Originally published in 1979, these essays provide a guide to the labyrinth of issues which together made up ‘housing policy’ in the late 20th Century. The focus is on the practical and political difficulties of devising measures which meet policy objectives – difficulties which are just as prevalent in the 21st Century. The search for ‘comprehensive strategies’ is shown to be a vain one: given the number of relevant issues and their complexity, only an incremental approach is practicable. Major issues are discussed in the context of an analysis of the institutional, historical and financial framework within which housing policy is formulated and operated.

Originally published in 1979, these essays provide a guide to the labyrinth of issues which together made up ‘housing policy’ in the late 20th Century. The focus is on the practical and political difficulties of devising measures which meet policy objectives – difficulties which are just as prevalent in the 21st Century. The search for ‘comprehensive strategies’ is shown to be a vain one: given the number of relevant issues and their complexity, only an incremental approach is practicable. Major issues are discussed in the context of an analysis of the institutional, historical and financial framework within which housing policy is formulated and operated.

Under Pressure is about instigation and design in urban housing. Urban housing is a bellwether for economic, social, and political change. It varies widely in quality, typology, and audience and lies between the formal systems of urban infrastructure and the informal systems of daily life. Housing’s complexity offers unique and exciting opportunities to architects. Its entwinement with private equity and public agencies presents important challenges amplified by urbanization. This book gathers and contextualizes relevant conversations in urban housing unfolding today across architecture through four topics: Learning from History, Changing Domesticities, Housing Finance and Policy, and Design and Material Innovation. The result is a multi-disciplinary amalgam of research and design intelligence from thought leaders in the fields of architecture, real estate, economics, policy, material design, and finance.

This thesis contains three empirical essays on housing markets and housing policies. In the first essay, we investigate the effects of rent control on rents using historical panel data in Lyon over a 78-year period. We use multiple regressions with fixed effects as the main form of analysis. Our results show that the causal effect of rent control on rents in Lyon is significantly negative. In the second essay, I study how age influences housing demand based on household level data from China. The two-stage hedonic house price model used in this essay allows me to estimate the pure age effect on housing demand, after housing quality and other household's characteristics are controlled for. The results demonstrate that the willingness-to-pay for a constant-quality house will decrease slightly or keep constant when a representative household head becomes old, if the household head's educational attainment is controlled for. In contrast, it will drop rapidly if the household head's educational attainment is not controlled for. Therefore, this essay concludes that the total housing demand will not decrease with population aging, because the current middle- aged generation get educated more than the current old generation. Finally, in the third essay, in the framework of Rosen-Roback model, I analyze how housing costs affect the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled workers, explicitly the skill intensity ratio (SIR), across cities in China. To avoid endogeneity issues, I use both share of unavailable land and historical housing prices as instruments of current housing prices. The results show that average housing prices have significant positive effects on the SIR in 2010 when workers' mobility is relaxed, but insignificant effects on the SIR in 2000 when workers' mobility was tightly regulated.

This dissertation comprises three chapters on topics related to low-income housing policies in the United States. Each chapter uses econometric methods to analyze data from administrative sources, aiming to establish causal relationships between variables of interest. In the first chapter, I provide evidence on how the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit policy impacts children's short- and medium-run human capital formation. I construct a novel dataset using the San Diego Unified School District administrative data and the California LIHTC database. Combining propensity score matching and difference-in-differences, I find an 0.28 percentage points decrease in the absenteeism rate, a 0.049 standard deviation increase in standardized English scores, and a 0.048 standard deviation increase in standardized math scores for students who moved into LIHTC during the study period. I also find positive effects on high school completion, college enrollment, and college completion. In the second chapter, I explore the impact of LIHTC on homelessness. Although an increase in affordable housing supply is observed, the effect on households at risk of homelessness is unclear. Combining point-in-time homeless counts and the LIHTC database from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, I construct a panel dataset that allows me to examine changes in homelessness on the Continuum of Care level from 2009 to 2019. With a first-differenced model, I find that one additional LIHTC unit is associated with a decrease of 1.1 homeless people. I also find that sheltered families and children are the primary beneficiaries of new LIHTC units. In the third chapter, I estimate the impact of the right-to-counsel policy in housing courts. New York City introduced a novel policy in 2018 to provide the right to counsel in housing courts for income-eligible tenants facing eviction. This policy allows low-income households better access to the formal justice system. Taking advantage of the staggered roll-out schedule on the zip code level, I estimate the causal effect of the policy change using a difference-in-differences approach. Despite no statistically significant impact on eviction filings, I find a 16.9 percent decrease in quarterly evictions. The results demonstrate positive impacts of tenant representation on evictions in the short run.

This book of specially commissioned essays by distinguished housing scholars addresses the big issues in contemporary debates about housing and housing policy in the UK. Setting out a distinctive and coherent analysis, it steers a course between those accounts that rely on economic theory and analysis and those that emphasize policy. It is informed by the idea that the 1970s was a pivotal decade in the second half of the twentieth century, and that since that time there has been a profound transformation in the housing system and housing policy in the UK. The contributors describe, analyze and explain aspects of that transformation, as a basis for understanding the present and thinking about the future. The analysis of housing is set within an understanding of the wider changes affecting the economy and the welfare state since the crises of the mid 1970s.