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Abstract
Problem: How have the main themes of housing scholarship, planning, and policy evolved since 1968, and how do they inform current scholarship?
Purpose: This introduction explores how housing issues have changed over thelast 40 years, to provide a holistic context for this special issue on the future(s) of housing.
Methods: I review secondary sources, and draw on them to synthesize the important themes that shape housing policy and this special issue.
Results and conclusions: Increasing owner-occupied housing is still the primary housing goal, as it was 40 years ago, but recent innovations in mortgage finance thatappeared to move it nearer may have backfired. How scholars and policy and planning professionals view the housing problem for lower-income households has evolved from simple housing quantity and quality inadequacies to something more complex: lack of affordability and homelessness, inadequate coordination of existing programs, and housing as an obstacleto economic opportunity. Despite current federal indifference, improvements in legal infrastructure and enforcement capacity have reduced, but not eliminated, housing discrimination since 1968. Federal funding diminished for public and, later, private supply-side initiatives in rental housing, and federal funds now support demand-side initiatives, small amounts of public housing, and grants to support increasingly important and autonomous state, local, and nonprofit sector efforts.
Takeaway for practice: The articles in this special issue recommend that planners and policymakers systematically assess the degree to which buildings promote and protect human health, and that they encourage innovation in housing construction, and age and economic diversity in residential areas. In existing neighborhoods that may be threatened by concentrated foreclosures or creeping blight, the authors in this issue encourage stimulating community reinvestment lending and preventing foreclosures. They also advocate improving the design and coordination of the increasingly diverse array of programs at various levels of government. Their recommendations build on the history of 40 years of housing scholarship and policy I summarize here.
Research Support: None.
Notes
1. For a deeper analysis of how these two causal influences are manifested, see CitationGalster and Danielle (1996).
2. This approach did not lack critics, of course. For example, CitationGans (1962) and CitationAnderson (1967) deplored the building of inner-city housing through the urban renewal program, and CitationSmolensky (1968) argued that it was an inefficient way to assist the poor.
3. It also established the principle of “opt-outs,” whereby owners could take their units out of subsidized use after a specified number of years. This principle continued with the Section 8 new construction program of 1974, and had repercussions on the supply of affordable housing in the 1990s.
4. This method was replicated in various cities; see, e.g., CitationFeins and Bratt (1983).
5. LIHTC replaced a complex system of federal income tax incentives for the production of low-cost rental housing.
6. The Task Force's recommendation for a housing block grant was eventually realized in the HOME program of the 1990 Housing Act.
7. Many of the reinvention proposals reflected bipartisan recommendations based on previously cited scholarship.
8. It did, however, recommend the expansion of housing choice vouchers and the HOME program.
9. It did, however, identify a gratifying reduction in discrimination against Black apartment-seekers and against Black and Hispanic homeseekers in most forms of treatment.
10. In particular, the collection does not address such important issues as racial discrimination and segregation; rural housing; women's perspectives on housing; local land use regulations and housing supply; supportive housing for special needs households and the elderly; environmentally sensitive architectural design; neighborhood dynamics; new urbanist or transit-based housing; housing suburbanization and sprawl; the consequences of housing tenure; or cost burdens.