Do regional approaches to affordable housing actually result in housing production and, if so, how? Regional Approaches to Affordable Housing answers these critical questions and more. Evaluating 23 programs across the nation, the report begins by tracing the history of regional housing planning in the U.S. and defining contemporary big picture issues on housing affordability. It examines fair-share regional housing planning in three states and one metropolitan area, and follows with an appraisal of regional housing trust funds--a new phenomenon. Also assessed are an incentive program in the Twin Cities region and affordable housing appeals statutes in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The study looks at recent private-sector initiatives to promote affordable housing production in the San Francisco Bay area and Chicago. A concluding chapter proposes a set of best and second-best practices. Supplementing the report are appendices containing an extensive annotated bibliography, a research note on housing need forecasting and fair-share allocation formulas, a complete list of state enabling legislation authorizing local housing planning, and two model state acts.

Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

This book presents a system view of the digital scientific and technological revolution, including its genesis and prerequisites, current trends, as well as current and potential issues and future prospects. It gathers selected research papers presented at the 12th International Scientific and Practical Conference, organized by the Institute of Scientific Communications. The conference “Artificial Intelligence: Anthropogenic Nature vs. Social Origin” took place on December 5–7, 2019 in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. The book is intended for academic researchers and independent experts studying the social and human aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the associated transition to the digital economy and Industry 4.0, as well as the creators of the legal framework for this process and its participants – entrepreneurs, managers, employees and consumers. It covers a variety of topics, including “intelligent” technologies and artificial intelligence, the digital economy, the social environment of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its consequences for humans, the regulatory framework of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the “green” consequences, prospects and financing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This book assesses the effects of spatially concentrated programs for housing and neighborhood improvement. These programs provide direct assistance to low-income property owners in an attempt to arrest neighborhood decline and encourage revitalization. The authors used the Harvard Urban Development Simulation Model (HUDS) in evaluating these programs. HUDS, a large-scale computer model, represents the process of housing rehabilitation, the production and consumption of housing services, household moving decisions, and other determinant of neighborhood change. The model simulates the behavior of approximately 80,000 individual households in two hundred residential neighborhoods of various quality levels. Unlike more aggregate models of urban development, HUDS has the capacity to identify how specific housing policies affect individual households as well as particular neighborhoods. Since program evaluations are no better than the models on which they are based, the authors provide sufficient detail to permit those readers primarily interested in the policy analysis to assess the methodology and to understandhow the policies are represented in the model; a more technical discussion of the model is then presented in appendixes. Although the simulations focus on policies that induce central-city property owners to upgrade their properties and thus stimulate revitalization, many of the authors' findings are relevant to larger issues of urban development. For example, the analysis of how housing rehabilitation subsidies affect the investment behavior of nonsubsidized property owners provides insights about the link between initial upgrading and sustained neighborhood improvement. The analysis also demonstrates how differences in location, household, and housing stock characteristics affect a particular neighborhood's responsiveness to a common policy initiative.