Reading List

 

Organizing, Advocacy, Politics

Articles/papers

• Barnett, Erica. "Fake News, Anecdata, and Things that Feel True." C is for Crank blog, 13 Dec 2017. https://thecisforcrank.com/2017/12/13/fake-news-anecdata-and-things-that-feel-true/.
   
• Been, Vicki, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan. “Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability.” Draft, 26 Oct 2017. 
  http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O%27Regan%20supply_affordability_Oct%2026%20revision.pdf.
       "This paper is meant to bridge the divide between the arguments made by supply skeptics and what research has shown about housing supply and its effect on affordability. In the following section, we address each of the key arguments that increasing supply does not improve affordability. Many of the arguments are plausible, and we take them seriously, but we ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low and moderate income families."
         "We analyze four of the most frequently voiced arguments below, drawing on both basic economic theory and empirical evidence.
  A. Housing is Bundled with Land, but Still is Ruled by the Laws of Supply and Demand
  B. Housing is Heterogeneous, but Adding Supply in One Market Will Affect Prices in Another
  C. Easing price pressure through additional supply may attract some demand–but not enough to completely offset the supply increase.
  D. Adding supply may raise neighborhood rents in some cases, but neither theory nor empirical evidence suggest that will be the norm."
   
• Bernstein, Laura. "How To Talk To Your NIMBY Parents". The Urbanist, 2016-10-31. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-to-your-nimby-parents/
   
• Bosetti, Nicolas, and Sam Sims, the Centre for London. "STOPPED: Why People Oppose New Residential Developments in Their Back Yard." 20 July 2016. study examining people's reasons for resisting new housing development.  http://www.centreforlondon.org/publication/nimby-opposition/
   
• Darmawi, Fay. "How Affordable Housing Can Make a Name for Itself (and Why).” Affordable Housing Finance, March 19, 2014. [in which a a "HousingWiki" was proposed]. http://www.housingfinance.com/policy-legislation/how-affordable-housing-can-make-a-name-for-itself-and-why_o.
   
• Domhoff, William G. Who Rules America? (1st edition1967, updated in 2000 and 2009). See: Wikipedia: Who Rules America? 
  See also: Who Rules America? web site collecting Domhoff's writing on power dynamics. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/
   
• Fahey, Anna. "A Blueprint for Better Housing Messages" SIghtline.org (April 5, 2017). http://www.sightline.org/2017/04/05/a-blueprint-for-better-housing-messages/.
   
• Fahey. Anna. "6 Tips for Talking Housing Solutions." Sightline.org (October 26, 2016). http://www.sightline.org/2016/10/26/6-tips-for-talking-housing-solutions/.
   
• Hankinson, Michael. "When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism." Harvard JCHS Working Paper, February 2017. http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research/publications/when-do-renters-behave-homeowners-high-rent-price-anxiety-and-nimbyism.
   
• Lingle, Colin, and Anna Fahey. "Seattle's Housing Affordability & Livability Agenda in the News: A Sightline Institute Media Audit." Sightline.org, August 8, 2016. http://www.sightline.org/research_item/seattles-housing-affordability-livability-agenda-in-the-news/.
   
• Stein, Debra. "The Ethics of Housing and NIMBYism." Affordable Housing Finance,  February 2006.
   
• Smith, Noah. "The NIMBY Challenge." [tweeted as: "How YIMBYs should respond to the intellectual challenge mounted by the NIMBYs."]. Noahpinion, May 20, 2017. 
  http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-nimby-challenge.html.
   
• Stein, Debra. "Overcoming NIMBY Opposition Before It Stalls Your Project." 
  Multi-Housing News Magazine On-Line, December 29, 2008

Books

• Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals (1971). full text, in ePub, PDF etc, at Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/RulesForRadicals. 
   
• Mathews, Joe. California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (2010).
   
• Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action (1965). 

Talks 

• Hoffman, A. Kimbery. "Yes, In My Back Yard." TEDxWilmington, 28 Oct 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUVgnocCVI4.

 

 

 

Land Use, Zoning, Planning

Articles

• Autor, David H., Christopher J. Palmer and Parag A. Pathak. "Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
   
• Bertolet, Dan."Exclusionary Zoning Robs Our Cities of Their Best Qualities." Sightline.org, 2016-04-20.
   
• Freund, Ernst (1929). “Some Inadequately Discussed Problems of the Law of City Planning and Zoning.” Illinois Law Review, June 1929. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11741&context=journal_articles.
   
• Furth, Salim. “The Two-Board Knot: Zoning, Schools, and Inequality.”  American Affairs Journal, Winter 2017.
  https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/two-board-knot-zoning-schools-inequality/. 
   
• George, Henry. "What the Railroad Will Bring Us" (1868).
   
• Glaeser, Edward. "Reforming land use regulations." Brookings Institute, April 24, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/.
   
• Hills, Roderick M, Jr, and David Schleicher. "Can ‘Planning’ Deregulate land use?" Regulation (Cato Institute), Fall 2015.  https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2015/9/regulation-v38n3-1.pdf,  
  "To overcome NIMBY politics and development constraints, urban areas should consider binding, comprehensive, citywide plans."
   
• Kiefer, Matthew J. "The Social Functions of #NIMBYism" Harvard Graduate School of Design Magazine, 2008: a nuanced, relatively sympathetic examination of NIMBYism. Republished by Planetizen. 
   
• Ricco, John. “Houston took this winning approach to adding housing. Could DC do the same?” Greater Greater Washington, September 8, 2016. https://ggwash.org/view/42799/houston-took-this-winning-approach-to-adding-housing-could-dc-do-the-same. 
  "in 1999, Houston decreased minimum residential lot size from 5,000 square feet to 1,400 in close-in neighborhoods...Areas once entirely ranch-style houses, McMansions, and underused lots are now covered in townhouses."
   
• White, Gillian B. "How Zoning Laws Exacerbate Inequality." The Atlantic, Nov 23, 2015.  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/zoning-laws-and-the-rise-of-economic-inequality/417360/. 
   
• White House. Housing Development Toolkit. September, 2016. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf. 

Peer-reviewed research 

• Davidoff, Paul, and Neil Newton Gold (1971). "Exclusionary Zoning." Yale Review of Law and Social Action: Vol. 1: Iss. 2, Article 5.
  Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yrlsa/vol1/iss2/5.
   
• Ellickson, Robert C., "Alternatives to Zoning: Covenants, Nuisance Rules, and Fines as Land Use Controls" (1973). Faculty Scholarship Series. 471. 
  http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/471.
   
• Ellickson, Robert C. "Publications List." 2014. https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/Faculty/REllickson_publications.pdf.
   
• Fischel, William A. "Why Are There NIMBYs?" (2000). eminent US land-use/zoning scholar William provides a useful analysis of the NIMBY phenomenon from an economic perspective. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/00-04.PDF.
   
• Fischel, William A. (2013). "Neighborhood Conservation Districts: The New Belt and Suspenders of Municipal Zoning." 78 Brook. L. Rev. (2013).
  http://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol78/iss2/17.
   
• Glaeser, Edward L, Joseph Gyourko and Raven Saks. "Why is Manhattan So Expensive? Regulation and the Rise in Housing Prices." 
   
• Glaeser, Edward L, and Bryce A. Ward. "The causes and consequences of land use regulation: Evidence from Greater Boston." Journal of Urban Economics 65 (2009) 265–278.  DOI:10.1016/j.jue.2008.06.003.
  PDF from author: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/the_causes_and_consequences_of_land_use_regulation_evidence_from_greater_boston_2009.pdf.
   
• Hall, Peter. "The Containment of Urban England." The Geographical Journal, Vol. 140, No. 3 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-408. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1796533. [article summary of Hall's 1973 book of the same name].  
  https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_E90AYG2sPDelVqeFBVVDFobVk.
   
• Hankinson, Michael. “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism.” draft, 2017. 
  http://mhankinson.com/assets/jmpWeb.pdf.
   
• Hills, Roderick M. Hills, and David Schleicher. "Planning an Affordable City." 101 Iowa Law Review 91 (2015).
  https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-1/planning-an-affordable-city/.
      "The solution to this housing crisis is economically simple but politically difficult. As a matter of economic rationality, local governments should deregulate their housing markets to allow an increased housing supply to meet a rising demand for housing. As a political matter, however, incumbent residents who already own housing vociferously and effectively protest against the reduction of zoning restrictions."
      "How, then, to free up urban land markets from the stranglehold of zoning driven by NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) neighbors? We argue, paradoxically, that the solution to excessive zoning is centralized, comprehensive, and binding land-use planning."
      "We argue in Part III.A that binding, comprehensive plans allow legislators to create “contracts” across electoral districts that are otherwise impossible when zoning proceeds through piecemeal lot-by-lot bargaining." Comprehensive plan. 
      "We argue in Part III.B that parcel-by-parcel bargaining imposes high information costs on outside investors, thereby reducing the market for investment in new housing to a handful of local insiders with incentives to constrain supply."
     "Prescriptions below in Part IV, including the idea that mayors and city planning departments ought to regularly redraw the citywide zoning map to comprehend all pending development proposals, a process that would look something like an annual budgeting process. [see Zoning budget -Yimbywiki]. Other proposals include fixed prices, defined ex ante in the zoning ordinance, for additional building rights [see Transfer of development rights -Yimbywiki] and prohibitions on any downzoning until citywide housing goals, defined with hard figures like vacancy rates or building permits issued, are met."  
   
• Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. "Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation." Working paper, May 18, 2017. http://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf.
  [earlier version:  Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti.  "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth." NBER Working Paper 21154, 2015. http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154. Preprint:  http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=housing_law_and_policy.]
   
• Huang, Haifang, and Yao Tang. "Residential Land Use Regulation and the US Housing Price Cycle Between 2000 and 2009."
   
• Lens, Michael C., and Paavo Monkkonen. "Do Strict Land Use Regulations Make Metropolitan Areas More Segregated by Income?" Journal of the American Planning Association, Volume 82, 2016 - Issue 1. Published online 2015-12-28. DOI. 
  UCLA Working Paper: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/ctr/ziman/2015-04WP.pdf. 
   
• Lewyn, Michael. "The Roots of Expensive Zoning." Real Estate Law Journal Vol. 45 Iss. 2 (2016) p. 256 - 266 
  Available at: http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/118/.
  [review of Zoning Rules by William Fischel]. 
   
• Lewyn, Michael. "Does the Threat of Gentrification Justify Restrictive Zoning?". Real Estate Law Journal (2017) @mlewyn https://works.bepress.com/lewyn/150/. @mlewyn
  [he argues, generally no]. 
   
• Mangin, John."The New Exclusionary Zoning." Stanford Law & Policy Review Vol. 25:91 (2014). https://journals.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stanford-law-policy-review/print/2014/01/mangin_25_stan._l._poly_rev_91.pdf. 
   
• Morrow, Greg [2013] "The Homeowner Revolution: Democracy, Land Use and the Los Angeles Slow-Growth Movement, 1965-1992." (doctoral dissertation, UCLA).  http://www.academia.edu/11858037/The_Homeowner_Revolution_Democracy_Land_Use_and_the_Los_Angeles_Slow-Growth_Movement_1965-1992. 
   
• O'Neill, Moira, Giulia Gualco-Nelson, Eric Biber (2018). "Getting it Right: Examining the Local Land Use Entitlement Process in California to Inform Policy and Process."
  Working Paper, February 2018, from UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, Berkeley Institute of Urban and Regional Development, and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/clee/research/land-use/getting-it-right/. 
   
• Parkhomenko, Andrii. "The Rise of Housing Supply Regulation in the U.S.: Local Causes and Aggregate Implications." Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Barcelona GSE.  Working paper, January 5, 2017. https://www.andrii-parkhomenko.net/files/Parkhomenko_JMP.pdf.
          "Abstract: Regulatory restrictions on housing supply have been rising in recent decades in the U.S. and have become a major determinant of house prices. What are the implications of the rise in regulation for aggregate productivity, and for wage and house price dispersion across metropolitan areas?....I find that the rise in regulation accounts for 23% of the increase in wage dispersion and 85% of the increase in house price dispersion across metro areas from 1980 to 2007."
   
• Quigley, John M., and Steven Raphael. "Regulation and the High Cost of Housing in California."
   
• Rothwell, Jonathan, and Douglas S. Massey. "The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas."
   
• Rothwell, Jonathan, and Douglas S. Massey.  "Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas."
   
• Schleicher, David. "City Unplanning". Yale Law Journal, __. A thorough review of US zoning's legal underpinnings, the economic dynamics produced, and some ways to counteract indesirable outcomes. PDF: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1162_m41e7ifa.pdf.

 

Books

• Angotti, Tom [2016], and Sylvia Morse, Philip DePaolo, Peter Marcuse, Samuel Stein. Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City. 2016.
  https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Race-Displacement-City-Planning/dp/0996004130. 
   
• Avent, Ryan. The Gated City (2011).
   
• Babcock. The Zoning Game (1966). 
   
• Fischel, William A. Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation (2015). 
   
• Fulton, William, and Paul Shigley. Guide to California Planning (4th edition, 2012). 3rd edition, 2005, available free on LibGen. https://libgen.pw/view.php?id=620298/ 
   
• George, Henry. 
  • Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879).
  • Progress and Poverty. Modernized edition by Bob Drake, 2006. http://www.henrygeorge.org/pintro.htm.|
     

 

• Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (2002).
   
• Hirt, Sonia. Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Cornell University Press, 2014).
   
• Kent, T. J. The Urban General Plan.  At Internet Archive: [1]. 
  classic work, long used as a planning textbook, by influential Bay Area planner and educator T. J. Kent. 
   
• Levy, John M. Contemporary Urban Planning (9th Edition, 2010).
• Marcuse, Peter, and David Madden. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Housing-Politics-Crisis/dp/1784783544. 
   
• McHarg, Ian L. Design With Nature (1969). 
  "pioneered the concept of ecological planning...continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning." -Wikipedia.
   
• Ross, Benjamin. Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. (Oxford University Press, 2014). Amazon. 
   
• Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. 2017.
   
• Ryan-Collins, Josh,‎ Toby Lloyd,‎ Laurie Macfarlane. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing. Zed Books. 2017.   
  A guide to the role of land in housing policy and how it has been excluded from mainstream economic theory. The "authors reveal how many of the key challenges facing modern economies - including housing crises, financial instability and growing inequalities - are intimately tied to the land economy. Looking at the ways in which discussions of land have been routinely excluded from both housing policy and economic theory, the authors show that in order to tackle these increasingly pressing issues a major rethink by both politicians and economists is required."
• Shoup, Donald. The High Cost of Free Parking. 
   
• Toll, Seymour. Zoned American (1969). Outstanding legal/cultural study of the origins and development of US zoning practices. PDF full text (60MB). 

Resource Guides

• 100 Essential Books of Planning, from American Planning Association (2009). 

 

Housing

Articles/papers

• Badger, Emily. "How big cities that restrict new housing harm the economy." Washington Post, July 25, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/25/how-big-cities-that-restrict-new-housing-harm-the-economy/.
   
• Beyer, Scott. "Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build." Forbes, 12 Aug 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable-housing-strategy-build-build-build/#6ec6182448d5. 
   
• Bonnewit, Natalie. “Affordable Housing in Amsterdam and Copenhagen: Lessons for the San Francisco Bay Area.” German Marshall Fund of the United States,  8 December 2017. http://www.gmfus.org/publications/affordable-housing-amsterdam-and-copenhagen-lessons-san-francisco-bay-area.
   
• Bosetti, Nicolas, and Sam Sims, the Centre for London. "STOPPED: Why People Oppose New Residential Developments in Their Back Yard." 20 July 2016. An excellent study examining people's reasons for resisting new housing development.  ISBN: 978‑0‑9932416‑7‑3.
   
• Boston Globe Editorial Board.
  • "Obama's YIMBY moment" 2016-10-12.
  •  "Make room for Granny, and other zoning fixes." 2016-05-27.
  •  "How Cambridge and Lexington invented new housing." Boston Globe, 2016-05-01.
     

 

• Cortright, Joe. "Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households." City Observatory, 17.2.2016
  http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-new-rental-housing-and-median-income-households/.
   
• Cutler, Kim-Mai. "How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)." TechCrunch. 2014-04-14.
   
• Durning, Alan, et al. Legalizing Inexpensive Housing (article series). Sightline.org. 
   
• Engels, Frederick. "The Housing Question." (1872). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/.
   
• Greenberg, Michael. “Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis.” The New York Review of Books, 17 August 2017. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/tenants-under-siege-inside-new-york-city-housing-crisis/.
   
• Hertz, Daniel. "Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable.". City Observatory, 2016-07-20.
   
• Jacobus, Rick."Why We Must Build." Shelterforce, 2016-03-09.
   
• Khouri, Andrew. "As new apartments flood downtown L.A., landlords offer sweet deals." LA Times, 3 August 2016. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-downtown-apartments-20160719-snap-story.html.
   
• King, Steve. “Thoughts on the Unnatural Occurrence of Cheap Housing.” Shelterforce, April 25, 2017.  https://shelterforce.org/2017/04/25/thoughts-unnatural-occurrence-cheap-housing/.
  "CDCs [Community Development Corporations[ and affordable housing developers have an opportunity to prevent displacement, preserve affordability, and improve the habitability of neglected housing."
   
• Legislative Analyst's Office (California). "Perspectives on Helping Low-Income Californians Afford Housing." 2016-02-09.
   
• Legislative Analyst's Office (California). "California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences." 2015-03-17.
   
• Mallach, Alan. "Using the Wrong Tools to Build Affordable Housing." Shelterforce, 1 March 2016. 
  [discussing French system of govt agencies or non-profits contracting to buy and maintain units in privately developed apartment buildings]. 
   
• Meek, James. "Where will we live?" London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 1 · 9 January 2014. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n01/james-meek/where-will-we-live.
   
• Myers, John. "Forget nimbys. Yimby housing policy can transform the UK – with the political will." The Guardian, 11 August 2017.
   
• Myers, John. “Yes In My Back Yard - How to end the housing crisis, boost the economy and win more votes.’’ Adam Smith Institute, 11 August 2017.  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac92/t/598c8b62be42d6f7f8e30ebe/1502382968482/John+Myers+-+YIMBY+-+Final.pdf. 
   
• McCormick, Kathleen. "Gentle Infill: Boomtowns are making room for skinny homes, granny flats, and other affordable housing." Land Lines (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), July 2016. https://law.wustl.edu/landuselaw/Articles/Gentle%20Infill.pdf.
   
• Ramos, Dante. "To avoid housing nightmare, say ‘yes in my back yard’". Boston Globe, 2016-07-24.
   
• Whitehouse.gov. Housing Development Toolkit. 2016-09-26.
   
• Woetzel, Jonathan, Jan Mischke, Shannon Peloquin, Daniel Weisfeld. "Closing California’s housing gap." McKinsey Global Institute, October 201
  http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/urbanization/closing-californias-housing-gap.
   
• Woetzel. Jonathan, Sangeeth Ram, Jan Mischke, Nicklas Garemo, and Shirish Sankhe. "Tackling the world’s affordable housing challenge." McKinsey Global Institute, October 2014. http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/urbanization/tackling-the-worlds-affordable-housing-challenge.
   
• Yglesias, Matthew. The Rent is Too Damn High.[ebook].
   
• Zuk, Miriam, and Karen Chapple. "Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships." Institute for Governmental Studies (University of California) Research Brief, May 2016.
   

 

Peer-reviewed research 

• Baar, Kenneth Baar (1992). “The National Movement to Halt the Spread of Multifamily Housing, 1890-1926.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 58:1, 39-48, DOI: 10.1080/01944369208975533.
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944369208975533.
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_E90AYG2sPDMU1vNmZWNm5Hbzg/view.
   
• Been, Vicki, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan. “Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability.” Draft, 26 Oct 2017. http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O%27Regan%20supply_affordability_Oct%2026%20revision.pdf.
       "This paper is meant to bridge the divide between the arguments made by supply skeptics and what research has shown about housing supply and its effect on affordability. In the following section, we address each of the key arguments that increasing supply does not improve affordability. Many of the arguments are plausible, and we take them seriously, but we ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low and moderate income families."
         "We analyze four of the most frequently voiced arguments below, drawing on both basic economic theory and empirical evidence.
  A. Housing is Bundled with Land, but Still is Ruled by the Laws of Supply and Demand
  B. Housing is Heterogeneous, but Adding Supply in One Market Will Affect Prices in Another
  C. Easing price pressure through additional supply may attract some demand–but not enough to completely offset the supply increase.
  D. Adding Supply May Raise Neighborhood Rents in Some Cases, But Neither Theory Nor Empirical Evidence Suggest that Will be The Norm.
   
• Chapple, Karen, John V. Thomas, Dena Belzer and Gerald Autler. "Fueling the Fire: Information Technology and Housing Price Appreciation in the San Francisco Bay Area." 
  Housing Policy Debate 15(2): 347-383.  (2004)
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2004.9521505.
   
• Chetty, R., Hendren, N., & Katz, L.F. (2015). "The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children:
  New evidence from the Moving to Opportunity experiment." Harvard University and National Bureau of
  Economic Research. Retrieved from: http://www.equality-ofopportunity.org/assets/documents/mto_paper.pdf.
   
• Diamond, Rebecca, and Tim McQuade. “https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/LIHTC_spillovers.pdfhttps://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/LIHTC_spillovers.pdf” Stanford GSB, December 2017. https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/LIHTC_spillovers.pdf. 
  "Abstract:
  We nonparametrically estimate spillovers of properties Önanced by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) onto neighborhood residents by developing a new difference-in-differences style estimator. LIHTC development revitalizes low-income neighborhoods, increasing house prices 6.5%, lowering crime rates, and attracting racially and income diverse populations. LIHTC development in higher income areas causes house price declines of 2.5% and attracts lower income households. Linking these price effects to a hedonic model of preferences, LIHTC developments in low-income areas cause aggregate welfare beneÖts of $116 million. Affordable housing development acts like a place-based policy and can revitalize low-income communities."
   
• Diamond, Rebecca, Tim McQuade, & Franklin Qian. “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco.” NBER working paper, October 11, 2017. http://conference.nber.org/confer//2017/PEf17/Diamond_McQuade_Qian.pdf.
   
• Glaeser, Edward, and Joseph Gyourko. “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply.” NBER Working Paper 23833, September 2017.
  http://www.nber.org/papers/w23833.
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_E90AYG2sPDejNvSms0QjdBZTA/view.
   
• Rosenthal, Stuart S. "Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates from a 'Repeat Income' Model." American Economic Review, Vol. 104, No. 2, Feb 2014 (pp. 687-706). 
  DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.2.687.  
  Preprint, June 2013: http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rosenthal/recent%20papers/Is_Filtering_a_Viable_Source_of_Low-Income_Housing_%206_18_13.pdf.

 

Books

• Angotti, Tom [2016], and Sylvia Morse, Philip DePaolo, Peter Marcuse, Samuel Stein. Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City. 2016.
  https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Race-Displacement-City-Planning/dp/0996004130.
   
• Barker, Kate (@barker4kate). "Housing: Where’s the Plan?" 
  2014. https://www.amazon.com/Housing-Wheres-Perspectives-Kate-Barker-ebook/dp/B00NXX6H3U/.
   
• Bauer, Catherine. Modern Housing. 1934. 
  

http://bit.ly/Bauer_Modern-Housing1 - [60MB PDF, assembled from page scans available at Internet Archive]. 
A landmark work focusing on European social housing post-WWI, by one of the most influential housing reformers of the 20th Century. 
 

• Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934." (MIT Press, 1999). 
  https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Red-Vienna-1919-1934/dp/0262024519.
   
• Bratt, Rachel G, Michael E. Stone, and Chester Hartman, editors. A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda (2006).
   
• Calavita, Nico, and Alan Mallach (Eds). Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, July 2010.
  Table of Contents, Forward, Preface, Ch. 1. http://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/inclusionary-housing-in-international-perspective-chp.pdf. 
   
• Davies, Colin. The Prefabricated Home (2005).
   
• Glaeser, Edward L., and Joseph Gyourko. Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable. (American Enterprise Institute, 2008). 
   
• Hohmann, Jessie.The Right to Housing: Laws, Concepts, Possibilities. (2013).
   
• Heben, Andrew. Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages (2014). 
   
• Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture (translation of Vers une architecture, 1923). Originally published: London : J. Rodker, 1927.
   
• Marcuse, Peter, and David Madden. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Housing-Politics-Crisis/dp/1784783544. 
   
• Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890).
   
• Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. 2017.
   
• Schwartz, Alex F. Housing Policy in the United States. (3rd Edition, 2014). ISBN: 978-0415836500.
  A widely used textbook, focusing on Federal financing and subsidy programs. 
   
• Tighe, J. Rosie. The Affordable Housing Reader. (2012).
   
• Turner, John F. C., editor. Freedom to Build : Dweller Control of the Housing Process (1972).
   
• Turner, John F. C. Housing By People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (1976). 
   
• Vale, Lawrence J.. From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors. (Harvard University Press, 2007).
   
• Walllis, Allan D. Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes (1997).
   
• Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1983).
   
• Wurster, Catherine Bauer [bio]. “Modern Housing.” Houghton Mifflin, 1934. PDF full text (assembled by YIMBYwiki from page scans at Internet Archive). 
  "Catherine Krouse Bauer Wurster (1905-964) was a prominent American public housing advocate and educator of city planners and urban planners. A leading member of the "housers," a group of planners who advocated affordable housing for low-income families, she dramatically changed social housing practice and law in the United States. Wurster's influential book Modern Housing was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1934 and is regarded as a classic in the field." -Wikipedia. 
   

 

Urbanism

Articles/papers

• Alexander, Christopher. A city is not a tree. (1965).  [suggested by Matin Barner]
   
• Couture, Victor, and Jessie Handbury. "Urban Revival in America, 2000 to 2010.” Free version May 2017 https://bfi.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/research/3_CoutureHandbury_UrbanRevival_Paper_Chicago.pdf.
  This paper documents and explains the striking reversal of fortune of urban America from 2000 to 2010. We show that almost all large American cities have experienced rising numbers in young professionals near their city center over the last decade. We assemble a rich database at a fine spatial scale to test a number of competing hypotheses explaining this recent trend. We first estimate a residential choice model to assess the relative roles of amenities, job locations, and housing prices in drawing the young and college-educated downtown. We find that initial conditions of non-tradable service amenities explain the diverging location decisions of the young and college-educated relative to their non-college-educated peers and their older college-educated counterparts. The coefficients on these initial conditions suggest that preferences for these amenities are changing over time. We investigate this hypothesis using complementary datasets, where we find that non-tradable service amenities are also playing an increasingly dominant role in the expenditure and travel decisions of the young and college educated relative to other groups. Finally, we show that these new trends are partially explained by the changing income composition and family structure of the young and college-educated and strongly related to opportunities to network and socialize with other young professionals."
   
• Marcuse, Peter. "Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and Policy Responses in New York City." Urban Law Annual ; Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, Volume 28 (January 1985). http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=law_urbanlaw.
   
• Mumford, Lewis. What is a City? article in Architectural Record, 1937.
   
• Wirth, Louis. "Urbanism as a Way of Life." 1938. http://www.sjsu.edu/people/saul.cohn/courses/city/s0/27681191Wirth.pdf. 

 

Books

• Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977).
   
• Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. (1993).
   
• Glaeser, Edward, The Triumph of the City (2011). 
   
• Goodman, Robert. After the Planners (1973).
   
• Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
  • Ch.1 Introduction, & Ch. 2 "The Use of Sidewalks".
     

• Lydon, Mike. Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change (2015). 
   
• Montgomery, Charles. Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (2014). 
   
• Moretti, Enrico. The New Geography of Jobs. (2012). 
   
• Mukhija, Vinit, and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, eds. The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor. 2014. https://www.amazon.com/Informal-American-City-Industrial-Environments/dp/026252578X/.
   
• Mumford, Lewis.The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1961). 
   
• Patch, Jason, John Joe Schlichtman, and Marc Lamont Hill. Gentrifier. 2017. 
  https://www.amazon.com/Gentrifier-UTP-Insights-John-Schlichtman/dp/1442650451/.
   
• Sennett, Richard, ed. Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (1969).
   
• Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996).
   
• Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.
   

Resource Guides / Bibliographies

• Zuk, Miriam Zuk; Ariel H. Bierbaum, Karen Chapple, Karolina Gorska, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Paul Ong, and Trevor Thomas. "Gentrification, Displacement and the Role of Public Investment: A Literature Review". Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Working Paper), August 24, 2015.  http://www.frbsf.org/community-development/publications/working-papers/2015/august/gentrification-displacement-role-of-public-investment/
  (funded by the California Air Resources Board as part of the project "Developing a New Methodology for Analyzing Potential Displacement."). 
   

 

 

 

San Francisco / Bay Area history and issues

Articles/papers/studies

• Chapple, Karen, John V. Thomas, Dena Belzer and Gerald Autler. "Fueling the Fire: Information Technology and Housing Price Appreciation in the San Francisco Bay Area." 
  Housing Policy Debate 15(2): 347-383.  (2004)
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2004.9521505. 
   
• City and County of San Francisco.
  • City Office of the Controller – Office of Economic Analysis. "Potential Effects of Limiting Market-Rate Housing in the Mission." September 10, 2015.
    http://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/6742-mission_moratorium_final.pdf.
  • San Francisco Planning Department. Centennial Celebration Brochure, 2018. 
    http://default.sfplanning.org/publications_reports/SF_Planning_Centennial_Brochure.pdf. 
     

• Cutler, Kim-Mai. "How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)." TechCrunch. 2014-04-14.
   
• Domhoff, William G. "Why San Francisco Is (or Used to Be) Different: Progressive Activists and Neighborhoods Had a Big Impact." Who Rules America, November 2011. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/san_francisco.html.
   
• Dowall, David E. (1982). "The Suburban Squeeze: Land-Use Policies in the San Francisco Bay Area." Cato Journal, Vol 2, No 3 (Winter 1982). https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1983/1/cj2n3-4.pdf.
   
• Hogan, Mark. "Living in a Fool’s Paradise: San Francisco must change." Boom California. June 25, 2014. https://boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/25/living-in-a-fools-paradise/. 
   
• Hood, Heather, and Geeta Rao. "The Elephant in the Region: Charting a Path for Bay Area Metro to Lead a Bold Regional Housing Agenda." Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., Dec 2017. [1].
   
• King, Steve. “Thoughts on the Unnatural Occurrence of Cheap Housing.” Shelterforce, April 25, 2017.  https://shelterforce.org/2017/04/25/thoughts-unnatural-occurrence-cheap-housing/.
  "CDCs [Community Development Corporations[ and affordable housing developers have an opportunity to prevent displacement, preserve affordability, and improve the habitability of neglected housing."
   
• LeSar, Jennifer, and Cecilia V. Estolano. “Housing-focused Publications in the San Francisco Bay Area: a Literature Review.” (lit review done for MTC MTCcasa initiative).
  https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/CASA%20-%20Literature%20Review%20-%20Housing-focused%20Publications%20in%20the%20San%20Francisco%20Bay%20Area.pdf.
  "This literature review was prepared by Estolano LeSar Perez (ELP) Advisors on behalf of MTC and CASA: the Committee to House the Bay Area. The goals of the literature review were to:
  •    Establish a baseline of information about regional housing trends and the impacts and concerns identified by diverse constituencies;
  •    Accelerate the CASA discussion by building on policy work done by stakeholders to date;
  •    Create a reservoir of good ideas to draw upon throughout the CASA process; and
  •    Distill thousands of pages of documents of relevant material into a concise and consistent format." 
   
• Rosen, Marcia, and Wendy Sullivan. “From Urban Renewal and Displacement to Economic Inclusion: San Francisco Affordable Housing Policy 1978-2012.” Poverty and Race Research Action Council, November 2012. 
  http://www.prrac.org/pdf/SanFranAffHsing.pdf. 
   
• Zuk, Miriam, and Karen Chapple. “Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships.” Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, May 2016. http://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images/udp_research_brief_052316.pdf.

Books

• Bagwell, Beth. Oakland The Story of a City (1982; 2nd edition 2012). 
   
• Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (2001). 
   
• DeLeon, Richard. Left coast city: progressive politics in San Francisco, 1975-1991 (1992).
   
• Hartman, Chester. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (2002). 
   
• Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area.(1978; Berkeley: Heyday Books; 25th Anniversary Ed. with a new Afterword, 2002).
• Polledri, Paolo. Visionary San Francisco (1990).
   
• Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. (Princeton University Press, 2003). 

 

California history and issues

Articles / papers / studies 

• Legislative Analysts Office [California]. "California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences." March 17, 2015. http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/housing-costs.aspx. 
   
• Legislative Analysts Office [California]. "Perspectives on Helping Low-Income Californians Afford Housing." February 9, 2016.  http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345.

United Kingdom / London history and issues

Articles / Papers Studies 

• Myers, John. “Yes In My Back Yard: How to end the housing crisis, boost the economy, and win more votes.” London: Adam Smith Institute, 11 August 2017. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac92/t/598c8b62be42d6f7f8e30ebe/1502382968482/John+Myers+-+YIMBY+-+Final.pdf. 

Books 

• Barker, Kate (@barker4kate). "Housing: Where’s the Plan?"  2014. https://www.amazon.com/Housing-Wheres-Perspectives-Kate-Barker-ebook/dp/B00NXX6H3U/.
   

Homelessness

Books

• Anderson, Nels. The Hobo.
   
• Blau, Joel. The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States.
   
• Desmond, Matthew. Evicted. 
   
• Feldman, Leonard C. Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. (Cornell University Press, 2006). 
   
• Heben, Andrew. Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages.
   
• Gowan, Teresa. Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 
   
• Hailey, Charlie. Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space. (MIT Press, 2009).
   
• ____ . Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place. 2008.
   
• Hopper, Kim. Reckoning With Homelessness. (Cornell University Press, 2002).   
     
• Katz. The Undeserving Poor (1st edition 1989). 
   
• Kerouac, Jack. "The Hobo in America", in Lonesome Traveller. 
   
• Kusmer, Kenneth L.. Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History. Oxford University Press, 2001.  
   
• London, Jack. The Road (1903). 
   
• Okin, Robert L. Silent Voices: People with Mental Disorders on the Street.
   
• Piven, Francis. Regulating the Poor.
   
• Quigley, John M, Stephen Raphael, and Eugene Smolensky. "Homelessness in California." Public Policy Institute of California, 2001. http://www.ppic.org/publication/homelessness-in-california/. 
   
• Rossi, Peter R. Down and Out in America. 1993.
   
• Willse, Craig. The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 

See Also

Online Publications