While safe, stable, and dignified housing is a cornerstone of health and well-being, providing affordable housing for everyone remains a critical challenge for communities across the nation.

On Tuesday, June 18, 2024, the Urban Institute, in collaboration with Policies for Action (P4A), a signature research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, hosted a series of panel discussions about equity-oriented affordable housing. Watch the entire program here.

The conversation brought together a diverse group of researchers, policymakers, advocates, and other stakeholders to examine housing policies that can significantly advance racial and health equity, and what these policies are accomplishing in different places across the country. P4A research grantees shared their latest housing policy research.

The program was kicked off by Janneke Ratcliffe, Urban Institute Vice President for Housing Finance Policy and Interim Vice President, Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy. Ratcliffe introduced the keynote speaker, Solomon Greene, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mr. Greene, a former Urban Institute Senior Fellow and P4A grantee, has been both a researcher and a policymaker. In his current role  at HUD, he relies on evidence-based research like that funded by P4A and RWJF. His deep commitment to solving the nation’s systemic housing challenges is rooted in his personal experiences of housing insecurity as a child in rural Upstate New York and he set the tone for the conference with a core question:

“What will it take to implement a range of housing policies that can reliably set families up for success and protect their health?”

Greene reminded attendees that no single policy created the unjust and inequitable situation that we have today. Instead, myriad overlapping policies that have constrained citizens’ choices about where to live have put us on this course: legalized racial segregation, blockbusting, affordable housing siting, and exclusionary zoning practices. Later, disinvestment, and practices like subprime lending, appraisal bias, and predatory lending, compounded with previous practices to produce today’s environment. Today, maintaining secure housing is increasingly difficult for middle- and lower-income families.

Three dynamic panel discussions followed.

The first of these, Evidence on State and Local Planning Policies, covered fair housing policies in two states on opposite sides of the country: California and Massachusetts. Both states have decades-old laws designed to further fair housing. These laws incentivize municipalities and developers to create and maintain affordable housing in all jurisdictions.

Panelists discussed the ways these laws are structured, implemented, enforced–and evaded. Although both states have made progress, outcomes have not been consistent with the goal of desegregation. Additionally, the results are geographically mixed, with some jurisdictions embracing the challenge while others resisting it. Most cities continue to cite affordable housing in lower income, more polluted, less white neighborhoods. The panelists agreed that state preemptive measures requiring change have helped balance the scales.

The researchers cited the need for objective metrics for cities, rather than the developer-driven subjective metrics broadly in use, and introduced some new tools and data sets for measuring the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of fair housing laws and assessing whether resulting policies are equitable. These tools can measure indicators of opportunity (income, transportation access, pollution, and other things-flexible across geographies) to see how policies are working. New data sets can be accessed as interactive maps.

Researchers suggested more progress might be made in the future with greater focus on land use and infrastructure policies, particularly changing land use policies in exclusionary neighborhoods.

Evidence on Outcomes for Households and Residents, the second panel, explored in-place strategies that have had some success. Portland, Oregon’s housing preference policy relocated low-income African-Americans back into a neighborhood where 90% of the city’s Black citizens lived until they were displaced by a series of “urban renewal” projects that began in the 1950s. The 2000 Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district creation in Northeast Portland has brought back a limited number of people who have deep historical connections to the neighborhood. The move gives them greater access to employment, transportation, childcare, green space, and better schools, but the study finds that when it comes to access, proximity is not the same thing as true availability, and transitioning to a now majority-white neighborhood has had its challenges. Research shows the move has generally enhanced wellbeing, but without the preference policy, the subsidized residents couldn’t afford to stay in the neighborhood.

The panel discussed home purchase assistance strategies in Washington, D.C., inclusionary zoning programs, and other tactics in the realm of finance that make homeownership accessible to more people at all income levels. The DC Housing Finance Agency, an investment boutique bank for affordable housing under D.C.’s Housing Production Trust Fund, finances $300m/year in tax exempt bonds to support affordable housing. They work with everyone in the equation from homeowners to diverse groups of housing practitioners. The Howard University Center of Excellence in Housing & Urban Research and Policy conducts research into one of the District’s inclusionary-zoning housing layered projects. Implemented in 2011, the program is designed to create affordable housing in growing neighborhoods with new rental properties and makes sure it includes the lower-income residents who couldn’t otherwise afford the rents. Their P4A funded research is looking into potential impacts for program beneficiaries, including factors like neighborhood amenities, green spaces, and schools. While still relatively new, and though it accommodates only a small number of the total applicants, inclusionary zoning in D.C. has had mostly positive outcomes. There is as yet very little research on inclusionary zoning.

The third panel, Key Insights and Reflections from the Real World, brought together directors of housing from across the Washington, D.C., metro area: the District of Columbia, Alexandria, Virginia, and Prince George’s County, Maryland, and a tenants rights advocate who has been a strong voice for the Latin American immigrant and undocumented community.

Their discussion shed light on how agencies and advocates often work together to get more families into stable housing. Community voices are increasingly being centered in policymaking, and advocates inside and outside of government unite where they find a lack of political will to prioritize the interests of families over larger, commercial interests. Their strategies are many as they work to get tools for wealth-building to more families: home purchase assistance, government investment trust funds, first right of refusal laws.

The people involved in this work agree that it is important to invest in neighborhoods that have been historically disinvested. They also agree that the housing crisis can not be solved in isolation from bigger issues like income inequality and inflation, both of which are rapidly increasing, exerting downward pressure on families’ ability to build a foundation for stability and wealth creation.

This body of work presents encouraging evidence of success in jurisdictions around the country, introduces new tools and strategies, and is intended to inform innovative, evidence-based policymaking that moves the needle on affordable housing for our nation as a whole.

 

Listen to the entire program here. Full bios and referenced research papers are in the event page. 

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