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Revisiting
Rental Housing: A National Policy Summit
November
14 and 15, 2006 The rental housing challenges facing the nation are great and persistent. They include substantial shares of renters that spend half or more of their income on rent, a smaller but still significant number of renters that live in physically deteriorated housing or housing with known hazards, concentration of many low-income renters in distressed areas of high poverty, and the loss of affordable rental housing. These problems impose public costs in addition to the private costs that are associated with suffering under rent burdens, living in substandard housing, living great distances from jobs because communities resist affordable rental housing, and living in distressed neighborhoods. Despite government efforts to address these problems, they remain enduring outcomes of the operation and regulation of housing and land markets. In November of 2006, with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University hosted a two-day rental housing policy summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts designed to reexamine rental housing policy, programs, and priorities. The symposium featured scholarly research on the nature of the nation’s rental housing problems, the government’s response to these problems, and alternative ways of engineering rental programs and policies suggested by past practice, evaluation research, and insights into the operation of housing markets. |