By Anthony Flint, April 16, 2024

The housing affordability crisis keeps rolling on, dragging down otherwise booming local economies. A survey for the Boston Chamber of Commerce found that nearly one-third of young people say they plan to leave because of high home prices. The Massachusetts housing chief bemoaned: “That’s our workforce.”

“That’s your favorite restaurant that can’t find enough help to stay open,” he wrote in the Boston Globe. “That’s the child-care provider you drop your kids off with. . . . That’s the large company considering moving out of state. That’s our economy.”

Runaway housing costs are impacting homebuyers and renters alike, not just in Boston but nationwide. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, the number of cost-burdened renters hit a record high with half of all households spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

Young people aren’t the only ones affected by the current crisis. The US population of people over 65 is ballooning past 60 million, and most of those people will be on fixed incomes while managing rising health care costs.

The Lincoln Institute is well-attuned to this extraordinary challenge, and recently dedicated our annual Journalists Forum to the subject of affordable housing. It was a lively series of conversations over two days, with some 30 reporters, editors, podcasters, and Substack columnists sizing up the problem and assessing the impact of several current policy interventions. This episode of the Land Matters podcast features highlights from the event.

The 2023 Journalists Forum: Innovations in Affordability was made possible by a partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and TD Bank. The annual convening bridges the media and academic inquiry, allowing journalists to explore new ideas with researchers and practitioners and to network with each other.

The forum was organized by first looking at the scope of the crisis, followed by an assessment of four major interventions: statewide zoning mandates requiring cities and towns to allow more multifamily development; tax policy designed to help manage runaway land prices and real estate speculation (with Detroit’s efforts to establish a land value tax as a case study); local strategies to outmaneuver institutional investors; and potential changes in the home financing system to help close a stubborn racial wealth gap.

Arthur Jemison, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, delivered the keynote address, describing the city’s “all of the above” approach to increasing housing supply, including legalizing accessory dwelling units or ADUs, embracing a citywide rezoning initiative known as “Squares and Streets,” and offering big incentives to property owners who convert vacant office buildings to residences.

Cities like Boston are going to need all that and more. According to the State of the Nation’s Housing report issued annually by the Joint Center for Housing Studies, home construction hasn’t kept pace with demand ever since the Great Recession. Prices are up 40 percent nationwide, inventory is tight, and it appears the era of low interest rates is decidedly over.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Chris Arnold of NPR moderates a panel on housing finance at the Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum with (l-r) Jim Gray of the Lincoln Institute, MJ Hopkins of TD Bank, Chrystal Kornegay of Mass Housing, and Chris Herbert of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Credit: Anthony Flint.

By Anthony Flint, March 17, 2023

In Cincinnati lately, good fortune extends well beyond the Bengals, the city’s football team, which has consistently been making the playoffs. The population is growing after years of decline, companies are increasingly interested thanks to its strategic location, and there’s even talk of southwestern Ohio becoming a climate haven.

But any resurgence in a postindustrial legacy city comes with downsides, as newly elected Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval has been discovering: the potential displacement of established residents, and affordability that can vanish all too quickly.

One of Pureval’s first moves was to collaborate with the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority to buy nearly 200 rental properties in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, outbidding more than a dozen institutional investors that have been snapping up homes to rent them out for high profits. That sent an important signal, Pureval said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast: transitioning neighborhoods will be protected from the worst outcomes of market forces in play in Cincinnati.

“These out-of-town institutional investors … have no interest, frankly, in the wellbeing of Cincinnati or their tenants, buying up cheap single-family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, but overnight doubling or tripling the rents,” he said, noting a parallel effort to enforce code violations at many properties. “If you’re going to exercise predatory behavior in our community, well, we’re not going to stand for it, and we’re coming after you.”

Pureval, the half-Indian, half-Tibetan son of first-generation Americans, said affordability and displacement were his biggest concerns as Cincinnati—along with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other cities hard hit by steep declines in manufacturing and population—gets a fresh look as a desirable location. Cincinnati scored in the top 10 of cities least impacted by heat, drought, and sea-level rise in a recent Moody’s report.

“Right now, we are living through, in real-time, a paradigm shift,” spurred on by the pandemic and concerns about climate change, he said. “The way we live, work, and play is just completely changing. Remote work is … altering our economy and lifestyle throughout the entire country but particularly here in the Midwest. What I am convinced of due to this paradigm shift is because of climate change, because of the rising cost of living on the coast, there will be an inward migration.”

But, he said, “We have to preserve the families and the legacy communities that have been here, in the first place. No city in the country has figured out a way to grow without displacing. The market factors, the economic factors are so profound and so hard to influence, and the city’s resources are so limited. It’s really, really difficult.”

Joining a chorus of others all around the U.S., Pureval also said he supports reforming zoning and addressing other regulatory barriers that hinder multi-family housing and mixed-use and transit-oriented development.

An edited version of this interview will appear in print and online as part of the Mayor’s Desk series, our interviews with innovative chief executives of cities from around the world.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The show in its entirety can also be viewed as a video at the Lincoln Institute’s YouTube channel.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval. Credit: © Amanda Rossmann – USA TODAY NETWORK.