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In an era in which psychiatry is dominated by neuroscience-based models, psychological constructs tend to be neglected and may be taken seriously only when they have neural correlates.37 Some psychoanalysts have sought to link their model with neurobiological research and to claim that newer methods of studying the brain can validate their theories.5,6¶ Mark Solms, a South African neuropsychologist, is the founder of “neuropsychoanalysis.” This new field, with its own society and its own journal, proposes to use neuroimaging to confirm analytic theories. Its key idea is that subjective experience and the unconscious mind can be observed through neuroimaging.5 It is known that brain processes can be seen on brain imaging even before they have entered consciousness.38 However, claims that neuroimaging validate Freud’s model of the unconscious can be based only on “cherry-picking” the literature. The observed correspondences are superficial and hardly support the complex edifice of psychoanalytic theory.¶ Solms39 has also suggested that Freud’s ideas about dreams are consistent with neuroscience research based on rapid eye movement (REM) activity. This attempt to rescue a century-old theory met with opposition from dream researchers who consider Freud’s clinical speculations to be incompatible with empirical data.40,41¶ The proposal to establish a discipline of neuropsychoanalysis also met with a mixed reception from traditional psychoanalysts, who did not want to dilute Freud’s wine with neuroscientific water.42 Neuroscientists, who are more likely to see links to psychology as lying in cognitive science,43 have ignored this idea. In summary, neuropsychoanalysis is being used a way to justify long-standing models, without attempting to find something new or to develop an integration of perspectives on psychology.¶ However, Eric Kandel,44 influential in the light of his Nobel Prize for the study of the neurochemistry of memory, has taken a sympathetic view of the use of biological methods to study psychoanalytic theory. Kandel had wanted to be an analyst before becoming a neuroscientist.45 But Kandel, who does not actively practice psychiatry, may be caught in a time warp, unaware that psychoanalysis has been overtaken by competitors in the field of psychotherapy.¶ Another attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with science has come from the literature on neuroplasticity.46 It is now known that neurogenesis occurs in some brain regions (particularly the hippocampus) during adulthood and that neural connections undergo modification in all parts of the brain. There is also evidence that CBT can produce brain changes that are visible using imaging.47 These findings have not been confirmed in psychoanalytic therapies. However, Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychoanalyst, has argued that psychoanalysis can change the brain.48 This may be the case for all psychotherapies. However, more recently, Doidge49 has claimed that mental exercises can reverse the course of severe neurological and psychiatric problems, including chronic pain, stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and autism. While these books have been best-sellers, most of their ideas in the second volume,49 based on anecdotes rather than on clinical trials, have had little impact in medicine. This story underscores the difficulty of reconciling the perspectives and methods of psychoanalysis with scientific methods based on empirical testing.¶ Psychoanalysis and the Humanities¶ Psychoanalysis claimed to be a science but did not function like one. It failed to operationalize its hypotheses, to test them with empirical methods, or to remove constructs that failed to gain scientific support.1 In this way, the intellectual world of psychoanalysis more closely resembles the humanities. Today, with few psychiatrists or clinical psychologists entering psychoanalytic training, the door has been opened to practitioners with backgrounds in other disciplines, including the humanities.¶ This trend is related to a hermeneutic mode of thought,50 which focuses on meaningful interpretations of phenomena, rather than on empirical testing of hypotheses and observations. Since the time of Freud, the typical psychoanalytic paper has consisted of speculations backed up with illustrations, similar to the methods of literary theory and criticism.¶ One model currently popular in the humanities is “critical theory.”51 This postmodernist approach uses Marxist concepts to explain phenomena ranging from literature to politics. It proposes that truth is entirely relative and often governed by hidden social forces. In its most radical form, in the work of Michel Foucault,52 critical theory and postmodernism take an antiscience position, denying the existence of objective truth and viewing scientific findings as ways of defending the “hegemony” of those in power

Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) reintroduced the “Choice in Affordable Housing Act” (S. 32) in the U.S. Senate on January 24. The bipartisan bill would expand and improve HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program while also increasing funding for and removing programmatic barriers in the HCV program to increase landlord participation. The bill was first introduced in the Senate in May 2021 (see Memo, 05/24/2021) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) in March 2022 (see Memo, 05/02/2022). NLIHC supports the “Choice in Affordable Housing Act” and urges Congress to enact the bill, along with investments to expand rental assistance and legislation to strengthen and enforce renter protections, to ensure that people with the lowest incomes and the most marginalized people have stable, affordable homes. Landlord participation in the HCV program, which determines the number of available homes and where they are located, has declined in recent years, making it more difficult for voucher holders to find housing in the community of their choice. The Choice in Affordable Housing Act would invest $500 million to increase voucher holders’ housing choices by offering incentives to landlords, including signing bonuses to landlords, security deposit assistance, and a financial bonus to public housing agencies (PHAs) that retain a dedicated landlord liaison on staff. In addition to financial incentives, the Choice in Affordable Housing Act would reduce programmatic barriers in the HCV program to help attract and retain landlords. The bill would require HUD to expand its 2016 rule requiring the use of Small Area Fair Market Rents in certain metro areas to increase the value of rental assistance, reduce inspection delays, and refocus HUD’s evaluation of PHAs to promote an increase in the diversity of neighborhoods where vouchers are used. To help renters on tribal land, the bill would also increase funding to the Tribal HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) program.

As Congress finalizes fiscal year 2023 appropriations bills that among other things will fund critical Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs and services, it should prioritize Housing Choice Vouchers and homelessness assistance programs to ensure that people with low incomes can afford safe, stable, and accessible housing. Congress should provide: sufficient funding to cover the cost of renewing existing rental assistance through the Housing Choice Voucher program; increased funding for homelessness assistance programs at the House-passed level of $3.6 billion; and new resources for additional housing vouchers and services to broaden housing choice. Both the House and Senate appropriations bills include $26.2 billion to renew existing vouchers. But the House version would also provide $1.1 billion for new vouchers, which would help an estimated 100,000 additional households afford safe, stable homes. Since vouchers are such an important but under-resourced rental assistance program, policymakers should include as much of this funding as possible in the final bill. The Housing Choice Voucher program is the country’s largest rental assistance program, helping about 2.3 million households afford a home of their choice in the private market. Households generally contribute 30 percent of their incomes toward their rent and utility costs, and housing agencies subsidize the rest, up to a limit. Housing vouchers are highly effective at reducing homelessness, overcrowding, and housing instability. Given the importance of the voucher program and persistent lack of resources, ensuring housing agencies have sufficient funding to maintain current assistance for households — and expand the number of households helped — should be a top priority. The House and Senate bills’ $26 billion for renewal funding should be enough to cover ongoing costs of current vouchers in 2023 despite rising rents and a voucher policy change designed to meet them. In September HUD announced an adjustment to the voucher program’s 2023 subsidy caps — known as fair market rents or FMRs — to keep pace with rapidly rising market rents. More accurate FMRs will help households with vouchers use their assistance more easily and in a larger range of neighborhoods. Although the House and Senate bills were released before this policy change and don’t reflect its cost implications, most housing agencies have higher-than-normal funding reserves that, combined with the bills’ $26.2 billion, should be enough to maintain assistance to families who currently receive vouchers. Also, the full effects of the increased FMR costs will happen relatively slowly. The new FMR calculations largely apply to families who are receiving vouchers for the first time or looking for a new home, or who experience a rent increase when they renew their lease. (Next year, these new FMRs will be part of the baseline renewal costs, and Congress should provide enough funding for housing agencies through appropriations to maintain support for families with vouchers. Reserves should not be an ongoing funding source for renewals.) But rather than merely maintain the voucher program, the 2023 appropriations bills are an opportunity to help it reach more households who need it. The House-passed bill includes $1.1 billion for new vouchers, which would help an estimated 100,000 additional households afford safe, stable homes. (The committee initially estimated that amount would create about 140,000 new vouchers, but with the new FMRs each voucher is more expensive, meaning 140,000 new vouchers could now cost closer to $1.5 billion.) Congress should include as close to that $1.1 billion as possible. Having more vouchers in 2023 is critically important. Due to limited funding, only 1 in 4 eligible households receives any federal rental assistance. This lack of affordable housing assistance disproportionately affects Black, Latine, Asian and Pacific Islander, and American Indian and Alaska Native households because of long-standing inequities stemming from structural racism in housing, education, and employment. Also, eviction rates, while down during much of the pandemic because of relief measures adopted, are again reaching pre-pandemic levels in many cities. Emergency rental assistance, which has helped many renters stay housed, is on pace to largely run out by year-end. Finally, rising rents are impacting people with the lowest incomes the most. Though data reflecting the impact of recent rent increases in 2022 are not available, between 2019 and 2021 rent costs for people making less than $15,000 per year increased by 6.6 percent after adjusting for inflation, well above the rate increase for any other income group (see chart). In fact, rent increases for people at the highest income levels were below the overall inflation rate of nearly 6 percent. Higher rents for people with the lowest incomes forces them to make unimaginable choices between paying for rent, food, medicine, and other basic needs.

One way to improve the situation is straightforward enough: better enforcement of source-of-income laws. Some cities are starting to take a more active role in this. For example, the NYC Department of Social Services has brought several lawsuits against large landlords for voucher discrimination. In 2018, NYC’s Commission for Human Rights formed a new unit to help fight income discrimination, and has since received over 800 complaints from voucher holders. The unit files formal complaints against landlords; its director, Stephanie Rudolph, said another top priority is intervening quickly, enabling voucher holders to move into buildings that had initially ignored them or turned them away. (Advocates in New York City who have praised the work of CCHR are pushing the city to provide greater funding for the unit, which currently has only five members.) Another key part of improving voucher programs is assisting voucher holders in their search and documenting discrimination, said Annie Carforo, campaign manager at Neighbors Together, a nonprofit organization that assists low-income New Yorkers. Carforo has talked to hundreds of people — many of them living in city shelters — who struggle to find apartments that will accept their vouchers and who have been given little, if any, assistance in their search. In some cases, people are unaware of the laws prohibiting voucher discrimination. “It’s heartbreaking to meet people who have been looking for housing for two years [using vouchers], and who never knew it was illegal for landlords to treat them this way,” Carforo said. Investing in a greater level of assistance for voucher holders is also a major component of Creating Moves to Opportunity, an initiative in Seattle and surrounding suburbs that helps families with housing choice vouchers relocate to high-opportunity neighborhoods. As Dylan Matthews recently reported for Vox, a randomized study of the program found big results: 54 percent of families in the treatment group that received counseling moved to a high-opportunity area, compared with 14 percent of families in the control group (which had received vouchers only). In some areas, improving the voucher system could also involve improving the voucher-acceptance process for landlords. Landlords in some cities have pushed back on source-of-income laws, and a recent qualitative study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University showed that some landlords are worried about losing money if they accept vouchers, due to inspections and other kinds of administrative delays. The researchers suggest that making the process more efficient could help address landlord concerns. Another approach may be increasing landlord incentives, such as bonuses and tax breaks, which a few states and cities already offer. In addition, the Urban Institute recommends greater investment in actively recruiting landlords to participate in voucher programs, particularly in low-poverty neighborhoods. The vouchers themselves could use improvements, too. In some cases, the lack of housing choice may be caused in part by voucher amounts that are not properly calibrated to local rents. Voucher amounts have typically been set by median rents in a large area (such as a metro area), but in recent years, there’s been a shift toward calculating median rents within smaller geographic areas (such as zip codes). Following a lawsuit, Dallas was the first to try this approach, which led to a greater use of vouchers in low-poverty neighborhoods. After studying the approach in five other pilot areas, HUD shifted to the new way of calculating median rent (called “small area fair market rent”) for 24 metro areas, and other housing agencies can decide to make the change voluntarily. (Though promising, it’s still too early to tell how much this policy shift will help increase mobility on a larger scale.)

When a woman in McKinney, Texas, told Tatiana Rhodes and her friends to “go back to your Section 8 homes” at a public pool earlier this month, she inadvertently spoke volumes about the failure of a program that was designed to help America’s poor. Created by Congress in 1974, the “Section 8” Housing Choice Voucher Program was supposed to help families move out of broken urban neighborhoods to places where they could live without the constant threat of violence and their kids could attend good schools. But somewhere along the way, “Section 8” became a colloquialism for housing that is, to many, indistinguishable from the public-housing properties the program was designed to help families escape. How did this happen? To begin with, Section 8 is poorly designed. It works like this: Families lucky enough to get off lengthy waiting lists are allowed to look for apartments up to a certain rent, which varies for each metro region. This figure is called the “fair market rent,” and is calculated by HUD every year for each metro area. The tenant pays about 30 percent of his income, and the voucher covers the rest of the rent (this is based on the idea that families should not spend more than one-third of their income on rent). But the fair market rent cut-off point often consigns voucher-holders to impoverished neighborhoods. This is in part because of how that number is calculated: HUD draws the line at the 40th percentile of rents for “typical” units occupied by “recent movers” in an entire metropolitan area, which includes far-flung suburbs with long commutes and, as a result, makes the Fair Market Rent relatively low. In New York City, for example, the Fair Market Rent for a one-bedroom is $1,249, a price that would relegate voucher-holders to the neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn, one of the most dangerous places in the city, and where the most public housing is located. Technically, voucher holders can live anywhere in a region that meets the price restrictions. But the tendency is for people to stay in neighborhoods that are familiar to them, though a few areas have created robust mobility-counseling programs to try and mitigate this. Additionally, as Eva Rosen has detailed, landlords in low-income areas aggressively recruit voucher-holders, as the vouchers are a much more reliable source of rent than other low-income tenants have available. The failings of Section 8 go far beyond flaws in how the program was designed to how the the states have implemented it. People can argue all they want about the merits of subsidized housing, but given that Section 8 exists, it would seem advantageous for states and municipalities to take advantage of federal funds to help families find better housing. But many states seem especially determined to keep voucher-holders in areas of concentrated poverty. “The whole idea of Section 8 in the beginning was that it was going to allow people to get out of the ghetto,” said Mike Daniel, a lawyer for the Inclusive Communities Project, told me. (Daniel has sued HUD over the way it is carrying out the program in Dallas.) “But there’s tremendous political pressure on housing authorities and HUD to not let it become an instrument of desegregation.” For example, in much of the country, landlords can refuse to take Section 8 vouchers, even if the voucher covers the rent. And, unlike the landlords in poor neighborhoods in Eva Rosen’s study, many landlords of buildings in nicer neighborhoods will do anything to keep voucher-holders out. The result is that Section 8 traps families in the poorest neighborhoods. One study in Austin found that there were plenty of apartments around the city that voucher-holders could afford. But only a small portion of those apartments would rent to voucher-holders. The report, by the Austin Tenant’s Council, found that 78,217 units in the Austin metro area—about 56 percent of those surveyed—had rents within the Fair Market Rent limits. But only 8,590 of those units accepted vouchers and did not have minimum income requirements for tenants. Most were located on the east side of Austin, in high-poverty areas with underperforming schools and high crime rates. (The survey only looked at apartment complexes with at least 50 units.) “Families don't have very many choices as to where they can actually use the voucher,” said Nekesha Phoenix, the Fair Housing Program Director at the Austin Tenants’ Council. “Although there are properties north and west that they could actually afford to live in, they can't do it because the properties won't take the voucher.” But in Austin the landlords successfully pushed back. The Austin Apartment Association sued the city over the ordinance, asking for an injunction to block it. The apartment owners say that being forced to accept Section 8 meant more paperwork, onerous lease terms, and “burdensome inspections.” (Section 8 properties have to be inspected to ensure they are sanitary and safe.)

The past three years – characterized by a global pandemic, widespread job losses, record-breaking inflation, unusually low vacancy rates, and skyrocketing rental prices – have underlined and exacerbated the financial precarity experienced by the nation’s lowest-income renters. Between January 2021 and December 2022, rental prices increased 22% nationally (Apartment List, 2022). These rent increases occurred across the country and were not confined to certain markets. As prices increased precipitously, the supply of rental housing affordable to extremely low- and very lowincome renters declined by more than one million units, continuing a long-term trend of a diminishing supply (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022b & 2020; Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2022; Hermann, 2020). Meanwhile, rental vacancy rates reached their lowest point in nearly four decades. With only 5.6% of rental units vacant at the end of 2021, renters’ choices about where to live became more and more limited (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023). Despite small improvements, the average vacancy rate in 2022 was 5.8%, a level not seen since the 1980s (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023). These trends are reflected in NLIHC’s most recent analysis of affordable and available rental homes for various income groups. Each year, NLIHC uses American Community Survey (ACS) data to estimate how many affordable rental homes are available to extremely low-income households – those with incomes at or below the federal poverty guideline or 30% of AMI, whichever is greater – and other income groups (Box 1). Affordable homes are those with rents that do not exceed 30% of a given income threshold. Homes are affordable and available for a specific income group if they are affordable and are either vacant or not occupied by a higher-income household. The Gap report provides estimates of affordable housing needs in the U.S., including in each state, the District of Columbia (D.C.), and the 50 largest metropolitan areas.2 Extremely low-income renters likely have even fewer housing options now than they did prior to the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, the shortage of affordable and available rental homes for them increased by 8%, from 6.8 million to 7.3 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022c; U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). As this report shows, we cannot successfully resolve our affordable housing crisis without housing assistance that adequately meets the housing needs of renters with the lowest incomes.

Due to limited program funding, families struggling to afford housing that manage to get off the waiting list for a Housing Choice Voucher must typically wait for years before receiving a voucher, CBPP analysis of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data shows. Among the 50 largest housing agencies, only two have average wait times of under a year for families that have made it off of the waiting list; the longest have average wait times of up to eight years. On average nationally, families that received vouchers had spent close to two and a half years on waitlists first, exposing many to homelessness, overcrowding, eviction, and other hardship while they wait. (See the Appendix for data on average wait times by state and among the largest agencies.) Moreover, these figures understate the unmet need for assistance. Millions of other families eligible for rental assistance never receive it because their names never rise to the top of the waiting list or they live in communities where the housing agency has closed or doesn’t keep a waiting list. Also, because of insufficient funding, local housing agencies often prioritize specific groups for available vouchers such as veterans, working families, or people fleeing domestic violence or experiencing homelessness. Setting priorities in the face of limited funding makes sense, but it means that families that need help paying for housing but fall outside the priority groups may never get assistance. For all of these reasons, an agency’s average wait for people receiving vouchers does not reflect the average wait for someone who puts their names on a waiting list for one. Significantly expanding the federally funded voucher program, which helps households with low incomes rent a modest unit of their choice in the private market, would help more people access rental assistance when they first need it instead of facing years of hardship. A top priority for policymakers in the upcoming recovery package should be to provide substantial, multi-year funding for new housing vouchers. The state and local housing agencies that administer the voucher program use virtually all the voucher assistance funds they receive, but a shortage of resources for rental assistance leaves the vast majority of eligible households without aid. In 2019, for example, 2 million households used vouchers to rent housing but more than 16 million unassisted renter households paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing or lived in substandard or overcrowded homes. (The federal government considers housing unaffordable if it exceeds 30 percent of income.) Households on agency waiting lists typically continue to experience homelessness, overcrowding, or other housing insecurity for years before receiving a voucher. And many other households needing vouchers either don’t get on a waitlist — 53 percent of agencies had closed their waiting lists to additional applicants, a 2016 survey found — or drop off without ever obtaining assistance, even after waiting years. Housing vouchers, when available, are highly effective at reducing homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding and at improving other outcomes for families and children, rigorous research shows. They also give people with low incomes greater choice about where they live, enabling them to move to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and more resources. Expanding the program could lift millions of people out of poverty. It also would reduce racial inequity: the housing affordability challenges that vouchers address are heavily concentrated among people with the lowest incomes and, due to a long history of racial discrimination that has limited their economic and housing opportunities, among people of color. Inadequate Funding Creates Long Waits The Housing Choice Voucher program, the nation’s largest form of rental assistance, offers a proven, evidence-based tool to address housing hardship. Currently it enables roughly 2.3 million households with low incomes to afford decent, stable housing. The family pays about 30 percent of its income for rent and utilities, a widely used standard for the amount a household can reasonably be expected to pay for housing. The voucher covers the rest, up to a cap based on HUD estimates of typical market rents in the local area.[1] Despite the demonstrated benefits of rental assistance and effectiveness of vouchers specifically, resources fall far short of need. Only 1 in 4 households eligible for rental assistance receive it due to funding limitations. Because the need is so much greater than the supply of vouchers, housing agencies establish waitlists for households interested in receiving assistance, and for each agency HUD publishes the average time someone who received a voucher had to first wait for assistance. While these data leave out millions of people in need who never get a voucher (see discussion below), they provide a useful indicator of the inadequacy of federal rental assistance funding by showing how long even people who succeed in obtaining a voucher must endure hardship before receiving help.

[Table omitted]

Removing Regulatory Barriers at the Local, State, and Federal Level to Allow More Homes and Apartments to Be Built and Reduce the Time and Cost of Building If the nation, and state and local communities, are going to make significant progress in addressing housing affordability, one of the key policy levers is to reduce or remove regulatory barriers to building new homes and apartments. Work is underway in the private sector and the public sector to achieve better regulatory policies for housing affordability. An excellent example of private sector innovation is Symbium, located in San Francisco, which has developed a computational law platform that mechanizes the rules and regulations of a planning code, to help homeowners, design professionals, and planners quickly determine if an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) is allowed on a property. Automating the legal analysis for the planning code enables anyone to access what is possible in a certain jurisdiction or on a given parcel, and it reduces the processing time from multiple months or weeks to an immediate response. This kind of computational capacity is an important breakthrough in reducing the administrative and regulatory barriers, and demonstrates the potential for other processing innovations related to planning and zoning. In the public sector, the City of Minneapolis and the State of Oregon have made important steps to break down the regulatory barriers to housing affordability by essentially eliminating single-family zoning. While nearly 75 percent of the housing in Minneapolis was previously zoned single-family, now, up to three units are allowed on any residential plot of land throughout the entire city. “By rezoning lots that currently accommodate only one single-family house to allow duplexes and triplexes,” says Andrea Brennan, Minneapolis’s Housing Policy and Development Director, “Minneapolis effectively triples the housing capacity of some neighborhoods.” In Oregon, the state legislature passed HB2001 in June 2019, with bipartisan support, historic legislation that effectively ended single-family zoning in the state. States hold the legal authority to establish the parameters for zoning at the local level, and the State of Oregon has made a bold move to assert that authority to encourage local jurisdictions to allow more housing to be built in their state.

2. Leverage tax incentives, grants, and other funding to spur office-to-housing conversions. The pandemic, with the attendant rise in remote work, has underscored the overcapacity of office space in many cities and towns and revealed a potentially valuable source of new housing. Yet many of the buildings most likely to be suitable for conversion to housing have aging components or hazardous materials such as asbestos and lead, making remodeling complicated and cost prohibitive. States can support office-to-housing conversions through financial incentives such as tax credits and grants. In fact, some states are drawing upon American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) monies to provide needed financing for office-to-housing conversions. For example, Pennsylvania is working with local officials in Pittsburgh, PA to use ARPA money to support these conversions. In December 2021, the District of Columbia government issued a request for information on suggested incentives that would encourage renovating commercial properties to residential. California has a provision in its historic renovation tax credit that allows developers to claim a 25% tax credit against personal income and corporation taxes for qualified rehabilitation expenses for projects that will contain affordable housing. 3. Create a clearinghouse of programs that support home repairs and improvements. Preservation through home improvement is an important way to maintain an affordable housing supply. Localities, states, and federal agencies—including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Energy, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs—have a myriad of programs in place to support weatherization, disaster resilience, aging in place, and other home repairs and improvements. New federal legislation, particularly the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, provide additional funding for these efforts and new programs, which may make it even more challenging for individuals, landlords, nonprofits, and communities to navigate all available funding and financing assistance options and secure resources for home improvements and repairs. However, states are uniquely positioned to help. In addition to better coordinating the programs they manage, states can establish one-stop shops to advertise available funding and financing options, provide valuable technical assistance, and help residents in locating and applying for these programs. 4. Work with industry and academic institutions to support home construction innovation. Innovative construction designs, materials, and processes have the potential to lower the costs of home construction and boost housing affordability. States can provide incentives to encourage universities to work with innovative design and manufacturing firms, to develop and evaluate new construction materials, or work with manufacturers on commercializing emerging building products. Linking construction and design firms to existing trade schools and community colleges would also ensure a fresh wave of skilled workers, educated in the newest techniques. For example, states like Oregon and Washington have programs focused on researching and piloting forestry-based building products. In Oregon, state legislation established the TallWood Design Institute, a collaboration of Oregon State University, the University of Oregon and private sector organizations that help support research, testing and commercialization of mass timber products and construction practices. Virginia Tech University collaborates with the construction sector to research and pilot innovative technologies. States can also work with industry leaders and academic institutions to identify any regulatory barriers that would inhibit the broad deployment of home construction innovations.

Higher price tags are showing up more frequently these days—on everything from groceries to housing. In fact, the Federal Housing Finance Industry noted in late November that US house prices rose 18.5 percent over the last year.Home prices are rising much faster than income, threatening to price all but the wealthiest buyers out of the market. Owning a home—once a pillar of the American dream—is now out of reach for millions of American families. A lack of housing supply is a big reason why homes are so unaffordable right now. The demand for housing has surged while the supply has failed to keep up. As the Maine Policy Institute points out, the number of newly built housing per capita in the United States has fallen 50% over the last 40 to 50 years. Onerous zoning laws and burdensome regulations are driving this housing shortage by making it expensive and difficult for developers to build more housing options. The good news is that states can take steps to address this problem. A Network of state and local policy organizations is already encouraging policymakers to adopt reforms that reduce these regulations, allow developers to meet demand, and make affordable housing options more available. California: Cut the red tape and mandates blocking development of new homes When you think of a state known for expensive houses, California is no doubt one of the first states that crosses your mind. The Golden State holds the title as the third-most-expensive state in terms of cost of living. Think tanks, such as the Pacific Research Institute, have been promoting policies and reforms that California can implement that will increase supply and alleviate the high cost of housing. In a recent blog post, the Pacific Research Institute argued the underlying issue driving the housing crisis is the thicket of rules blocking the new development of homes. In an op-ed for the Times of San Diego, the Institute argued green building mandates will increase the cost of housing in California. And in the policy brief, “Unaffordable,” PRI noted California housing is expensive because of a severe shortage that is the result of government policies that have disincentivized home building. Hawaii: Change zoning rules to make more land available The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii has been advocating for reforms that would increase housing supply and lower costs in Hawaii, a state with the highest housing costs in the country. These reforms include reducing zoning laws and regulations, making more land available, and lessening the need for state and county approvals of projects under a certain size. In October 2021, Grassroot conducted and highlighted a survey that found that 97 percent of Hawaii residents think the cost of housing in the state is too expensive. The survey also found that residents support adding land and reforming zoning laws to increase housing. Grassroot is also finding creative ways to promote these findings and reforms. In September 2021, executive vice president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, Joe Kent, went viral on Tik Tok for a video on Hawaii’s high cost of housing. The video received more than one million views. Maine: Start by strengthening the economy In August 2021, the Maine Policy Institute submitted testimony to the Commission to Increase Housing Opportunities in Maine. The Institute noted that, in many ways, housing unaffordability is a symptom of a weak economy. The Institute highlighted how targeted incentive policies that favor certain groups negatively affect the overall fiscal health of states and can play a role in high housing costs. States like Maine should instead focus on lowering costs for everyone by cutting taxes and fees and removing regulations. In addition, Maine Policy argued local deregulation is the path to relieving Maine’s housing crunch. States should remove burdensome local ordinances such as parking requirements for new construction, restrictions on accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and building and permitting fees. Minnesota: Eliminate excessive regulations and fees that slow construction The Center of the American Experiment highlighted how the housing shortage in Minnesota’s two biggest cities, St. Paul and Minneapolis, is the worst in the nation. What’s more, Minnesota is expected to be 40,000 houses and apartments short of what’s needed over the next five years to keep pace with population growth. Through op-eds, blog posts, and other outreach, American Experiment is advocating for reforms that reduce housing prices and increase supply for Minnesota residents. To tackle the state’s housing crisis, American Experiment argues lawmakers should focus on removing impediments to housing construction, namely excessive fees and regulations. In the November 2021 election, to address the housing crisis, Minneapolis and St. Paul residents voted to enact rent control, a policy that imposes a maximum rent that a landlord can charge a tenant. In a report, American Experiment argued rent control is a harmful and ineffective policy and will exacerbate the housing crisis in the Twin Cities. Montana: Speed up permit approvals The Frontier Institute highlighted how local planning departments can often take months to approve building permits. In Missouri, permit approvals can take 10-12 weeks and add more than $20,000 to the cost of new developments. Frontier also noted that one of the biggest factors constricting the supply of housing in Montana is zoning and building regulations imposed by local governments. In a blog post, Frontier asked readers to “Imagine instead if a developer could walk into a city permit office with their plans, walk out with a permit, and start construction that same day.” Frontier highlighted how Phoenix, Arizona, is now known as the “24-hour city” for implementing a system that allows business owners to start the application for a building permit and receive an approval for that permit within 24 hours. Frontier encouraged policymakers in Montana to consider implementing innovative reforms like Phoenix’s 24-Hour City. New Hampshire: Get lower prices by relaxing housing regulations The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy has been reiterating that rolling back bad ordinances will increase housing supply in New Hampshire—a state in dire need of more housing. The Center also released a poll in May 2021 that found that New Hampshire residents are willing to relax local housing regulations in exchange for lower prices. Utah: Remove minimum lot requirements The Libertas Institute highlighted how housing prices in Utah have increased, on average, by more than $100,000 over the last year. Libertas also explained how minimum lot requirements, or a policy that controls the size of property that can be created on a zone-wide basis, exacerbate the housing crisis and disproportionately harms lower-income people. Libertas commended Cedar City, Utah, for ending this practice and taking a first step towards affordable housing.

Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well. Where you live affects nearly everything about your life – where you work, how you spend time off, who your friends and neighbours are, how many kids you can have and when, and even how often you get sick. Most people’s most valuable asset is, by far, their own home. And housing is so important for the overall economy because it determines the location and supply of the most important ‘resource’ of all: people. interest rates, which reflect a lower cost of borrowing and lower returns from other investments, have helped people bid up the price of housing There’s a growing consensus that housing is too expensive in most Western countries. In many places, the prices of new homes far exceed the cost of building more of them. Higher incomes in cities draw people to those places, who use some of their increased wages to bid up rents and house prices there. Easier credit and falling as well. For most goods, including very expensive and durable goods like ships and airplanes, higher incomes and falling interest rates would cause supply to increase, instead of keeping the price permanently high. But for housing in and around many in-demand cities, supply has not been able to keep up with demand. This is true across the developed world: Dublin, Singapore, Auckland, Paris, Vancouver, Rome, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Moscow, Cape Town, Zurich and many other cities have wildly expensive housing compared to the cost of building more of it. Costs are especially high in places whose economies are built on intangible capital, like software or financial services. In these kinds of industries, there are especially large benefits to people being near one another, because it makes them both more productive and more innovative. This is why the San Francisco Bay Area – probably the most productive place in the Western world – is also one of the most in-demand places to live. And that demand, plus restrictions on building more houses, is why it is one of the most expensive places to live as well. This housing affordability problem has become much worse over the past four decades – coinciding with, and partly driven by, the growth of the intangible economy — the move towards production based on software and intellectual property, instead of machinery and other physical capital. In the 1960s, it was commonplace that a middle class single-earner American or British family would be able to afford a comfortable home. When more people want to live in an area, we either build more homes to accommodate them or squeeze them in to the existing housing stock, with those people bidding up the price of living there. We can see all of these mechanisms in play in the Western world’s most in-demand cities. In London, for example, empty homes now make up only a few percent of the total, as it becomes more and more costly to leave something empty. The most dramatic evidence of housing scarcity can be seen in price rises over the past forty years. Average New York City metropolitan area house prices are up 706% since 1980 (or 376% more than US consumer prices, and 326% more than US wages). For San Francisco the rise is 932%. London house prices are up over 2,100% in that period (or around 1,500% more than wages). Prices in Sydney, Australia, have risen by 1,450% (compared to hourly wage increases of 480%). In Ireland, prices have risen by about 800% in that period, driven by rises in Dublin in particular. Rents show similar, but less extreme, trends, because they are not directly affected by interest rates. These prices range from about twice to four times the cost of building new homes of equivalent specification. This wedge, between build costs and house prices, is a rough proxy for how much extra cost is being driven by restrictions on new building. By contrast, almost every other household product has become better and less expensive since then. Compared to 1975, the number of hours a median American worker would have to work to buy a television fell from 60 hours in 1975 to 7 hours in 2013; to buy a fridge-freezer, it fell from 65 hours in 1975 to 20 hours in 2013; to buy a manual exercise treadmill, from 18 hours in 1975 to 6 hours in 2013; and to buy a washer-dryer, from 67 to 30 hours. Even cars are three times ‘cheaper’ in terms of hours worked on an average hourly wage now than they were in 1964. And none of these estimates accounts for how much better most of these products are now than they were in 1975.

[Table omitted]

Some 16 million renter households paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing or lived in overcrowded or substandard housing in 2019.[16] Some 5.7 million of them are working households. Because many jobs do not pay enough to enable workers to afford housing and housing costs have outpaced income growth,[17] nearly 1 in 5 working renter households paid over half their income for housing in 2018.[18] In addition, 580,000 people experienced homelessness in January 2020, according to HUD’s annual point-in-time count.[19] These housing problems are linked to cascading harm in other aspects of families’ lives, including adverse effects on children’s health, development, and educational success. Vouchers offer a proven solution and expanding Housing Choice Vouchers would help more people receive assistance when they first need it. Rigorous research shows that Housing Choice Vouchers sharply reduce homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding. By lowering rental costs, vouchers also allow low-income people to spend more on other basic needs like food and medicine,[20] as well as on goods and services that foster their children’s healthy development.[21] They also provide people with low incomes greater choice about where they live, allowing them to make decisions based on what works best for them. When families choose to use their voucher to move from a neighborhood with a high poverty rate and lack of investments to a neighborhood with low poverty rates and more resources, research shows the children have substantially higher college attendance rates and adult earnings than peers who grew up in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. Adults in these families have improved mental health and lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity.[22] Providing vouchers to all eligible households would lift 9.3 million people above the poverty line and cut the child poverty rate by a third, a Columbia University study estimated.[23] It also would shrink the gaps in poverty rates between white and Black households (by over a third) and between white and Hispanic households (by nearly half). And it would significantly reduce poverty disparities for people with disabilities. (See Figure 2.)

Constraints on supply have made houses into scarce assets, more like bonds, fine art or precious metals than durable goods like refrigerators or cars. This only feels normal because we’re used to it, and does not happen in places where developers can easily add more homes to an area, such as Tokyo, Seoul, or New York City before the 1920s. In places like these, rising demand leads to more supply, not just higher prices. A fixed supply of housing means improvements in people’s aggregate incomes often partially go to landowners, since people bid up the price of housing with some of their increased income. This is one of the bases for the economist Henry George’s proposal for taxes on land value. George realised that even improvements in a local area – a new park, or better sanitation – would also be captured by local landowners. The new park would make people more willing to pay to live nearby, bidding up the price of housing in that area, so that existing landowners captured much of the value the park created. These effects play out visibly in fights over gentrification. Rising wages let bankers and tech workers bid up the rents on poorer parts of cities that have become fashionable, driving up rents. Many low-income communities have been broken up as people have been forced to move away by these rising rents, and by shops and other services changing to cater to wealthier new customers. Few people object to making a place more pleasant, greener and safer: the biggest concern for current residents is not improvement in the place, but the risk of being priced out of their homes and communities. There is another way. Increasing the supply of housing and commercial space, while ensuring that it benefits existing residents, could turn this zero-sum situation into one where everyone can be better off. This might be done, for example, by allowing them to vote on increased density, and benefit from it directly. The new demand could be accommodated and the financial rewards to development could be shared with existing residents without displacing them. The aggregate, countrywide effect of housing being so limited in supply has been that economic growth in most Western countries has accrued more and more to landowners and less to everyone else. Economist Thomas Piketty famously demonstrated an increase in the share of national income that flows to owners of capital, rather than to labour. But what was less widely acknowledged was that, at least in the US, it was really an increase in the share of income going to landowners, driven by increases in the cost of housing, and that this effect was particularly strong in states that have highly restrictive rules against building more homes. The rising inequality Piketty demonstrated appears to have been largely driven by housing shortages turning, in one economist’s words, ‘houses into gold’. And this is the case across the Western world: housing inequality, not income inequality, primarily determines how much wealth inequality there is in most Western countries. Housing shortages have driven regional inequality as well. Earlier, we told the story of workplaces deprived of lower-skilled staff having to get their star employees to do work that would be better done by someone with less-expensive skills. And the other side of this is that people who cannot earn top salaries are unable to move to high-income cities at all. Consider a cleaner living in Alabama. In 1960 they could move to NYC and earn wages 84% higher, and still end up with 70% higher income after rent. In 2010, they could move to New York City and become 28% more productive, and earn a wage 28% higher – and reduce the surplus of workers back home, letting them demand higher pay. But since housing costs are so much higher, the net earnings and living standards of someone like this would fall if they moved today, and wouldn’t be worth it. The same would be true for plumbers, receptionists and other professions that allow other people to specialise at what they’re best at and minimise the time they spend on things like DIY and answering the phone. By contrast, top lawyers get wage boosts that are still sufficiently higher to justify a move in both 1960 and 2010, even after the higher rents they’ll have to pay. Economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag conclude that this effect, on aggregate, has directly led to a slowdown in the rate at which poorer US states have been catching up with richer ones. Between 1880 and 1980, poorer US states caught up with the richest ones at a rate of around 2% per year; since then, this rate of convergence has halved, to around 1% per year. Where previously people of all income and skill levels would move to more prosperous places, now only well-paid ones at the top do, leaving behind many who are not so lucky in places with a surplus of labour.

The nation’s lowest-income renters have long faced a severe shortage of affordable housing, and the problem has only worsened in recent years, as record-high inflation and the loss of lowcost rental homes have impacted renters nationwide. Though inflation has cooled and rent prices have flattened entering 2023, the nation’s lowest-income renters still face enormous challenges finding and maintaining safe and affordable rental housing. Each year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) estimates the availability of affordable rental homes, with a particular focus on the housing needs of households with extremely low incomes, defined as incomes at or below either the federal poverty guideline or 30% of the area median income (AMI) – whichever is greater. These households account for one-quarter, or 11 million, of the nation’s 44.1 million renters and experience significant rates of financial and housing precarity. NLIHC’s annual Gap report provides estimates of affordable housing needs in the U.S., including in each state, the District of Columbia (D.C.), and the largest metropolitan areas. The key findings of this year’s report are as follows:

• The shortage of affordable rental housing primarily impacts renters with extremely low incomes. Extremely low-income renters in the U.S. face a shortage of 7.3 million affordable and available rental homes, resulting in only 33 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.1

In addition to the deleterious impact of systematic disinvestment and systemic racial inequity on individual children and family’s health and wellbeing, many communities exhibit racially based inequity in upward mobility. The statistically significant variance in intergenerational social mobility is strongly correlated to the intersection of race, gender, place, and wealth accumulation, which, in United States is most commonly related to home ownership.8 These compounding factors create intergenerational income gaps, a form of intergenerational inequality defined as “racial differences in income distributions conditional to parental income.”8 Without intentional investment in communities, neighborhoods can become disenfranchised and become centers of inequality. Neighborhood level inequality can be seen in occupational segregation, degradation of the built environment (such as poor lighting, lack of green space, and increased levels of environmental toxins), poor educational opportunities, and incarceration of adolescents and young adults. 8,18,32−34 These factors are buttressed by historical drivers of systemic racism and form a feedback loop that generates persistent inequity.18 This obstinate neighborhood level inequality is also exemplified by the negative impact it has on children and family’s health and wellness outcomes such as asthma exacerbations and average depression scores for caregivers.4,16,18,34 A multitiered and multifaceted approach is needed to dismantle the inequitable housing structures that induce and sustain health disparities for families with low incomes, especially for those in communities of color. The four tiers that will be examined in this manuscript are 1) Family/Primary Care Pediatrician Level; 2) Clinic Level Practices; 3) System/Anchor Institution Level; 4) Policy Level − the tertiary prevention strategies that address upstream drivers of inequity (Table). [table omitted]

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s provided momentum for the creation and enforcement of equitable housing practices via the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This law prohibited discrimination on the basis of color, race, religion, and national origin in most real estate transactions, and established a moral and legal precedent for the banking and housing sector.12,15 Unfortunately, this pivotal law was often poorly enforced due to societal pressures to maintain the established racial hierarchy.12,15 The impact of racial residential segregation was compounded by systematic disinvestment in housing by the federal government in the late 20th century. The federal government has tools to address the needs of renters including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers a tax incentive to developers to produce affordable housing, and the Housing Choice Voucher program, which provides rental subsidies to increase affordability for renters. These programs, however, are underfunded, in contrast to the mortgage interest deduction, which enables homeowners to deduct mortgage payments from their tax burden. As a result, deep inequities in wealth accumulation persist between predominately white homeowners and renters of color.16 This disinvestment intersected with a decreased low-income housing stock, and increasing cost for housing.10,16 These inequities were compounded by the Great Recession of the late-2000s that led to a rapid decline in homeownership and increase in renters, with the largest increase occurring in low-income households.16 The impact of the economic downturn and stagnant HUD funding restricted the sustainable pathways for low-income renters to secure affordable housing16 and led to an increased number of cost burdened renters (those who are paying greater than 30% of their income for rent) which rose from 14.8 million to 21.3 million from 2001 to 2014.16 It also led to an increased number of severely burdened households (those who are paying greater than 50% of their income for rent) which rose from 7.5 million to 11.4 million in the same time period.16 The economic downturn had a disparate burden on families and communities of color.16

Eliminating the affordable housing shortage will require a long-term federal commitment to investing in new affordable housing, preserving affordable rental homes that already exist, bridging the gap between household incomes and rent through universal rental assistance, providing emergency assistance to stabilize renters when they experience financial shocks, and incentivizing reductions in zoning regulations that limit affordable housing development. Reductions in federal appropriations for critical housing assistance programs that serve renters with extremely low incomes will only exacerbate our affordable housing crisis and push even more families into housing instability and homelessness. Budget cuts not only exacerbate the problem but can generate negative long-term effects that are difficult to reverse. Increases to HUD’s appropriations in recent years, for example, have not entirely made up for the cuts experienced by HUD during the first years of budget caps under the “Budget Control Act of 2011” (BCA). Between fiscal year (FY) 2011 and FY2017, HUD experienced seven consecutive years of real budget cuts after accounting for inflation (Figure 12). HUD’s cumulative appropriations during this time were $27 billion less than if HUD’s annual appropriations had remained at FY2010 levels, adjusted only for inflation. Even with significant increases in HUD’s appropriations in recent years, HUD’s cumulative appropriations since FY2010 are still slightly lower than if annual appropriations had remained at FY2010 levels. To fully address the shortage of affordable rental housing for renters with extremely low incomes, Congress must increase funding for both preserving the stock of existing affordable housing and increasing the supply of deeply affordable units. Proposed legislation like the “American Housing and Economic Mobility Act” (“S.1368” in the 117th Congress) would address the shortage of affordable rental homes for extremely low-income renters through an investment of nearly $45 billion annually in the national Housing Trust Fund. The bill also includes resources to repair public housing, build or rehabilitate housing in tribal and Native Hawaiian communities, and create and preserve affordable homes in rural areas. Congress must also increase resources for rental assistance through Housing Choice Vouchers or a renters’ tax credit. While vouchers alone do not increase the supply of housing, they help address the shortage of affordable and available units for extremely low-income renters by allowing them to afford moderately priced units. The “Ending Homelessness Act of 2021” (“H.R.4496” in the 117th Congress), for example, proposed to establish a universal voucher program that would enable all eligible households to receive rental assistance. The bipartisan “Family Stability and Opportunity Vouchers Act” (“S.1991” in the 117th Congress) would create 500,000 housing vouchers specifically targeted to low-income families with young children and provide mobility counseling services to help families find housing options in neighborhoods of their choice.

This housing deficit has been exacerbated by the failure of successive governments to address this issue and there is no simple solution to it. But it is possible to turn the tide and fix our country's housing supply. Together with housing charity Shelter we have outlined four essential reforms that the next government can implement within the first 100 days of the next parliament for increasing the supply of affordable homes and stabilising England's rollercoaster housing market. 1. Allow councils to work together to plan development A fundamental first step for the new government will be to identify how it can better plan where and how many houses are built nationally. We are the only advanced economy to have no planning for homes above the most local level, and this needs to change. Our councils need to be encouraged to plan housing developments together alongside building the roads, hospitals and schools we need to support our growing population. They shouldn't just work in isolation of their own fiefdoms. For example, when we build major new roads or train lines across the country we need to build houses that are connected to these new infrastructure projects. We need to stop the piecemeal approach to development that has long held Britain back. 2. Encourage local enterprise partnerships Local enterprise partnerships also have a role to play here, and could help councils assess what our housing needs are across the wider economic region. After all, many people live in one authority but work in another, so their needs must be considered by both councils. Placing housing at the centre of city deals, and devolving house-building budgets from central government to those cities that want to grow would give city leaders the finance they need to tackle the problem. 3. Introduce 'new homes zones' But we need also to unlock land for development, empowering those who want to build high-quality homes quickly with the means to do so. This could be achieved by giving planning authorities the power to create "new homes zones" – sites where significant numbers of new homes could be developed. Combined with infrastructure, development would be led by councils, the private sector and local communities, and self-financed through sharing in the rising value of the land. 4. Incentivise small builders It's also important to make it easier for small builders to enter the market – including self builders. Even building at full capacity, our major house builders can't build the number of houses we need: on average they build just 130,000 houses each year. To bridge this gap we need to mobilise an army of small builders, so people can commission the construction of their own homes. This is the norm elsewhere in Europe – in Austria, for example, 80% of houses are built this way. Small builders need access to cheap finance and a 2015 government could provide this via a new help-to-build scheme that guarantees lending to small and medium-sized house builders. This would be a mirror of the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme already in place. A lack of affordable housing is an issue that, if left unaddressed, could impede the social mobility of a generation and have a paralysing effect on businesses. Business leaders will struggle to attract and retain a talented workforce if employees can't find affordable housing close to work.

However, existing research has completely overlooked the single most important determinant of people’s everyday welfare, the largest asset on their household balance sheets, and the driver of massive macroeconomic instability over the last two decades: housing. Like trade and technological change, the housing market has had a profound impact on the distribution of winners and losers across advanced capitalist economies. Some homeowners, based in booming global cities, have profited handsomely from rapid house price inflation; others, based in regions of economic decline, have weathered a housing crash that sent them into negative equity, foreclosure, and increased risk of depression (McLaughlinet al.2012). Indeed, while there is broad recognition that the housing market played an important role in the financial crisis (Rajan2010), and broad recognition that the financial crisis has played an important role in the political economy of populism (Rodrik2017), there is not a single study to our knowledge that has examined the impact of housing market dynamics on populist vote share. This article aims to fill that gap in the literature. We examine two recent elections with a salient populist dimension:Britain’s 2016 referendum on membership to the European Union and France’s Presidential Election in 2017. Across both, we show that the WEST EUROPEAN POLITICS345 housing market is closely tied to populist electoral outcomes: areas that have gained from house price inflation are far less likely to vote for populist causes or parties than areas that have been excluded from those gains. We run our analyses at both the local and the individual levels, control-ling for a range of key variables in the populism literature, including age, income, gender, and education. We show that housing has a strong effect on populist support independent of these socio-economic and demo-graphic factors. Our findings make contributions to both the housing literature and the populism literature. Several studies have explored the link between house prices and voters’ preferences over party choice (Verberg2000) and so-called ‘first-dimension’(material) issues like trade (Scheve and Slaughter2001)and welfare expenditures (Ansell2014). Yet very little attention has been paid to how housing markets affect preferences along the‘ second dimension’(group-based) of politics, which dominates new populist movements and, through them, much of contemporary West European politics (Jagers and Walgrave2007). We develop a novel theory of housing and its impact on voters ’sense of exclusion from the economic and cultural changes over the last quarter-century. In doing so, we help to bridge the economic and cultural explanations of populist appeal. Several recent studies attempt a horserace between these explanations, evaluating the relative impact of indicators like house-hold income and attitudes toward immigration (Inglehart and Norris2017; Rodrik2017). On the basis of these measurements, some scholars have concluded that the‘ economic inequality’ perspective is largely invalid (Inglehart and Norris2017). Our findings suggest that economic inequality is an indispensable explanation of the populist vote, but were frame our understanding of inequality in geographical terms. The housing market structures the political map by locking people into–or out of–different climates of fortune: in some areas, a housing boom inspires optimism; in others, a housing bust fosters a sense of exclusion–not only from the gains of their neighbours, but also from the areas where housing is no longer affordable to them. It is in these latter areas, we show, that the culture of resentment thrives (Cramer2016), clearing the way for populist candidates. Housing has clear material winners and losers, but its geographic fixity also means that houses are embedded in local communities, and voters ’sense of self-understanding and group identity flows from these local conditions. Diverging fortunes in the housing mar-ket can activate both sets of concerns and thereby drive voters’ satisfaction with the political status quo. In the next section, we develop a theory of the relationship between the housing market and local populist appeal. In the third section, we346D. ADLER AND B. ANSELL describe the methods that we employ to examine this relationship. In the fourth and fifth sections, we examine the data from Britain’s referendum on EU membership and the French presidential election of 2017, conduct-ing analyses of both local electoral outcomes and individual vote choice. The sixth section concludes by drawing out broader lessons.

Americans are feeling the impact of historic inflation, and rising rents are a primary driver. The price of housing is by far the largest category in the Consumer Price Index and one of the greatest contributors to the inflationary pressure squeezing all households, especially those with the lowest incomes. In restarting negotiations on a major spending package, Congress and the Biden administration have a crucial opportunity to tackle inflation and ensure that America’s lowest-income and most marginalized people can get and stay stably housed. Even before the pandemic, millions of households were struggling to keep roofs over their heads, always just one financial shock away from falling behind on rent and being threatened with eviction, and in the worst cases homelessness. Then came COVID-19. By August 2020, according to the best available data, as many as 12 million households were at risk of losing their homes without immediate governmental action. Many were among those already struggling to pay rent when the pandemic brought sudden job losses, reduced work hours, and higher costs for health care, childcare, and the internet. Advocates sounded the alarm, and federal, state, and local governments took heed, providing unprecedented resources and protections to keep tenants housed. Emergency rental assistance and eviction moratoriums were essential protections. Yet they offered only a temporary patch for the gaping holes in our social safety net. Now, as pandemic-era renter protections expire and resources are depleted, renters are encountering a housing market upended by soaring inflation. Last year, the cost of rent rose on average 14 percent nationally, with some cities seeing rent increases as high as 40 percent. Rents are expected to rise another 10 percent this year. These price increases affect renters of all incomes but threaten the lowest-income renters most of all. Skyrocketing rents are in part a consequence of the severe shortage of affordable homes for renters with the lowest incomes. There is a national shortage of 7 million homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes, and fewer than four affordable and available homes exist for every 10 of the lowest-income households. Not a single state or Congressional district has enough affordable homes to meet the demand. Without affordable options, 10 million of the lowest-income households spend over half their incomes on rent, depriving them of the resources needed to put food on the table, purchase medications, and make ends meet. Renters need an annual income of nearly $50,000 — or $23.96 an hour — on average to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment. In many parts of the country, they need to earn much more. For many working families, seniors, and people with disabilities, incomes like these are completely out of reach. People of color are disproportionately impacted. Black households account for 13 percent of all households but a quarter of all extremely low-income renters and nearly half of people experiencing homelessness. Latino households, who make up 12 percent of the total population, account for 21 percent of extremely low-income renters and 22 percent of people without homes. Native Americans are significantly overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness, and the harms are compounded for women of color. The tragic and preventable results of the housing crisis are visible everywhere you look. Eviction filing rates are increasing throughout the country and, in some communities, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. When America’s lowest-income renters lose their homes, they have few options available to them. Most double or triple up with other families in overcrowded homes. Many become homeless and resort to staying in congregate shelters. And on any given night in America, more than 200,000 people are sleeping in tents, cars, and other areas not fit for human habitation. With rents rising rapidly, homelessness worsening, and millions of families struggling to stay housed, federal investments are desperately needed and long overdue. Congress was close to providing vital funding through the Build Back Better Act passed last year by the House of Representatives. The bill included historic and targeted housing investments, including $25 billion to expand rental assistance to 300,000 new households, $65 billion to preserve public housing for its 2 million residents, and $15 billion to build 150,000 homes affordable to people with the lowest incomes. In December, however, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced his opposition to Build Back Better and effectively killed the bill. Now, the White House, congressional leaders, and Manchin have restarted negotiations over a new, scaled-down spending bill that would increase federal revenues by raising taxes on corporations and high-income earners, create savings by reducing the costs of prescription drugs, and use the resources generated to address the deficit, climate change, and inflation. If these members of Congress and the administration are sincere in their desire to bring down inflation, they should ensure the new bill includes robust measures to lower the cost of housing. Congress must retain the essential housing investments included in the Build Back Better Act — in rental assistance, public housing, and the national Housing Trust Fund — in any final reconciliation bill. By doing so, Congress will take an important step toward curbing inflation and ensuring that more of America’s lowest-income and most marginalized people have stable, affordable homes.CP causes massive rise in inflation

Husock 22 (Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on municipal government, urban housing policy, civil society, and philanthropy. Before joining AEI, Mr. Husock was vice president for research and publications at the Manhattan Institute, 5/24/22, “Biden’s Housing Plan? More Vouchers and Tax Credits Mean Inflation and Dependency”, https://www.aei.org/op-eds/bidens-housing-plan-more-vouchers-and-tax-credits-mean-inflation-and-dependency”, https://www.aei.org/op-eds/bidens-housing-plan-more-vouchers-and-tax-credits-mean-inflation-and-dependency/)//rrm