Co-sponsored by the City Club of New York and CNU NYC. 

This event is part five in the ongoing program series Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus. 
Watch the recordings of parts 1-4 on our YouTube page.

This series is co-sponsored by the City Club of New York and by CNU NYC. 

The YIMBY explanation for the country’s housing affordability crisis rests on three premises: that the country faces a severe housing shortage, that this shortage is driving up costs, and that those cost increases have made housing unaffordable. These premises have become so widely accepted that they have become starting points for policy, rather than theories to evaluate. But what does the evidence actually show?

In Part 5 of Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus, we speak with Kirk McClure (University of Kansas) and Alex Schwartz (The New School) about new research that challenges these premises. After looking at housing production, vacancy rates, and household formation across decades and hundreds of metropolitan areas, they find ample reason to question the commonly held housing shortage assessment. More provocatively, their research shows that even unrealistically steep reductions in market rents and home prices would do surprisingly little to reduce the affordability problem for those who need the help most — a problem ultimately rooted in wage stagnation and inequality.

Join us as we discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the affordability crisis and the appropriate strategies for confronting it.

Moderator:

Juan Rivero is the Special Projects Director at Village Preservation. 

Presenters:

Kirk McClure is a Professor Emeritus of urban planning in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. His research examines housing market behavior and evaluates federal affordable housing programs. He was a Scholar in Residence at HUD’s Department of Policy Development and Research. 

Alex Schwartz is Professor Emeritus in the Public and Urban Policy program at the New School for Social Research. His work focuses on housing and community development in the United States. He is the author of Housing Policy in the United States: 4th Edition.