NYU Furman Center

07/10/2024

Local Housing Solutions released a new brief outlining key steps and resources localities can use to promote housing electrification in their communities.

These include strategies that localities can use to engage stakeholders, develop electrification goals, modify policies or regulatory frameworks —such as building codes— and evaluate progress towards established goals. You can check out the brief here! https://buff.ly/3zKrmVe

07/09/2024

As we celebrate the Housing Solutions Lab’s third anniversary this month, we are capping off a busy year of working with cities to advance more equitable and effective housing policies. Thank you to our primary funder, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, our steering committee, partner organizations, and city stakeholders for their continued partnership and support.

Please read more about this year’s highlights below and contact us with any questions, ideas, or interest in collaborating with the Lab.

Celebrate the Housing Solutions Lab's third anniversary and a year of impactful work with cities to advance equitable housing policies.

07/08/2024

The year started with some optimism for the market, with Wall Street investors expecting the Federal Reserve to finally begin cutting interest rates as inflation ebbs. That hasn’t happened via 's

Polls show skyrocketing housing costs are a top issue for young voters, with more than 90 percent in one survey saying affordability is a key factor in how they'll vote.

07/03/2024

NYU Furman Center faculty directors Vicki Been and Ingrid Gould Ellen offer six principles to guide policymakers as they try to create a housing strategy that will continue to welcome a diversity of new residents and to help them climb the economic ladder via Vital City https://buff.ly/4coAwWa

The first principle is flexibility. The cities that will thrive in the future are those that can reinvent themselves in the face of remote work and other unforeseen challenges to come.

The second principle is openness to growth and change. Leaders should focus on making it easier to build more, and more varied, housing overall and investing heavily in means-tested, subsidized housing that can ensure some level of diversity even in the face of rapid appreciation.

The third key principle is generality. The task of providing more housing —and more affordable housing— can’t fall to just a few neighborhoods, as it is now. Efficiency, fairness and political viability depend upon every community district doing its part to provide more housing.

The fourth principle is equity. We must end exclusionary and unfair land use policies, reduce the city’s high levels of segregation and boost homeownership among households of color.

A fifth principle is targeting the neediest. We need to focus on the lowest-income households (in part because they won’t directly benefit as much as others from new building).

The final key principle is thoughtful cost control. The City needs a comprehensive and sustained all-hands-on-deck strategy to reduce the costs of developing and operating residential buildings and stretch tax dollars further.

Housing affordability is key to a vibrant and sustainable future for New York. While the roots of some of the challenges are national, and even global, there is much the City can do. While the city has changed in myriad ways over the decades and centuries, one constant has been its wonderfully open doors.

A new vision for postpandemic housing policy

07/02/2024

Register here for the free CoreData webinar on Thursday, July 11, 2024, at 10 a.m. ET. You will learn how to use CoreData tools to understand and analyze current housing and neighborhood policy issues in New York City, as well as how to use new features.

Join us for a free webinar on Thursday, July 11, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. ET, and learn how to use the new interactive features of the NYU Furman Center's CoreData.nyc platform. This webinar will explore how policy-focused audiences can use CoreData tools to understand and analyze current housing and neig...

06/17/2024

A new study published in Housing Policy Debate finds that policies like Massachusetts Chapter 40B—a fair share policy that streamlines the permitting process for housing developments with affordable units—may be valuable complements to other major housing programs in the United States.

Opening up neighborhoods that offer greater opportunities for social mobility to low- and moderate-income households remains a challenge in the United States. Exclusionary zoning practices act as a barrier to current efforts by restricting the supply of affordable housing.

Focusing on Massachusetts Chapter 40B, they find clear evidence that fair share policies that seek to bypass restrictive zoning practices build affordable housing in neighborhoods with greater opportunities for social mobility.

Read the paper by Hector Blanco, a former postdoctoral research fellow at the Furman Center here:

Opening up neighborhoods that offer greater opportunities for social mobility to low- and moderate-income households remains a challenge in the United States. Exclusionary zoning practices act as a...

06/13/2024

The NYU Furman Center would like to give a special thanks to our sponsors , for their generous support of our By The Numbers: The Use of Housing Choice Vouchers in NYC launch event for the release of our annual State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods report on May 21.

Their generous support directly funds the work of our talented Graduate Research Assistants, who meaningfully contribute to every critical part of our State of the City. Students take responsibility for everything from analyzing data, updating our Neighborhood Data Profiles, building new interactives, communicating our findings, and of course, fundraising and executing our event. We would not be able to achieve our work without their valuable contributions.

This year's State of the City Graduate Research Assistant Team: Tony Bodulovic, Peter Estes, Clara Smith, Will Viederman, Junyi Li, Camille Préel-Dumas, Daria Guzzo, Shannon Flores, MPA-PNP, Danya Rubenstein-Markiewicz, Yael Gonzalez Meiler, Benjamin Hitchcock, and Chloe Fauber-Lyle.

Thank you again for supporting our vital work during the city’s continued affordable housing crisis.

Read our full report ➡ https://buff.ly/3UXfLcK

06/12/2024

Panelists at the Furman Center’s State of the City launch event on May 21 discussed the challenges of administering a federal voucher program and proposed a range of solutions to improve its function—including expanding housing supply, offering more operational flexibility for localities, strengthening protections against discrimination from landlords, and coaching people as they navigate the program so they are empowered to move into new neighborhoods.

"We need an all-of-the-above approach,” said Solomon Greene, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who spoke at a breakfast reception before the presentation and panel. “The crisis of affordable housing is too great for us to be fighting for little pieces of the solution.”

Read NYU Furman Center's Benjamin Hitchcock and Yael Gonzalez Meiler's article on the panel 👇

Panelists at the Furman Center’s State of the City launch event on May 21 discussed the challenges of administering a federal voucher program and proposed a range of solutions to improve its function—including expanding housing supply, offering more operational flexibility for localities, streng...

06/10/2024

Even as California has tried to make building legal accessory dwelling units as easy as possible, a new study suggests that, in San José, more than 1,000 unpermitted ADUs were constructed in a four-year period—reflecting the state’s severe housing shortage and underscoring the urgent need for affordable housing options.

Property owners in San José, one of the largest cities in northern California, legally built about 291 detached ADUs from 2016 to 2020, according to a paper by a team of University and Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers supported with a grant from the Housing Solutions Lab at Furman Center. But by employing a computer vision model, human annotations on a stratified sample of parcels, and publicly available satellite imagery, the authors estimated that 1,045 (±226) additional informal detached ADUs were built during the same time period.

California legalized ADUs, but unpermitted ones dominate. A Lab-funded study finds over 1,000 unpermitted ADUs in San José, highlighting the state's housing crisis.

05/31/2024

The NYU Furman Center's final graduating Research Assistant is Camille Preel-Dumas! 🎓

Camille has been a Data Research Assistant at the Furman Center since her start at NYU Wagner in September 2022. She has enjoyed working on a variety of projects during her time, including renter-stability interventions, the State of the City Focus Chapter on low-density neighborhoods, Good Cause Eviction research, and Supply Skepticism Revisited.

She’ll miss the depth of knowledge and dedication her FC colleagues consistently demonstrate, as well as FC’s terrace parties, field trips, and presentations on the dew point and Animal Crossing-inspired planning principles.

Next, she’ll be joining the Community Preservation Corporation as a Policy Associate working to advance affordable housing policy and deploy financing to decarbonize multifamily housing nationwide. She’s excited for this next chapter and is so grateful to the Furman Center over these past years!

Thank you, and congratulations Camille!

05/30/2024

The NYU Furman Center's next graduating Research Assistant is Ben Hitchcock! 🎓

Ben has been a research assistant at the Furman Center since May 2023. He has written public-facing policy stories that help interpret the Center's vital research on zoning reform, housing supply, and more. He is particularly proud of a long feature story he wrote about Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, investigating how the city's housing affordability crisis developed and examining possible solutions.

Ben is excited to continue at the Furman Center for a few more months this summer while he looks for his next permanent role.

Thank you, and congratulations Ben!

05/30/2024

Applications are now open to join the Housing Solutions Lab and Enterprise Community Partner's New York State’s Peer Network. Localities with a population size of 25,000 to 100,000 in New York State are invited to apply to become part of a network of municipalities aiming to tackle the state’s housing affordability crisis.

The Network will bring leaders from cities and towns throughout the state to implement, refine, and strengthen tools to meet rental housing and homeownership needs in their communities.

Selected participants will convene with Housing Solutions Lab and Enterprise Community Partner's experts to learn about key housing policy tools and receive access to technical assistance and research support.

To learn more about that application process and review eligibility requirements, please see the request for proposals: https://buff.ly/3VlyIqV

The deadline to apply is July 8. Apply here: https://buff.ly/3USvv0g