Dr. Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and prominent housing policy and urban economics analyst, recently authored a blog post in which she calls for better research into the efficacy of housing policy reforms. The post notes that recent legislative actions in places from Minneapolis and Raleigh to Maine and Utah are an opportunity to build positive momentum in advancing pro-housing reforms like zoning reforms, legalizing more types of housing like duplexes, rowhouses, Accessory Dwelling Units, and other procedural changes.
As policymakers are looking to replicate these new reforms, research needs to be forward-looking and use real-time data and analysis to inform policy choices. The two central questions facing advocates, researchers, and policymakers involve the design of policies for increasing the supply, diversity, and affordability of housing, and the set of political strategies that would yield the greatest likelihood of implementing these policies. Then, the policy design and political strategy questions are broken out into smaller pieces for readers to digest.
From there, the piece lays out a framework for empirical research to evaluate recent housing policy changes, while identifying opportunities and challenges. Dr. Schuetz also notes that tackling an ambitious research agenda requires a small army of interdisciplinary researchers. Recommendations for evaluating policy changes include:
- Clearly describe policy design and targeted housing outcomes
- Lay out a timeline for policy implementation and market responses
- Consider how policy design interacts with underlying housing market conditions
- Collect better data to track outcomes at the right time frames and geographies
Dr. Schuetz is the author of Fixer Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems.