San Antonio, the most impoverished major city in the country, according to census data, has enacted policies to help low-income renters, including a $150 million bond issue to support affordable housing construction and a Strategic Housing Implementation Plan. Before the pandemic, the wait list for public housing in San Antonio was roughly 35,000 families, earning an average of $11,000 annually, said Ed Hinojosa Jr., president and chief executive of Opportunity Home, the city’s housing authority. Today, it’s 95,000.

“The need has never been as high as it is now,” Mr. Hinojosa said. “And with the trends we’re seeing, it’s just going to keep growing.”

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Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it? Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor.

In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.

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The U.S. shortage of affordable housing, bad enough before the pandemic, has only gotten worse since 2020, according to a new report by Moody's Analytics. Since then, a combination of factors have conspired to eliminate 500,000 units for extremely low-income renters nationwide, or about 8% of the total stock.

Many affordable housing properties for that income group, which were funded via Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, or LIHTCs, have reached the end of their 30-year compliance period in the last few years. At the end of that period, the property owners have the option of converting their units to market rate.

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Homelessness surged across the Washington region by 18 percent in the past year, with the greatest increases in the suburbs, according to data released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

The D.C. region joins a growing list of cities that are seeing similar spikes, which coincided with the end of pandemic relief programs and stubbornly high inflation.

“We are seeing these increases all over the country,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “What we are also seeing is a real criminalization and villainizing of the homeless, which is something I haven’t seen in my 30 years in this field.”

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If there’s a building in America, a local government has decided the number of parking spaces it needs. But these rules not only overestimated the amount of parking that was needed, they created a society that virtually demanded a car to conduct daily life. America has a parking problem. We’ve built millions of parking spaces we don’t need. Each one costs us.

Parking minimums shape your entire life even if you don’t realize it, from the size of your rent check to the length of your commute to how many friends live nearby. Requiring businesses to include copious parking spots raises the cost of construction and the amount of land needed, codifying sprawl.

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Zoning codes established roughly a century ago were meant to protect residents from the impacts of industrial and commercial developments, but they were also used to enforce segregation. Those regulations have contributed in large part to the current housing shortage, and experts argue that it’s time for reforms. 

As the nation confronts a severe housing crisis, the Biden administration is calling on local governments to revisit outdated zoning policies that slow development.  A recent report from the Urban Land Institute highlights the zoning strategies cities are using to bolster housing development equitably and sustainably, including complete overhauls of single-family regulations and reductions of lot size minimums.  

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The housing crisis in New York State has locked out middle-class families and young people from homeownership, left hundreds of thousands burdened with high rents, and sent tens of thousands of working people into public shelters. Of 3.43 million renters in the state, more than half, roughly 1.7 million, spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Yet instead of strengthening Ms. Hochul’s housing plan, the State Senate and Assembly last week offered proposals that would gut it.

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As homelessness overwhelms downtown Phoenix, a small business wonders how long it can hang on. In recent years, the city has been hit by a housing crisis, a mental health crisis, and an opioid epidemic, resulting in one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with over 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. Read about the experiences of Joe and Debbie Faillace, owners of Old Station Subs in Phoenix, Arizona. With a rising homeless population and a lack of affordable housing, the Faillaces have been struggling to keep their business running amidst the chaos and suffering caused by this humanitarian crisis.

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DC is 70% of the way towards meeting Mayor Muriel Bowser's goal of producing 36,000 new housing units by 2025. Approximately 25,000 units delivered between January 2019 and September 2022, per the latest data available on the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) dashboard. This represents 69% of the desired total. A report released in 2019 further specified affordable housing production goals for each of the city's ten planning areas. The graphic above details where those areas are with progress towards housing production.

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Los Angeles currently has about 42,000 homeless residents, with 28,000 unsheltered. In 2016 the people of Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed Proposition HHH, a ballot measure that raised $1.2 billion through a higher property tax to create 10,000 new apartments for the homeless. Six years later, neither the mandate the money has proved to be nearly enough. This is the paradox of housing development in Los Angeles and so many other cities. The politics of the affordable housing crisis are terrible. The politics of what you’d need to do to solve it are even worse.

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The pace of growth in U.S. home rents slowed in September to its lowest rate in 16 months — but the hugely elevated post-pandemic cost of renting a home is not likely to subside anytime soon. A recent sharp rise in inflation and interest rates has made homeownership less viable. Coupled with limited new supply, it means that even as rents become less affordable for the average American, they are unlikely to drop significantly.

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One big reason for the chronic housing shortage in America’s most prosperous regions is that state governments have ceded control to local governments that behave like private clubs. In California, the heartland of the housing crisis, the state is starting to take power back. The state’s political leaders are clearing the way for housing construction by restricting local interference, prioritizing the needs of all Californians — and those who might like to be.

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More than 8 million people were behind on their rent at the end of August, and nearly half of those residents say they are somewhat or very likely to be forced out of their homes in the next two months, according to new Census Bureau figures reported by Yahoo News.

At the same time, evictions are on the rise as assistance doled out by the federal government during the pandemic begins to dry up. Data from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University found evictions were 52% higher than average in Tampa, 90% above average in Houston and 94% above average in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

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Throughout Fairfield County, Conn., local residents and elected officials are seeking to block large housing projects that include units affordable to low- and moderate-income households, warning that the increased density could change the character of their towns. The 32-year-old law that enables such projects has always generated some pushback, but the opposition has grown more fierce as the number of proposals has increased in recent years.

The fervent campaigns against housing applications reflect a battle that has engulfed the state, town by town. Last week, a group led by the Open Communities Alliance announced that it would file a civil rights lawsuit against the town of Woodbridge, saying that the town’s zoning regulations, which sharply restrict multifamily housing, violated the state Fair Housing Act, state zoning laws and the state Constitution.

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Many California towns, particularly ones with rich people, have fought higher-density housing plans in recent years, a trend that has become known as NIMBYism for “not in my backyard.” But Atherton’s situation stands out because of the extreme wealth of its denizens — the average home sale in 2020 was $7.9 million — and because tech leaders who live there have championed housing causes.

The companies that made Atherton’s residents rich have donated huge sums to nonprofits to offset their impact on the local economy, including driving housing costs up. Some of the letter writers have even sat on the boards of charities aimed at addressing the region’s poverty and housing problems.

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There’s long been a popular narrative about land use: New development, particularly of market-rate housing, gives rise to gentrification. That translates to lower-income residents, particularly those of color, getting squeezed out. Sound familiar?

It’s “explicitly or implicitly at the core of almost any discussion about housing in the D.C. region,” said Casey Anderson, chair of the Montgomery County Planning Board. The specter of displacement is a formidable fear for some and harrowing reality for others. But it’s also too monolithic an account.

The study does highlight a factor that’s hard to ignore: the positive effect of more housing production in the D.C. region.

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San Francisco's homegrown hostility to new development has made it the epicenter of California's housing crisis. It will now become a testing ground for a newly empowered state government's ability to force liberalizing reforms on a city that repeatedly refuses to build.

On Tuesday, the state's Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) announced that it would be launching an unprecedented review of San Francisco's housing policies and practices "aimed at identifying and removing barriers to approval and construction of new housing there."

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Santa Fe is home to New Mexico’s first net-zero energy multi-family unit project.

The recently opened Siler Yard caters to the members of the art and creative community who make under 60-percent of the Area Mean Income.

The 65-unit, $17.4 million project was made possible through a $10.4 million competitive Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and a $5.2 million, 40-year, Section 221(d)(4) mortgage — both U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development programs for affordable housing.

The project also received $600,000 in permit and fee waivers from the city of Santa Fe, which also contributed $400,000 in infrastructure funding and the 4.3 acres of land it was built on.

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The U.S. needs 4.3 million new apartments over the next 13 years just to meet projected demand, a total that includes the current shortfall of 600,000 units, according to a new report published by the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association.

The shortfall is largely a legacy of the late 2000s financial crisis and deep recession, when U.S. development ground almost to a halt, the report said.

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The five states in the U.S. with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. Some of the bluest states in the country, not one red state on that list.

And at the core of that failure is the failure to build enough homes, full stop. Housing is fundamental. When you fail to provide it, that failure reverberates throughout society, it lays waste to all your other carefully laid policy plans and ideals. Few understand the ins and outs of America’s housing system or systems like Jenny Schuetz.

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