Who’s Responsible for the Housing Crisis?

Americans love local government. In a December 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 61 percent of respondents had a favorable view of their local government, whereas 77 percent had an unfavorable view of the federal government. But behind this veneer of goodwill is a disturbing truth: Local government is driving a housing crisis that is raising rents, lowering economic mobility and productivity, and negatively impacting wages.

A Teen’s Murder, Mold in the Walls: Unfulfilled Promises Haunt Public Housing

The year before Desaray died, President Joe Biden called for the federal government to spend tens of billions of dollars to fix dilapidated public housing that he said posed “critical life-safety concerns.” The repairs, Biden said, would mostly help people of color, single mothers like Gilliard who work in low-income jobs, and people with disabilities.

How Do We Solve America’s Affordable Housing Crisis? BU Research Helps Inspire a Federal Bill That Suggests Answers

A new federal bill, introduced by Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), aims to solve the crisis by making it easier to peel back local rules that can block new construction—and that are often weaponized by those who don’t want new housing in their backyards. And the bill’s approach was inspired, in part, by Boston University research.

Creating and Managing Rental Registries: Cities’ Experiences and Exploring Use of Lived Experience to Evaluate Impact

According to HUD’s American Healthy Homes Survey II, 22.3 million housing units in the U.S. have one or more significant lead-based paint hazards. Many unsafe housing units are in disadvantaged neighborhoods where most people rent their homes and may be unable to afford better, safer housing. For a city’s most vulnerable residents, a rental registry with proactive inspections is a lifeline.

The YIMBYs are coming, to the suburbs

Fed up with the hostile reception to new development in Franklin, Frongillo and a group of other residents formed what was once a rare breed of advocacy organization in Boston-area suburbs: a pro-housing group, whose members go to public meetings to say yes to more housing development, instead of no. Katherine Einstein, a Boston University researcher who has studied housing politics in Massachusetts, said the new advocacy groups can wield a lot of influence. Even showing up at public meeting to speak in favor of projects is helping to offset longstanding dynamics that have shaped decisions about local housing policy.

A BU Class Tackles the Massachusetts Housing Crisis

Not-so-fun fact: if you plan to stay in Boston after BU, it could take you nine years to save enough to buy a starter home. That’s if you’re coupled. Stay single, and you can quadruple that wait. The depressing numbers, from a study by real estate news and research site Point2, testifies to Massachusetts’ affordable housing crisis—one of the topics of this spring’s College of Arts & Sciences political science class Urban Politics and Policy. Several students taking the course, taught by Katherine Levine Einstein, a CAS associate professor of political science, focused their final project on ground zero in the state’s housing wars, Milton.

The Homevoter Hypothesis: A New Generation Gap?

We know that older people vote more than younger people and that homeowners vote more than renters; but are older homeowners, as a class, overrepresented in local elections? Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, Ellis Hamilton, and Ethan Singer analyzed the intersections of age, race, home tenure, and election scheduling to find out, publishing their findings as The Gray Vote: How Older Home-Owning Voters Dominate Local Elections.

Who Represents the Renters?

Katherine Levine Einstein finds that renters are starkly underrepresented by a margin of over 30 percentage points — a gap that persists across a variety of institutional and demographic contexts.