Introduction

The housing crisis sits at the intersection of basic human needs and complex societal structures, touching nearly every aspect of modern life. This multifaceted issue spans fields such as politics, urban planning, community activism, real estate, finance, and markets. It profoundly affects people's lived experiences, influencing their opportunities, access to resources, emotional health, and community integration. The crisis is further shaped by social position, income, race, historic wealth, and political representation.

More than almost any other issue, housing gets personal. The acronym Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) was popularized for good reason - most of us want control over our personal space and its surroundings. Yet, this individualistic approach often clashes with broader community needs. Opinions on housing can become a reflection of one's most tightly held values, revealing the tension between individual desires and societal necessities.

Humans have always needed shelter, a fundamental need typically protected or provided for by communities, governments, markets, or families. The current housing crisis, however, presents a unique challenge: how to ensure this basic right while navigating the entangled markets, industries, and social structures we've built around housing. This page explores the various facets of the housing crisis, from affordability and availability to policy approaches and market dynamics. For related topics such as the future of housing, neighborhood segregation, and public housing, please see our dedicated issue pages on these subjects.

News, Literary Items, & Podcasts

PODCAST

The Billionaires’ Secret Plan to Solve California’s Housing Crisis. Michael Barbaro with Conor Dougherty. The Daily. 2024.

NEWS

US voters press Congress candidates to fix housing crisis. Moira Warburton & Makini Brice. Reuters. 2024.

NEWS

Political Leaders Are Finally Responding to the Housing Crisis. They Need to Move Faster. Victoria Guida. Politico. 2024.

NEWS

How Does Housing Stability Affect Mental Health? Katherine Fallon. Urban Institute: Housing Matters. 2023.

NEWS

Childhood housing insecurity linked to short- and long-term anxiety and depression. Maya Brownstein. Harvard T.H. Chan Public Health News. 2023.

NEWS

Middle-Income Housing Programs Emerge as Affordability Challenges Climb the Income Ladder. Hermann, Airgood-Obrycki & Whitney. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. 2024.

NEWS

Where a Little Mortgage Goes a Long Way. Matthew Goldstein. The New York Times. 2020.

NEWS

The Housing Proposal That’s Quietly Tearing Apart Atlanta. Brentin Mock. Bloomberg. 2021.

NEWS

Rents Are Unaffordable for Half of American Households, Harvard Study Says. Jon Leckie. CoStar. 2024.

NEWS

The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less. Bryan Caplan. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

The Old New Way To Provide Cheap Housing. Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times. 2023.

NEWS

The Housing Market Is Weird and Ugly. These 5 Charts Explain Why. Ben Casselman. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed. Stephen Jacob Smith. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments in Suburbs. Conor Dougherty. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires. Reihan Salam. The Atlantic. 2023.

NEWS

We Have a Housing Crisis. This New Jersey Town Has a Solution. Binyamin Appelbaum. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

What Would Jesus Do? Tackle the Housing Crisis, Say Some Congregations. Conor Dougherty. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

America’s Affordable Housing Crisis. Conor Dougherty. The New York Times. 2024.

NEWS

An expert’s 7 principles for solving America’s housing crisis. Matthew Yglesias. Vox. 2019.

NEWS

America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing? Rachel Cohen. Vox. 2024.

NEWS

The Growing Federal Push for Zoning Reform. Nolan Gray. Bloomberg. 2024.

NEWS

Can Your Town Solve the Housing Crisis? John Surico. Bloomberg. 2024.

NEWS

The US Housing Market Has Become an Impossible Mess. Patrick Clark & Prashant Gopal. Bloomberg. 2023.

NEWS

No, Really. Building More Housing Can Combat Rising Rents. Sarah Holder. Bloomberg. 2023.

PODCAST

What Could the Future of Housing Look Like? Alli Rico with David Friedlander. Dwellings. 2021.

PODCAST

Increasing Our Supply of Housing. Jeff Scott with Vince Rocha. Dwellings. 2023.

NEWS

FFS, Stop Saying There’s a Housing Shortage in America. David Friedlander. Medium. 2024.

PODCAST

Inclusionary Zoning. Shane Phillips with Emily Hamilton. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2022.

PODCAST

Geographies of Gentrification. Shane Phillips with Hyojung Lee. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2023.

PODCAST

What Happened When Auckland Upzoned Everything. Shane Phillips with Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2023.

PODCAST

The Geography of Eviction. Shane Phillips with Kyle Nelson. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2023.

PODCAST

Low-Income Housing and 'Crowd Out'. Shane Phillips with Michael Eriksen. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2024.

PODCAST

Political Representation and Housing Supply. Shane Phillips with Michael Hankinson. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2022.

PODCAST

Landlords, Discrimination, and Eviction. Shane Phillips with Eva Rosen & Philip Garboden. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2022.

PODCAST

Housing Jusice. Shane Phillips with Casey Dawkins. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2022.

PODCAST

Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices with Daniel Kuhlmann. UCLA Housing Voice Podcast. 2021.

NEWS

NYC neighborhoods made for workers: The history of Queens’ Steinway Village and the Bronx Co-ops. Cait Etherington. 6fsqft. 2018.

PODCAST

Why Housing Is So Expensive–Particularly in Blue States. Jenny Schuetz on The Ezra Klein Show. 2022.

NEWS

Housing Breaks People’s Brains. Jerusalem Demsas. The Atlantic. 2022.

NEWS

Why Isn’t the Government Doing More About the Housing Crisis?. Annie Lowrey. The Atlantic. 2023.

NEWS

Meet the Latest Housing-Crisis Scapegoat. Jerusalem Demsas. The Atlantic. 2023.

NEWS

Brown Has Introduced Bills To Create and Preserve Affordable Housing. U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. 2024.

NEWS

The Anti-California. Annie Lowrey. The Atlantic. 2023.

NEWS

Book Review: Broken City, Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis. Setha Low. The Planning Report. 2024.

NEWS

UBC Panel: Is Local Democracy in the Way of Affordable Housing? Patrick Condon. UBC Panel Opening Remarks. 2024.

NEWS

Ben Reznik on Why State Housing Mandates Are Long Overdue. The Planning Report. 2023.

NEWS

Six states where housing is hard to find: Here’s what governors are doing about it. Politico. 2024.

PODCAST

Moving to Opportunity? Karen Duffin. Planet Money. 2019.

NEWS

NPR Series: Crisis in the Housing Market. 2013.

PODCAST

Return to the Giant Pool of Money. Ira Glass with Adam Davidson & Alex Blumberg. This American Life. 2009.

NEWS

Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems. The Economist Special Report. 2020.

NEWS

The Affordable Housing Crisis Grows While Efforts to Increase Supply Fall Short. U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2023.

NEWS

How Do We Solve America’s Affordable Housing Crisis? BU Research Helps Inspire a Federal Bill That Suggests Answers. Andrew Thurston. BU's The Brink. 2024.

NEWS

Grand boulevards would solve the housing crisis, Calthorpe says. Robert Steuteville. Public Square, a CNU Journal. 2024.

NEWS

Rural America is losing affordable housing at a crisis pace. Bill Conroy. Housing Wire. 2024.

NEWS

Housing affordability is so stretched that fewer than 3% of renters can afford to buy in some markets. Lance Lambert. FastCompany. 2024.

NEWS

4 practical solutions to the world's spiraling housing crisis. Michael Purton. World Economic Forum. 2024.

NEWS

How Lisbon and other world cities are tackling the affordable housing crisis. Carlos Moedas. World Economic Forum. 2024.

NEWS

Living with a Crisis of Affordable Housing. Emily Gaines Buchler. Johns Hopkins U HUB. 2023.

NEWS

A new bill is proposing a human right to housing. How would this work? Chris Martin. The Conversation. 2024.

NEWS

Surging property prices: When will Europe’s cities become affordable again? Geoffrey Ditta. The Conversation. 2024.

NEWS

‘Urban form’ and the housing crisis: Can streets and buildings make a neighbourhood more affordable? Cem Kayatekin & Lorenzo Uribe Sanmiguel. The Conversation. 2024.

NEWS

Hamilton council passes a bylaw to end renovictions, helping to address housing affordability. Brian Doucet. The Conversation. 2024.

NEWS

Could taxing land more than income fix the UK housing crisis? Nick Gallent. The Conversation. 2024.

NEWS

4 affordable housing strategies that are working in Canada. Brian Doucet. The Conversation. 2023.

PODCAST

Why Is It So Hard (and Expensive) to Build Anything in America? Stephen Dubner. Freakonomics. 2023.

PODCAST

Your Stories and Solutions for the Housing Crisis. SOLD OUT. 2022.

PODCAST

Zoning Out. SOLD OUT. 2020.

PODCAST

A Right to Housing. SOLD OUT. 2020.

PODCAST

Evicted: A Suburban Story. SOLD OUT. 2022.

PODCAST

Daniel Shoag: Reduce inequality and boost growth by building more housing. Political Economy with James Pethokoukis. 2019.

PODCAST

It's Time for Affordable Housing

PODCAST

Gimme Shelter

PODCAST

The Housing Problem

PODCAST

Let's Talk Housing

NEWS

Why Your House Was So Expensive. Derek Thompson. The Atlantic. 2022.

NEWS

Cities Start to Question an American Ideal: A House With a Yard on Every Lot. Emily Badger & Quoctrung Bui. The New York TImes. 2019.

NEWS

How Housing Supply Became the Most Controversial Issue in Urbanism. Richard Florida. Bloomberg. 2019.

NEWS

The Deep, Uniquely American Roots of Our Affordable-Housing Crisis. Bryce Covert. The Nation. 2018.

NEWS

Panelists Propose Solutions to Improve the Efficacy of Housing Choice Vouchers. NYU Furman Center Blog. 2024.

NEWS

A 30-Year Trap: The Problem With America’s Weird Mortgages. Ben Casselman. The New York Times. 2023.

NEWS

How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. Matthew Desmond. The New York Times. 2017.

PODCAST

Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here's One. Brian Schatz on The Ezra Klein Show. 2024.

Books, Videos, & Films

FILM

American Casino. 2009.

VIDEO

Closing the Homeownership Gap: New Wealth-Building Tactics from across the Country. Urban Institute. 2024.

BOOK

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See. Richard Kahlenberg. 2023.

BOOK

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Matthew Desmond. 2016.

BOOK

Fixer Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing. Jenny Schuetz. 2022.

BOOK

Homelessness is a Housing Problem. Gregg Colburn & Clayton Aldern. 2022.

BOOK

Housing Policy in the United States. Alex Schwartz. 2021.

BOOK

Just Housing: The Moral Foundations of American Housing Policy. Casey Dawkins. 2021.

BOOK

Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis. Charles L. Marohn Jr. & Daniel Herriges. 2024.

BOOK

The Company Town: The Industrial Eden's and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy. Hardy Green. 2010.

VIDEO

Affordable Housing: The Vienna Model Panel. Panel from VerdeXchange 2023.

VIDEO

How the US made affordable homes illegal. Vox. 2021.

BOOK

Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis. Einstein, Glick & Palmer. 2020.

VIDEO

How did our housing get so expensive? World Economic Forum. 2024.

VIDEO

How ADUs or ‘Granny Flats’ Can Help Solve the Housing Crisis. World Economic Forum.

BOOK

A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid. Nancy Kwak. 2015.

BOOK

The Affordable Housing Reader. Elizabeth Mueller & J. Rosie Tighe (eds). 2022.

VIDEO

Imagining Home. 2009.

FILM

The Greening of Southie. 2008.

BOOK

The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity. Ellen & Steil (eds). 2019.

BOOK

Through the Roof: What Communities Can Do About the High Cost of Rental Housing in America. Ellen, Lubell & Willis. 2021.

FILM

Owned: A Tale of Two Americas. 2018.

FILM

99 Homes. 2014.

FILM

The Dilapidated Dwelling. 2000.

FILM

Facing Eviction. 2022.

FILM

Housing Court. 1984.

FILM

America Divided: A House Divided. 2016.

FILM

Where Can I Live - A Story of Gentrification. 1983.

FILM

We Will Not Be Moved. 1980.

FILM

Push. 2019.

FILM

Priced Out. 2017.

FILM

London and Landlords: An Unfinished Video History. 2020.

EXPERTS

PETER KEMP

ALEX HOROWITZ

CHRIS HERBERT

MARTHA GALVEZ

CAROL GALANTE

LAN DENG

KAREN CHAPPLE

ADRIANNE TODMAN

CORIANNE SCALLY

EDWARD GOETZ

INGRID GOULD ELLEN

LORETTA LEES

Resources, Organizations, & Institutes

ORGANIZATION

National Low Income Housing Coalition

RESOURCE

Zoning Reform Tracker, Othering & Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley

RESOURCE

Home Price-to-Income Ratio Interactive Tool, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies

RESOURCE

Home Prices Far Outpace Incomes Tool, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies

CENTER

Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard

ORGANIZATION

National Rural Housing Coalition

CENTER

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Housing

ORGANIZATION

National Urban League - Housing

ORGANIZATION

Alliance for Housing Justice

RESOURCE

Cityscape. HUD Office of Policy Development & Research

ORGANIZATION

Strong Towns

RESOURCE

Housing Shortage Tracker, National Assoc. of Realtors

ORGANIZATION

Incremental Development Alliance

ORGANIZATION

Congress for New Urbanism

ORGANIZATION

Housing Crisis Research Collaborative

ORGANIZATION

Pew Charitable Trusts Housing Policy Initiative

RESOURCE

HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Mapping Tool

ORGANIZATION

Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative

Research & Original Documents

RESEARCH

The Homeownership Rate and Housing Finance Policy-Part 2: The Heavy Life to Break the 65 Percent Barrier. Don Layton. JCHS Working Paper. 2022.

REPORT

America’s Rental Housing 2024. JCHS, Harvard. 2024.

WHITE PAPER

Repurposing Underutilized Strip Malls to Create Multifamily Housing. Ahmad Abu-Khalaf. Enterprise. 2023.

REPORT

Rethinking the Retail Strip. Kuschel, Guerrero & Reardon. MAPC. 2022.

RESEARCH

Supply Skepticism Revisited. Been, Ellen, and O'Regan. NYU Law & Economics Research Paper. 2023.

RESEARCH

The Impact of Upzoning on Housing Construction in Auckland: Update and Extended Results. Greenaway-McGrevy. Univ. of Auckland Business School Economic Policy Centre Working Paper. 2023.

RESEARCH

Secondary Housing Supply. Andreas Mense. Geography & Environment Discussion Paper Series. 2023.

RESEARCH

What is housing affordability? The case for the residual income approach. Michael Stone. Housing Policy Debate. 2006.

RESEARCH

Evictions: The hidden housing problem. Chester Hartman & David Robinson. Housing Policy Debate. 2003.

RESEARCH

Understanding Homelessness. Peter Somerville. Housing, Theory & Society. 2013.

RESEARCH

Housing: an infrastructure of care. Emma Power & Kathleen Mee. Housing Studies. 2019.

RESEARCH

Brown kids in white suburbs: Housing mobility and the many faces of social capital. Xavier de Souza Briggs. Housing Policy Debate. 2010.

RESEARCH

JUE Insight: City-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains. Bratu, Harjunen, Saarimaa. Journal of Urban Economics. 2023.

RESEARCH

Ten Economic Facts About Rental Housing. Bauer & Edelberg. Brookings. 2024.

RESEARCH

Where Is The Housing Shortage? Kirk McClure & Alex Schwartz. Housing Policy Debate. 2024.

RESEARCH

A Novel Framework to Address the Complexities of Housing Insecurity and Its Associated Health Outcomes and Inequities: "Give, Partner, Invest." Bhatnagar, Lovelace, Prushnok et al. Int J Env Res Public Health. 2023.

RESEARCH

Housing Affordability and Health: Evidence From New York City. Rachel Meltzer & Alex Schwartz. Housing Policy Debate. 2014.

RESEARCH

Impact of the US Housing Crisis on the Racial Wealth Gap Across Generations. Social Science Research Council. 2015.

RESEARCH

Housing as a determinant of health equity: A conceptual model. Carolyn Swope & Diana Hernández. Soc Sci Med. 2019.

RESEARCH

How U.S. cities are using Federal American Rescue Plan funds to tackle affordable housing. Glencora Haskins & Joseph Parilla. Brookings. 2024.

RESEARCH

Global Affordable Housing Shortages Can Harm Migrant Reception and Integration. Solf, Guerrero & Sherzad. Migration Policy Institute. 2024.

RESEARCH

Climate and Housing Crisis: A Research Agenda for Urban Communities. Johnson, Belloy et al. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper. 2021.

RESEARCH

Exploring the Affordable Housing Shortage’s Impact on American Workers, Jobs, & The Economy. Kristen Klurfield. Bipartisan Policy Center Report. 2024.

RESEARCH

The State of the Nation’s Housing. Report by JCHS. 2024.

RESEARCH

Blueprint for More and Better Housing. Report by Canada's Task Force for Housing & Climate. 2024.

RESEARCH

The Nuances of NIMBY: Context and Perceptions of Affordable Rental Housing Development. Corianne Scally. Urban Affairs Review. 2012.

RESEARCH

Eviction and Poverty in American Cities. Collinson, Humphries, Mader et al. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2024.

RESEARCH

Race, Space, and Take Up: Explaining housing voucher lease-up rates. Ellen, O’Regan, Strochak. Journal of Housing Economics. 2024.

RESEARCH

The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context. Richard Green & Susan Wachter. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 2005.

RESEARCH

Home Ownership and the American Dream. Laurie Goodman & Christopher Mayer. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 2018.

Connections