Adam Guren didn’t expect to end up in housing economics. Now he’s providing expert advice on housing to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.
Guren, an associate professor of economics at the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences, is an active researcher in the fields of macroeconomics and real estate. His research landed him a role on a team authoring a report for Wu evaluating property tax abatement in Boston.
Wu sought an independent expert opinion on the possible costs to taxpayers and other effects of property tax abatement in rental housing. Guren and five other researchers wrote a report on their findings.
Interview responses have been edited for clarity.
Arts & Sciences: Can you talk about your work with Mayor Wu?
Guren: In the city of Boston, there have been a lot of residential units that were approved by the Boston Planning & Development Agency, the planning board of Boston, but have not started construction. The mayor wants there to be more housing construction, and several developers suggested abating real estate taxes in exchange for accelerating development in the current high-rate environment based on the 421a program in New York. She asked Edward Glaeser, who is the chair of the economics department at Harvard and one of my advisors from graduate school, to put together a committee to study various policy options.
We spent several months looking at data on this and produced a report for the mayor. Importantly, the report did not advocate for any policy position. We felt that she was the appropriate person to evaluate the benefits of building buildings faster, but we could help her think about the costs. That report came out in January and based on our analysis and a number of other factors, the mayor decided not to pursue this particular policy. I give the mayor a lot of credit for seeking a rigorous policy analysis by outside experts.
How does that work relate to what you teach at BU?
It relates closely to the freshman seminar I teach on housing policy. In fact, I went through the basics of that report with my students. In the first half of my class, we study affordable housing policy. I cover public housing, vouchers, and subsidies for renters and developers – notably the Low Income Housing Tax Credit but also other developer subsidies. And then we study rent control and inclusionary zoning. So when I was talking about the low-income tax credit and related developer subsidies, this kind of naturally fit in.
How did you first get into economics and specifically housing?
In high school, I worked for Turing Award-winning computer visionary Alan Kay on computer science related topics. I was particularly involved in creating tools for using computers and computer programming as a tool for education. I decided I wanted something that had a little more of a human element. I took economics and really liked it. As an undergraduate, I was in between journalism and academia. I ended up going the academia route, figuring I could always do journalism later.
The first day of my PhD in economics was the day Lehman Brothers failed and our macroeconomics professor came in and said, ‘You picked a great time to come to graduate school!’
If you had told me before I went to graduate school that I’d be in housing, I would have said, ‘That’s boring.’ But housing wrecked the economy, and it turned out to be a very, very interesting area. What I ultimately became interested in was using micro data to think about macro questions. It turned out there were a lot of interesting macro questions in the housing market and a lot of interesting micro data that people hadn’t explored to think about those questions. Since then, one project has naturally led to another.
What does it mean to use “micro data to think about macro questions?”
The idea is to do macro from the ground up – to start with data on individual households or businesses or prices or in this case, houses, and examine that micro behavior empirically to answer macroeconomic questions about aggregate variables like gross domestic product, inflation, or house prices.
Do you have any research plans for the upcoming years?
I’m continuing to think about the nexus of macroeconomics and housing. I’m thinking about things like housing search and how people learn through their search process, monetary policy transmission through housing markets, and I’m thinking about low-income housing policy. I think low-income housing policy is a really important issue and one that’s extremely pressing in the short term.
Interview by Shelby Rose Long (COM’27)