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Building and expanding a fixed rail public transit system is a considerable undertaking for any metropolitan region. Investments on this scale, which can run in the billions of dollars, certainly reshape how people move throughout a region, but their impacts do not end at the turnstile. For residents and businesses that place importance on accessibility, such investments can also essentially redistribute the value of location within a region, making a place more or less desirable than before simply because of its proximity to the transit system. And as we know, a residential location’s value is best reflected in how much people are willing to pay to live there. 

Drawing on literature reviews published by the Center for Housing Policy in January 2011, this Planning Commissioners’ Journal article outlines the various ways in which affordable housing can create jobs, increase tax revenues, and generally foster economic growth. The article also includes an overview of several effective state and local strategies for developing affordable housing.

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In the United States, housing assistance is not an entitlement. Despite annual federal expenditures in excess of $30 billion for housing subsidies distributed to roughly 4.8 million households, millions of eligible families with low incomes and high housing costs do not receive any support. Some families have applied for assistance from their local housing authorities but must wait for their names to come to the top of the list; others have not applied but may pay large shares of their income for rent, reducing available funds for basic necessities, such as food and health care. To ensure that our limited federal housing resources are available to assist as many families as possible, we should be actively searching for innovative ways to encourage existing subsidy recipients to build assets and make progress toward economic security. By helping families take advantage of the stability that federally-subsidized housing provides as a foundation for income and asset growth, we can free up existing housing subsidies for other families in need.

After a prolonged recession, employers are slowly starting to hire again. But will the newly created jobs pay enough for workers to afford housing, or will workers have to struggle to get by with each paycheck? This edition of Paycheck to Paycheck focuses on housing affordability for the five largest jobs in the industry sector currently doing the most hiring.

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This fact sheet reviews recent literature on the subject of housing counseling and finds that there is strong evidence that housing counseling can be an effective intervention in helping distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure.