Since 2016, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority has offered door-to-door trips from on-demand shuttles. Here’s what the transit operator has learned.

San Diego County last year saw its GDP rise 1.4% to $261.7 billion — bigger than half the states in America.

The government’s leading program for creating affordable rentals is enriching corporate landlords while making life hell for struggling tenants—and politicians including Kamala Harris want to double down on it.

Of the 9,632 housing permits issued in 2023, 73% were in the "above moderate" price category, while the rest were reserved for residents with very low, low or moderate incomes. Research shows housing production at all price levels makes housing more affordable, including in low-income areas. [i.e., filtering]

New housing experiments with courtyards show that this age-old design approach can still deliver for cities struggling to provide homes for families.

Consider the local market and see whether zoning reform, phased development, or pop-ups can make implementing transit-oriented development a reality.

How Concentrated Wealth Disrupts Housing Markets and Worsens the Housing Affordability Crisis

A house today is not the same as a house historically. We made our houses better because we are richer now and housing is a great thing to invest in with extra wealth and income.

463 new mixed-income apartments that will be majority owned by Maryland's Montgomery County, Maryland

A developer is proposing a 23-story high rise at 970 Turquoise Street in PB. It is supposed to have 139 hotel rooms on 9 floors and 74 housing units on the other floors, including a whooping 10 units as affordable (5 very low income and 5 moderate income). It proposes 7 floors (2 below ground) of parking alone.

In Sioux Falls, the mobility company Via is betting that on-demand vans can complement fixed-route bus service across a sprawling and fast-growing South Dakota city.

If you want more affordable homes, make it legal to build more. If you don't, then don't.

How a bonus ADU program allows 'granny towers' in gardens.

After the financial crisis of 2007-09, global house prices fell by 6% in real terms. But, before long, they picked up again, and sailed past their pre-crisis peak. When covid-19 struck, economists reckoned a property crash was on the way. In fact there was a boom, with mask-wearing house-hunters fighting over desirable nests. And then from 2021 onwards, as central banks raised interest rates to defeat inflation, fears mounted of a house-price horror show. In fact, real prices fell by just 5.6% — and now they are rising fast again. Housing seems to have a remarkable ability to keep appreciating, whatever the weather. It will probably defy gravity even more insolently in the coming years.

History shows grants delivering higher prices, not higher home ownership rates

How we experience the shape of our cities defines how we feel, how we get about and how we decide where we want to be.

The Mid-City Plan Update includes Normal Heights, Kensington-Talmadge, City Heights, and Eastern Area

Government interventions in housing have a long history of falling short of their lofty promises. In many cases, they have resulted in outright failures. And the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act is likely destined to meet the same fate. To address the housing crisis, we need a bold shift toward market-driven solutions that focus on expanding the overall supply of housing, rather than relying on ineffectual and costly subsidies.

As a quick summary, Glaeser and Gyourko assume in this paper that in an unregulated market,cities will only have detached housing and that every home in every city will have the same market price which is always construction cost multiplied by1.4625. Absurd, right?

On The Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy is a collection of reported essays by Demsas that explores the role that democratic structures play in perpetuating a housing shortage. Writing with plain yet authoritative language, she tackles the difference between such thorny economic concepts as shortage denialism and supply skepticism, showing how they manifest in real communities. Yet she also writes from the ground level to explore the toll of hyperlocal overdemocracy, connecting rational decisions by neighborhoods to reject development to an irrational picture of a country that can no longer build.

Interesting information about right-sizing brick-and-mortar in the wake of Covid and ongoing migration to online retail

Filtering is a concept in housing analysis that describes the fact that people occupying new homes come from other homes. Sometimes these relocations are described as moving chains.

For an outsider, the attention to such a niche concept might seem a little strange. After all, where else do people come from to occupy new homes if not existing ones?

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps have long been blamed for racial inequities in today’s Black neighborhoods, but recent research shows that’s misleading.

At its June 27 meeting, the Beverly Hills City Council voted 5-0 to deny an appeal from developer Leo Pustilnikov challenging an October 2013 incomplete application determination made in response to his proposed project at 125-129 S. Linden Drive. The proposed development would consist of a 19-story, approximately 200-foot-tall building featuring 165 apartments - 20 percent of which would be rented to lower income households - and a 73-room hotel.

A prominent urbanist argues that redeveloping commercial corridors with denser housing could bridge the gap between the housing supply and demand.

This article includes some objective design standards for scaling Grand Boulevards

The United States is experiencing a housing shortage. At least, that is the case according to common belief — and is even the basis for national policy, as the Biden administration has stated plans to address the housing supply shortfall. But new research from the University of Kansas finds that most of the nation’s markets have ample housing in total, but nearly all lack enough units affordable to very low-income households.

Granny flat permits nearly tripled last year, from 651 to 1,907, and represented almost 20% of all new-housing permits issued in the city's best year for housing development in decades.

On May 31, construction commenced for two projects which will bring 87 new apartments for homeless veterans to the sprawling West Los Angeles VA North Campus.

Officials celebrated the grand opening of the Levant Senior Cottages in Linda Vista on Thursday. The development is the first of 11 affordable housing projects to complete construction on County excess land.

Gary Indiana was once the largest steel plant in the U.S. - a potential site for making low-carbon cement?

Usual bits about exclusionary zoning and all of the land locked up in supposed single-family neighborhoods.

The method, which the researchers say is “an absolute miracle”, uses the electrically-powered arc furnaces used for steel recycling to simultaneously recycle cement, the carbon-hungry component of concrete.

Data on conversion of office buildings into housing.

This Prosper Australia Research Note shows that if Australian states were to meet a benchmark level of efficient taxation from the land value base, the additional revenue raised could fund removal of the most significant distortions in the tax and transfer system, leading to higher workforce participation, economic activity, and well-being.

Alleged example of NIMBYism and historic preservation. Is the project that the consultants we met in LA were working on?

'California Forever' have released a new advertisement showing new proposals for their utopian city.

The group are promising 'walkable, middle class neighborhoods that we can afford' in the new ad, as well 15,000 new jobs in manufacturing and tech.

Images shared by the group show rolling landscapes with families enjoying a picnic amongst a cluster of trees, while youngsters are seen cycling.

Advocates for Levittown as a model for affordable owner-occupied housing.

Another ruse from Scott Wiener to enrich his developer campaign donors.

In addition to the headline, it also talks about knock-on economic activity from added remote workers.

Researchers at the UK's Newcastle University are using fungal networks (called mycelium) to build structures. The goal is to create lighter-weight buildings, reducing our reliance on concrete and lessening negative environmental impact.

"Preservation efforts stabilize neighborhoods, promote cultural heritage tourism, and contribute to a vibrant, diverse and dynamic urban landscape, among other benefits."

"The New Tenant Rent Index and All Tenant Regressed Rent Index are research index series that use data sourced from data collected in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) Housing Survey. The New Tenant Rent Index (R-CPI-NTR) measures prices renters would face if they changed housing units every period. The rent component of the official CPI measures the change in all rents, including new leases, renewals, and rents in the middle of a lease. In contrast, the New Tenant Rent Index uses only a subset of the data the official CPI uses, namely the first survey observations after new tenents move into their sampled housing units. The All Tenant Regressed Rent Index (R-CPI-ATR) is a measure with a scope similar to the CPI, but using methodology similar to the New Tenant Rent Index. The All Tenant Regressed Rent Index measures the rent paid by all renters, both new and continuing, and incorporates most of the survey data used for the CPI Rent of primary residence index. The All Tenant Regressed Rent Index is published alongside the New Tenant Rent Index to facilitate comparisons."

Rediscovery of affordable, livable small cities.

If California was a country it would have the sixth largest GDP in the world, however, as the economy has grown so has income inequality. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to tech giants minting millionaires, but also a population of service workers and tech professionals that can barely afford to live here. A drive down the quiet, pristine streets of Mountain View and Palo Alto shows rows of RV’s housing folks that cannot afford the high rents in these towns.

ARB is asked to evaluate structures that presumably fits within all of the other regulatory conditions, such as height, floor area, percentage of lot coverage, setbacks, and approved uses. And, in the case of a “housing” project that states 15% of the units will be “affordable,” it is, therefore, able to become a beneficiary of State HCD (Housing & Community Development) “development bonuses.” Gelson’s is such a project at the intersection of Ocean Park Blvd. & Lincoln Blvd.

Outcome of Austin's guaranteed income program.

Redevelopment in Akron Ohio combining adaptive reuse, form-based code, and walkable, green spaces.

Overview of proposed California Forever project.

Questions the data and conclusions of Thomas Piketty.