Blog

In an area where the median home costs $820,000, San Francisco’s Bay Area is currently experiencing an affordable housing crisis. Unsurprisingly 25,951 people lack stable housing in the Bay Area. A recent Brookings Institute income inequality study ranked the San Francisco metropolitan area (including San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin Counties) the third highest in income inequality in the United States. In the Bay Area, where the median fair market rate for a two bedroom apartment is $3,121, the highest earners were making eleven times more than the lowest.

Among those most affected by the rising rents are minority …

Affordable Housing: Of Inefficiency, Market Distortion, And Government Failure, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay, I examine the types of costs that are imposed on society as a whole due to the absence of a sufficient number of decent housing units that are affordable to the low-income population. These costs present themselves in relation to health care, education, employment, productivity, homelessness, and incarceration. Some of the costs are direct expenditures while others are the result of lost opportunities.

My hypothesis is that these costs are significant and offer, at the very least, a substantial offset to the cost of creating and subsidizing the operation of the necessary number of affordable housing units …

Do You Believe In Ghost Apartments?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

According to the popular press, expensive cities are being overrun by "ghost apartments"- condominiums owned by wealthy foreigners, but used as investments rather than being rented out to local residents. This article points out that such apartments are in fact a very small percentage of housing supply, even in some cities that are supposedly overran with such condos.More importantly, the existence of new “ghost apartments” does not justify exclusionary zoning policies. If a city popular with foreign investors discourages construction of new housing, investors are likely to purchase older housing units, outbidding local residents for those units. In this scenario, …

More Housing Near Public Transit: Relocating The Bay Area’S Poor, Maneesha Birdee

Poverty Law Conference & Symposium

Housing discrepancy, coupled with an environmental push set in place a decade ago to reduce car-based greenhouse gas emissions, propelled a housing and public transportation bill. Senator Scott Weiner, along with Senator Nancy Skinner and Assembly Member Phil Ting, created Senate Bill 827 (“Bill”). The Bill proposes building denser housing near public transportation, thereby allowing more people to live close to their jobs. The Bill was introduced in January 2018 and sparked feverous debate over California housing. It was amended two times—once in March 2018 and once in April 2018. Two weeks after its April amendment, in a lively senate …

Narrowly-Tailored Privatization, Brandon Weiss

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Affordable housing projects in the United States have served as an integral part, and often the backbone, of broader community economic development (CED) initiatives for as long as community development corporations (CDCs) have existed. As the field of CED evolves, and critical thinking about the role of law and lawyers within it continues to develop, it is important that this thinking include a rigorous reevaluation of how affordable housing strategies can best support the broader aims of CED. Evidence from eighty years of significant federal policy intervention in affordable housing, fifty years of experimentation by CDCs, and thirty years of …

Side By Side: Revitalizing Urban Cores And Ensuring Residential Diversity, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

Fifty years ago, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed a hope that someday people of all races would “live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing.” Residential patterns in America today, however, remain highly segregated by race and income. The Fair Housing Act outlawed overt housing discrimination and unjustified discriminatory impacts, but zoning laws and housing finance structures have continued to impede housing integration, leaving communities nearly as racially homogenous as they were in the mid 20th century. These separate neighborhoods are far from equal. The majority of people who reside in financially distressed city-center neighborhoods are …

Equitably Housing (Almost) Half A Nation Of Renters, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

America’s population of renters is growing faster than the supply of available rental units. Rental vacancies are reaching new lows, and rental rates are reaching new highs. Millions of former homeowners have lost their homes in foreclosure and, due to today’s much tighter mortgage underwriting realities, will not realistically re-enter the ranks of owner-occupants. For a number of reasons – variety of incomes, different stages in life, and a range of personal preferences and lifestyles – homeownership is not for everyone. And yet federal government housing policy has consistently prioritized homeownership over renter-specific issues, such as affordability and rental supply …

Building Community, Still Thirsty For Justice: Supporting Community Development Efforts In Baltimore, Renee Hatcher, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Baltimore is a city of many challenges, but it possesses true communitybased strength. The city’s residents and community organizations are its greatest assets. This article highlights some of the community’s work and how the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law (CDC) supports this work through its experiential learning curriculum.

The challenges facing Baltimore’s communities (systemic disinvestment, structural racism, vacant buildings, unemployment, and the criminalization of poverty, to name a few) existed long before the national media coverage and uprising surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury …

Putting Exclusionary Zoning In Its Place: Affordable Housing And Geographical Scale, Christopher Serkin, Leslie Wellington

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The term “exclusionary zoning” typically describes a particular phenomenon: suburban large-lot zoning that reduces the supply of developable land and drives up housing prices. But exclusionary zoning in its modern form also occurs both within the urban core and region-wide. Exclusionary zoning at the sub-local and regional scales results in property values that fully capitalize the benefits of living in higher-wage regions, and the value of local public goods (like high-quality schools). Lower-income households then cannot meaningfully access those advantages, even if every municipality accommodates its fair share of regional need. The long-standing focus of exclusionary zoning on the content …

Unaffordable “Affordable” Housing: Challenging The U.S. Department Of Housing And Urban Development Area Median Income, Michael E. Stone

Center for Social Policy Publications

There is no such thing as “affordable” housing. Affordability is not a characteristic of housing: It is a relationship between housing and people. For some people, all housing is affordable, no matter how expensive. For others, no housing is affordable, no matter how cheap.

Massachusetts' System Redesign To End Homelessness: An Overview And Assessment, Donna H. Friedman, Ghazal Zulfiqar

Center for Social Policy Publications

The Clayton-Mathews and Wilson 2003 analysis of Massachusetts’ expenditures of state and federal dollars to address family homelessness documented a serious system misalignment of public resources: that is, 80% of state and federal resources were tied up in shelter provision, while only 20%, including rental assistance, were designated for homelessness prevention (Clayton-Matthews and Wilson, 2003). Their analysis demonstrated what many had long suspected: if homelessness is to be ended in Massachusetts, fundamental changes would be needed to shift the state system from shelter-oriented toward prevention-oriented. Both the Romney and the Patrick administrations have clearly prioritized this objective with broad-based support …

A Quiet Crisis In America: Meeting The Affordable Housing Needs Of The Invisible Low-Income Healthy Seniors, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

Part I of this article discusses population statistics in greater detail, exploring available financial demographics of seniors and showing that many seniors are likely to be in need of affordable housing today, and that many more will likely join this group in the future. Part II discusses the role of the federal and state governments in providing affordable senior housing and concludes that these programs have typically failed to yield effective results on a wide enough basis. Part III focuses on the impact that local governments can have immediately in helping to address the affordable senior housing crisis through the …

Maturing Subsidized Mortgages: The Next Frontier Of The Expiring Use Crisis, Emily Achtenberg

Center for Social Policy Publications

Over approximately the next decade, close to 17,000 affordable housing units could be lost in Massachusetts as their federally- and state-subsidized mortgages mature, terminating all associated use and affordability restrictions. Most of this housing, developed 30-40 years ago under various federal and state mortgage subsidy programs, is only partially assisted with project-based Section 8 rental subsidy; but 100% of the units are affordable due to budget-based (and tiered) rent restrictions.

To the extent that the properties have Section 8 assistance, the maturing mortgage crisis overlaps with larger crisis of expiring Section 8 subsidy contracts. However, the unique characteristics of this …

Exclusionary Eminent Domain, David A. Dana

Faculty Working Papers

This Article explores the phenomenon of "exclusionary eminent domain" – the exercise of eminent domain that has the effect of excluding low-income households from an otherwise predominantly or entirely middle-class or wealthy neighborhood or locality, whether or not exclusion itself was the purpose of the condemnation. All condemnations exclude the condemned owner (and his or her tenants, if any) from the condemned property. Exercises of what I am calling "exclusionary eminent domain" are doubly exclusive because the displaced residents are unable to afford new housing in the same neighborhood or locality as their now-condemned, former homes. In exclusionary eminent domain, …

Preventing Homelessness And Promoting Housing Stability: A Comparative Analysis, Donna H. Friedman, Jennifer Raymond, Kimberly Puhala, Tatjana Meschede, Julia Tripp, Mandira Kala

Center for Social Policy Publications

This final evaluation report is the culmination of a three-year investment of time, energy and resources involving 28 Massachusetts nonprofit organizations: 7 foundations, led by the Boston Foundation, The Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development; and Homes for Families which joined with the Center for Social Policy team to conduct 10 focus groups involving 72 parents and individuals who shared their perspectives on homelessness prevention, with the guidance of a consumer advisory board involving six persons who have experienced homelessness. Collectively, we engaged in this evaluation effort because we believed that the outcomes of interventions, practice experience of service …

Local Inclusionary Housing Programs: Meeting Housing Needs, John R. Nolon, Jessica A. Bacher

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article explores the expansive legal authority that local governments in many states have to meet housing needs directly by providing for the production of new affordable homes. There is not a great deal of scholarship on the subject as we approach it. The emphasis in the academic literature in the field of affordable housing is on top-down, systemic, or theoretical solutions: urging reforms in federal and state finance programs, imploring courts to penalize localities that engage in exclusionary zoning, describing in detail a variety of inclusionary zoning techniques, or explaining relevant theories or the economics of the issue of …

15th Annual Forum On Affordable Housing & Community Development Law: 2006 Michael Scher Award Given To William C. Kelly, Nestor M. Davidson, Leonard A. Zax

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Promoting The Promise Manufactured Homes Provide For Affordable Housing, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

This Article raises issues for HUD and other policy makers to consider with respect to MHIA programs and broader mobile home policies. It also seeks to spark public awareness about the potential that mobile homes provide for affordable housing. The time is ripe for policy makers on federal and state levels to craft safety and financing regulations that take into account the unique character and complexities of mobile home transactions and mobile home ownership. Furthermore, the MHIA should ignite mobile home manufacturers, retailers, lenders, and consumer advocates to join forces to help alleviate burdens of mobile home ownership and provide …

Rhetoric And Realities Of Gentrification: Reply To Powell And Spencer, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Gentrification represents one of the most encouraging trends in city life since the 1960s. That may be a sad commentary on the fate of American cities or on our urban policies, but it is nevertheless true. The return of affluent people to urban living offers the possibility of reversing declining populations and municipal revenues, permitting enhanced spending on basic services, and increasing employment and educational opportunities. It also brings greater ethnic and economic diversity, which can contribute to a more humane social and cultural life. The great drawback to gentrification is that increased demand for housing increases rents, at least …

Two Cheers For Gentrification, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The very word "gentrification" implies distaste. Advocates for the poor and ethnic minorities see affluent whites bidding up the prices for urban housing to levels that force poor families out, depriving them of affordable housing, perhaps rendering them homeless, and changing the character of a neighborhood from one that reflects distinct ethnic and class needs and cultural traditions into a bland emporium for expensive consumer goods. Sometimes historic preservation laws are indicted as particular culprits in setting this dynamic in motion. A result of these perceptions is that the legal literature on gentrification, in general, and historic preservation both reflect …

What Explains Crowding In California?, California Research Bureau

California Agencies

Crowding (defined as more than one person per room) has been rising in California. The average household size (number of persons in the household) has increased as well. A number of observers believe that this increase in household size reflects a rise in crowding in response to the lack of affordable housing. Concerns about whether new building construction was enough for the increased demand posed by California's growing population, emerged with the housing market conditions of the late 1990s. Annual housing production in the 1990s fell well below that of the 1980s, and lagged the growth in new jobs and …