New Books: Affordable Housing in the United States
Listen to our conversation with Gregg Colburn, co-author with Rebecca Walter of Affordable Housing in the United States, published in 2024 by Routledge. Affordable Housing in the United States offers a comprehensive and accessible guide for students and practitioners on affordable housing policy and best practices, along with well-researched case studies on the approaches of three different cities: Chicago, Seattle, and San Antonio. We discuss the book itself, and wade into the more recent challenges and uncertainties around affordable housing provision and preservation under a new federal administration.
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Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. This week, I’m speaking with Gregg Colburn, the co-author with Rebecca Walter of Affordable Housing in the United States, published earlier this year by Routledge. Affordable Housing the United States is a little different from the monographs we usually cover on the show: it’s a well-researched and thoughtfully composed primer on affordable housing policy written primarily for students and planning professionals and practitioners.
Gregg Colburn
My name is Greg Colburn. I am at the University of Washington. I'm a faculty member in the Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environment and I study housing and homelessness.
Emily
Gregg, thank you for taking some time to talk to us a bit about this book. Maybe to get started, could you tell us how this project got started? How did you and Rebecca get involved, and who are you writing this for?
Gregg Colburn
The impetus was actually an inbound call from the publisher who was actually looking for someone to write a book on affordable housing. And so, there were a couple of different avenues that we were pursuing and debating with the publisher. And we had two different ideas, and finally we kind of settled on the idea that we probably just need an affordable housing 101 book, that there were a lot of great housing policy books broadly defined that were very policy focused. But we wanted to kind of bring in everything in this book, not just policy, but also just what does it mean to have affordable housing or not have affordable housing consequence of that, etcetera. So that was it was kind of a bumpy process actually trying to get to the point where like, OK, this is actually the book we're going to write and finally got it done.
Our idea is that it certainly could be used in the classroom, but also that it could serve as a resource for advocates or elected leaders who now on the City Council tasked with dealing with affordable housing, don't know where to start. And this would be kind of a 101 introduction into the topic. So we certainly wrote it with that in mind as well.
Emily
Great, so then moving into how the book is organized – and you make a distinction that this is focused on affordable housing, rather than just housing writ large – how is the book structured, and really, how did you make some of those decisions about what to keep in, what to leave out?
Gregg Colburn
So you know, we start with what is affordable housing, and this was I would argue, probably from my perspective, one of the more important chapters, which is really defining what it means. And you know, Rebecca and I made the decision that affordable housing is not, at least in this book, synonymous with subsidized housing.
And a lot of people have made that claim. I happen to disagree with that because there's plenty of subsidized housing that isn't affordable to certain households and then there's plenty of non-subsidized housing that is affordable for people, like as we mentioned in the first couple of pages for Bill Gates, all housing is affordable and so you know, affordability is a function of the cost of housing and the resources that households have to devote to that expense. And so, we kind of talked about that and historic patterns in the United States of declining housing affordability, which some other research is really focused heavily on. And so that's kind of where we go. And then in the second part it's really diving into what does that mean? Looking at the housing stock, deconstructing affordability and looking at trends in income and housing costs over time, which is really the story here, when you look at this over the last 50 years, which is incomes have stagnated, especially among renters and housing costs and rents have really, really increased, which has created this affordable housing crisis that we're that we're dealing with and we kind of go back in history, which is kind of housing policy, which other books have done as well and kind of looking at how do we get where we are, why do we have the system that we have? Why do we have the system that really benefits homeowners and frankly doesn't give a whole lot to renters, especially low income hunters, we talk about the challenges of race and affordable housing and the obvious discrepancies by race and disparities by race, not only in terms of housing access but wealth accumulation and etcetera, etcetera, and then segregation and then kind of conclude that chapter or that section with housing and stability, which is something that I think a lot about in terms of precarity, homelessness, eviction, foreclosure, etc.
And then the third section we just talked about how do we provide access to affordable housing? And that's looking at who are all the actors involved. And that's not just the government, that's developers and it's financiers and it’s planners and all that kind of stuff, nonprofit for profit developers, etcetera. And then we go into kind of the basics of affordable housing policy supply side assistance, which would be public housing and LITEC tax credits we've got demand side assistance.
We talked about affordable homeownership plans, and then all the regulatory levers that that policies can or that governments can pull or not pull as the case may be. And then we conclude with three case studies, Chicago, San Antonio, and Seattle, and we picked 3 very, very different cities that we each had some familiarity with just to show how federal policies interact with local action very differently in different contexts.
What's really interesting in those chapters is seeing because of the way the formulas were established at HUD. You know, Chicago actually gets more per capita goodies from the federal government than Seattle does, even though Seattle's housing crisis is at a far greater level than Chicago's. And so what you see is kind of the Rust Belt and industrial Midwest and northeast.
As you know those cities do fairly well in terms of allocation of HUD resources, whereas newer Western cities don't get quite as much. And then our final chapter, which is a little bit ironic given what's transpired over the last about 5 months. But was this kind of road path idea, and we kind of look at what could housing affordable housing look like in the United States under different states in terms of status quo, to kind of incremental change, to kind of more substantive or transformative change in policy making and the idea being -- my frustration with a lot of policy books, not just housing generally, is that a lot of people will can write these great books and then basically say like, this is what we should do. But the likelihood of that happening is like .0001. And so it's kind of like, well, does this help me? And so, what we wanted to do is say like, well, let's just say that the politics of the United States doesn't change radically. What could we do in this kind of current state of kind of butting heads politically. We're not powerless. States and localities can do some things the federal government could do some things where there is alignment, and then if we start to move along a little bit, we could make more, more transformative changes. No, we didn't do this right. Kind of, you know, kind of the negative, which is status quo.
Where with the government looking to dismantle housing policy, which is at least in the President's budget, what we're looking at right now, and so we look a little foolish in the sense that we assume that status quo is kind of the baseline and potentially we're going to go backwards from that which I'm putting my cards on the table right now would be really, really damaging from my perspective. And so I'm hopeful that the budget that passes Congress will not have some of those elements in it.
Emily
Well, you talked a bit about how you made the case study selections here – Chicago, Seattle, and San Antonio. If you were to do this again, would you want to look at other cases for comparison? What are other examples of these kind of paradigmatic cities when we’re thinking about affordable housing?
Gregg Colburn
And I don't know that these are necessarily exemplary other than they're different. And so, Chicago's kind of big, big city static, Midwestern City; Seattle high growth; and then San Antonio's emblematic of kind of sunbelt boom, not quite Austin-like, but it's still pretty robust growth in San Antonio.
In my travels, what I have found really interesting in other cities that I would like to highlight for folks are, I've been in the Midwest, but not Chicago. Smaller places: I've been in Green Bay, WI, Indianapolis was just in Missouri two weeks ago and what I'm seeing in the Midwest is really tightening housing markets, vacancy rental vacancies below 5%, rents going up and these cities saying, you know what is going on here.
That to me is super interesting, and that's a case that I would want to highlight. My suspicion, and this is true all around the places we're seeing a lot more single person households, not more single person renting, which means that you can have flat population growth but declining vacancy rate because people are each household is consuming more housing on a per capita basis. And I first saw this in Albuquerque, and I was doing some work down there I was like, “Why are their vacancy rates down, they haven't grown in 10 years” and it's because they've actually created a lot of new households. They're just single person households. So it creates all these questions around one, affordability because you don't have vacancy and then two or kind of housing stock you need. If people are wanting to live alone, you know people are certainly partnering later in life, romantically speaking. And I think the roommate dynamic I always had roommates until I was married. That's just seems less prevalent now among the 20 somethings. And so that's an interesting question. So one, I would want to think about those types of cities.
I think there's another class of cities that I've visited that's really interesting to me, which is kind of what I'm calling the hospitality driven cities in the United States. So, Sun Valley, ID, Bend OR, Santa Fe, NM, Asheville, NC, the similarities across these cities is pretty remarkable. San Luis Obispo, I was just there a few weeks ago.
These are places that are now destinations many times for retirees. People are going there for the lifestyle and these cities are blowing up and the affordability crisis is profound. It has huge impacts for service workers. It's more homelessness. And so I think that's a class of cities that I don't know that the nation is really realizing what's going on there and so that would be another one that would be super interested in.
And then what would be a third? So one Midwestern, one of those boom ones, and probably Sunbelt? Charlotte, NC, probably growing pretty fast. They've built a ton of housing. They've actually accommodated growth fairly well. So, I think that's a story that's pretty interesting.
Emily
So you just mentioned Charlotte’s housing production boom – is that the key to maintaining affordability? Or are there other public policies integrated into it that help support and maintain affordability?
Gregg Colburn
One of the points is that there are places that have built a whole bunch of housing and therefore have avoided a housing crisis. So, it's not a housing program per se in the sense that it's public policy, but it's basically they've created conditions where they can build a whole bunch of housing and therefore you can accommodate growth. And so that's kind of, a lot of cities in the Sunbelt are in that camp and I want to caveat that with a lot of times that housing was built in a way that we in Seattle and many people on the coast might not find that attractive, which is through limited regulation and sprawl. And so, you know, it's a double-edged sword in the sense that it does demonstrate that building the units matters in the sense that you can help accommodate growth and maintain our rental market. That's more reasonable. That's the story of the sunbelt. In the 2010’s it boomed and they built a bunch of housing.
And the story of the coast is it boomed and they didn't build much housing. And what happened, you know, rents just went bananas. And so, in no jurisdiction are the affordability policies sufficiently robust to deal with the scale that we're talking about. And so, we're kind of nibbling around the edges in each of those places.
And so, I want effective nibbling, like I want those programs to be as productive as possible. But ultimately, we also need to make sure as jurisdictions that we are pairing and job growth with housing growth. And if we don't these programs are just going to be chasing higher and higher rounds and it just becomes really, really challenging. And so I think for folks that are not interested in sprawl, who are not interested in in really, really limited regulatory environments, we then need to have a real adult conversation around well. Then what does that mean then to substantially increase the production of housing in Seattle and Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in ways that are environment, you know, demonstrate good environmental stewardship and creating the density that doesn't force people to drive for two hours to their job. And that's I think what we're wrestling a little bit with, especially on the West Coast. And that's why there's this whole abundance conversation is kind of centering around that as well. And you know, we got people like that hate that but that's a good conversation to have right now of there are other places that have done it, and if you don't like how they did it, that's fine, but then we should probably figure out how to do that as well as opposed to just saying we're going to sit on our hands because the consequences that have been dire, you know on our coast if you just look at affordability and homelessness and all those problems.
Emily
Right, so there are some really important ingredients that go into a healthy, sustainable housing policy framework beyond supply, beyond land use regulations. Can you talk about some of the other important factors? What are the biggest challenges in these local communities?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I think the biggest challenge is just the local political opposition to multifamily housing and denser housing, which is true in every single city in the United States and the same, the same story plays out over and over and over again, which is: you start to change people's neighborhoods and they get upset and they show up on Tuesday night and pretty soon you don't have new housing. And so that at its root is central to these challenges and that's why this is hard, because one stroke of the pen doesn't do it. It's happening every Tuesday night. And so that civic engagement becomes really important. I think the way we even envision civic engagement needs to change because in the name of kind of democratic representation, we've invited people who are impacted by new housing development to meetings, to Planning Commission meetings and then they show up and five people show up and they're over 50 and they're white. They're single-family homeowners. They’ve got nothing else to do. And they say no. And then the Planning Commission or the City Council says, well I'm representing my constituents. Five of them showed up and said No, zero showed up and said yes, so I have to say no and then we end up in this. And so when you think about like the challenges to scaling our region, Puget Sound needs 880,000 housing units over the next 20 or 25 years, according to our local planning organization. That's a lot of housing. And so when we're literally fighting over a 50- or 200-unit development and that goes back and forth and back and forth and someone sues and then we do this and it takes five years.
It's like, we have to get to 880,000 like we're not going to get there, kind of playing small ball like each Tuesday night, fighting about every single development. And so to me, like rethinking that system becomes super, super important. And it's obviously easier said than done, but we need to be thinking at scale, in my opinion. The problem is we haven’t. We've just been thinking project to project and I'm not an anti-regulation person. I always say in my talks on my first book, I joke. I'm for regulation society. I want my ground beef to be safe and everyone kind of laughs and we're like, well, yeah, of course we want our ground beef to be safe, and we want people to live in housing. That's not going to fall down on them or it's going to, you know, we don't want asbestos and all this kind of stuff, but taking seven years to build housing in San Francisco right now, when people are dying on the streets, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me to say, like when maybe we should rethink that a little bit. There has to be some reasonable middle ground where we can be good stewards of the environment, you know, provide appropriate processes to ensure that housing is quality. But also we’ve got to get the housing built and that's where we've really fallen down and I think that's where a lot of elected leaders on our coast need to look a mirror a little bit and frankly the other people need to look in the mirror. The folks who are showing up at Tuesday night and saying we don't want this housing because that coalition of folks has absolutely contributed to our affordability crisis in the cities where we desperately need housing.
And so, then you get into land use changes and parking minimums and all these things that have been demonstrated to have a real impact. It's not immediate, it's not a light switch, but when you get that full package of changes, over time you're going to see more housing production in the interim. There will still be a lot of pressure on these on these policies to support low-income folks because you know rents aren't going down and see how anytime soon even if we get rid of single family.
Emily
We’re recording this in May 2025, so it’s unclear what the world is going to look like by the time this airs – but have you already started to observe how staffing cuts at HUD, or the pending federal budget, just the overall capacity of affordable housing advocates has been changing since January?
Gregg Colburn
Yeah, I mean, I travel around the country a lot and so I certainly hear what local jurisdictions are dealing with right now and it's kind of concerning. On the homelessness side, there's definitely been the federal governments been a little slow to release money that's already been appropriated to states and localities.
There's been this kind of give and take of you know will you abide by our new rules that we've established through executive order, and some jurisdictions saying, well, we don't really agree with those executive orders and they're inconsistent with our business practices. And so there's litigation going on there.
There's obviously the proposed budget cuts that we discussed a moment ago in terms of what HUD might look like, what that could mean for voucher capacity and the number of vouchers in the system. And then I just think there's the, there's the, the, the capacity of HUD to do it wants to do with less head count and I think that's going to be tough to see in weeks and months, but I think that that plays out over time where just the capacity of the organization to do what it needs to do to help a lot of people who need housing may be constrained and that's something I'm certainly watching and concerned about over the next couple of years.
Emily
And again, this is being recorded in May, so this is another moving target, but how do you see tariffs impacting affordable housing production? Is it already visible?
Gregg Colburn
Yeah. I mean, I've kind of had casual conversations on this, so this is not necessarily an empirical this is more of an anecdotal thing. But yeah, I think people are really concerned. From what I understand I'm not a builder, just to be clear, but I think the Canadian lumber was exempted in the last round, which was a win for the home, I think the home builder lobby was pretty aggressive with the administration saying we get a lot of our lumber from Canada, and if you if you put a big tariff on that, like our houses are going to cost a lot more. And yes, we do have American lumber, but right now that's our source. And so we can't just grow trees in the next two weeks.
So that was one that I was kind of following just because we're so close to the Canadian border here and you know, and there's a lot of Canadian lumber up here, but I think there's a huge level of uncertainty and I think the other part is just what's going to happen with interest rates and you know, and certainly we saw on Friday with S&P downgrading the credit rating of the US government and our debt. What happened to the 10-year Treasury yesterday as it weren't up? And I noticed this morning, it's up again today and so that translates into higher mortgage costs and that's going to hurt home buyers. But it's also going to hurt people who need to raise financing to build housing. And so when you get this double whammy of higher costs and higher financing costs, it's just harder to build the housing that you are going to build is more expensive and then when you couple that with a federal policy regime that's looking to pull back in terms of supports, whether it's rental assistance or subsidies, it's a pretty problematic path that we're looking at and somewhat alarming. So my hope is that some of the more dramatic changes don't prevail because it you know, there could be a perfect storm that looks pretty, pretty ugly here, and I hope that that cooler heads prevail and that we don't end up down that path.
Now, even if we get rid of that stuff as we highlight in the book. We're still in a situation where all of this is inadequate, so to end this interview on a really high note it's tricky. It's absolutely tricky.
I think the other point on the tariff side of things is also just labor supply. You know, there's a huge concern that there are a lot of folks who are building homes right now who may or may not be documented. And if we end up losing that labor supply in agriculture and home building, etc., that could have big impacts as well. And so, there are a lot of forces right now that are, I think, complicating the production of housing.
Emily
My thanks to Gregg Colburn, co-author with Rebecca Walter of Affordable Housing in the United States from Routledge. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.