Solving Housing Affordability Challenges in the United States

Abstract

Housing affordability matters to people because it may impact a household’s budget, including necessary expenditures for food, utilities, health, child care, and possibly transportation to work, apart from savings for emergencies, retirement, attending college, or starting a business (Anacker et al., 2018). The almost century old housing policy landscape in the US was partially triggered by the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (Carr and Anacker, 2014, 2015). However, the policy landscape is balkanized (i.e. federal, state, and local programs administered by multiple administrative units and implemented by public, private, or nonprofit institutions, all at different levels (Schwartz, 2021)). Despite the existence of the policy landscape, the national housing affordability crisis has gradually worsened over the past few decades, then rapidly and exponentially intensified over the past few years (Anacker, 2019). The US has been experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic since early to late March 2020, and Congress subsequently passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Securities (CARES) Act, which authorized assistance and eviction protection for some renters, positively impacting housing affordability, in late March 2020 (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, n.d.). However, most measures ended in 2021 or 2022, exemplifying yet again the brokenness of the housing system and that affordable housing solutions are needed more than ever (Schuetz, 2022). In The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping It There), Shane Phillips, who is currently an independent researcher and adjunct instructor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, discusses several dozen solutions to the housing affordability crisis in the US. Phillips is based in California, which has been at the forefront of progressive affordable housing solutions over the past few years (Dougherty, 2018; Shaw, 2018). Expanding his lens from California to the US, he argues that the solutions to the housing crisis are based on three interconnected, equal priorities: supply (i.e., having housing for everyone), stability (i.e., having tenant protections and rental housing preservation), and subsidy (i.e., providing “benefits of abundant housing and stable communities” (p. 20)). The book has an introduction, three parts, a conclusion, and an appendix. Part I discusses principles and general recommendations with action verbs, such as “pursue,” “focus,” “adapt,” “pick,” “track,” and “align,” among others; part II is about policies, divided among supply, stability, and subsidy sections; and part III is labeled “Bringing It All Together.” Interestingly, Part III contains all the policies already discussed in Part II clustered under new sections: intermediate priority, mediumterm priority, and long-term priority. Book review forum