NYC to suburbs: renters don’t have cooties | Feb 13th at 4:26pm
To be honest, this is the panel I’ve been waiting for the entire conference (not only is rental housing one of my main research areas, I’m a renter myself and live in a city dominated by renters). That said, I’m a little disappointed that the opening paper was so narrowly focused on Section 8 and LIHTC. Most poor renters don’t live in subsidized housing, so why do we so often frame the rental housing debate about a few programs?
Kudos to Bart Harvey and Carol Galante for pointing out that we need new and different types of policy interventions, to be able to site LIHTC (or non-subsidized rental housing, for that matter) in low-poverty neighborhoods. I’m by no means convinced that inclusionary zoning is the best tool for this, but there’s only so far we can go with either vouchers or LIHTC if suburban zoning makes it impractical to use them in desirable areas. Tying this back to Ed Glaeser’s comments about restrictive zoning at the opening session yesterday, I would have liked to see more discussion about what kind of zoning reform would be politically feasible. That probably doesn’t qualify as low-hanging fruit, but it’s still worth exploring.
Jenny Schuetz is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the City College of New York and a Senior Research Affiliate at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.
