From the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley:
As communities across the country grapple with rising housing costs and widening inequality, state legislatures are taking action and seeking solutions to encourage housing production by targeting one key factor: restrictive local land use regulations.
A new paper from the Terner Center and Urban Institute presents new tools to better understand how states have approached driving local action on housing production. Incentivizing Housing Production: State Laws to Encourage or Require Municipal Action develops a new typology to classify these approaches—from plans and state standards to carrots and sticks—and applies that typology to the first nationwide database of 144 pro-housing laws. The paper finds that laws often employ more than one policy lever or goal, and that many laws were iteratively developed over multiple legislative sessions.
This paper is published as part of the Housing Crisis Research Collaborative, which aims to address the long-standing inequities in access to safe, stable, and affordable rental housing that have been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Collaborative is led by a group of research partners at Urban Institute, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the NYU Furman Center, and the Terner Center.
Read a summary blog post and find the full paper on the Terner Center’s website.