General News

Facebook announced a $1 billion commitment over the next decade to help address the affordable housing crisis in California, which will go toward creating up to 20,000 new housing units to help essential workers such as teachers, nurses and first responders live closer to the communities that rely on them.

The MIT Sloan School of Management recently announced the appointment of Edward L. Golding as executive director and senior lecturer at the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy (GCFP). Golding, a former head of the Federal Housing Administration, will help lead the GCFP in its mission to support governments in their role as financial […]

HUD released an evaluation of its Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), which finds significant evidence that RAD is stimulating billions of dollars in capital investment, improving living conditions for low-income residents and enhancing the financial health of these critical affordable housing resources. The report says that the 956 RAD conversions studied leveraged $9.66 for every dollar provided through HUD’s public housing programs, that all rehabilitation projects covered their rehabilitation needs, that there is an 87 percent post-conversion decrease in unscheduled capital needs for completed RAD properties and that tenants were pleased with the improvement.

A new working paper from Jacob Cosman and Luis Quintero of the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University cites concentration of developers as a reason for the dearth of affordable housing. From 2006 to 2015, the number of builders who controlled 90 percent of a typical market dropped by a quarter, which has cost the country approximately 150,000 additional homes a year and decreased the annual value of housing production nationwide by $106 billion — all else being equal.

A new report in Health Affairs examines whether expansions of Medicaid can prevent evictions from occurring. Early Medicaid expansion in California was associated with a reduction in the number of evictions, with 24.5 fewer evictions per month in each county from a pre-expansion average of 224.7.

Energy Efficiency for All (EEFA) released two new reports to provide industry experts and contractors the information needed to help make healthier building materials the easier choice. The first study by Elevate Energy provides a case study on the Energy Performance of Chicago Properties Retrofit With Fiberglass Insulation. The second study by Three3 examines Drivers, Adoptability and Performance of Healthier Energy-Efficiency Retrofit Materials in Affordable Multifamily Housing.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University released a new report, Housing America’s Older Adults 2019, as a supplement to its State of Nation’s Housing Report. The report finds housing inequality is becoming increasingly evident among older Americans as the number of older households climbs to unprecedented levels.

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) released his presidential housing plan, which calls for creating 3 million new homes through the National Housing Trust Fund; creating 3 million new homes through a $60 billion investment in the Capital Magnet Fund and investing $50 billion to rehab public housing; fully fund Housing Choice Vouchers. If elected president, […]

2020 Democratic Presidential hopeful, Senator Michael Bennet (CO) released a plan to Tackle America’s Housing Affordability Crisis. The three tenants of his plan are Build More Affordable Housing Near Good Jobs, Help Middle-Class and Working Families Afford A Home and Reform Federal Housing Tax Incentives. Sen. Bennet calls for expanding the LIHTC by 50 percent, […]

In a new Issue Brief Vincent Reina, PhD with the University of Pennsylvania argues for a national housing policy in the face of unprecedented housing challenges. This Issue Brief lays out several policy prescriptions for improving housing affordability and fairness, both for renters and owners: modifying the federal Housing Choice Voucher program, as well as […]

New research from Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz examines the effect of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment on children’s long-term outcomes. Their estimates imply that moving a child out of public housing to a low-poverty area when young (at age eight on average) using a subsidized voucher like the MTO experimental voucher […]

In a new paper, Mark Willis with the Furman Center, suggests including an ‘Internet Rating’ in a modernized Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) framework since the current assessment areas used to delineate the primary geographies within a bank’s CRA test do not adequately account for the rise of internet banking. Under his proposal, banks would be […]