Professor Brian Connolly Joins KCBS San Francisco to Discuss Ideas to Ease Housing Crisis

“At the federal level, there are a lot of challenges. Our federal government doesn't build housing, it participates in funding for some housing and provides tax credits for affordable housing. But housing is certainly a major issue around the country. And so some of the challenges that the federal government faces is we have high-interest rates that are making new development of housing challenging in the current market, we're still seeing elevated construction costs, you know, still, some supply chain issues stemming from the COVID pandemic, but also labor shortages in the construction market. And then also, and this sort of goes to some of what was discussed at the housing ideas showcase, there's relatively little land available in many of our major metropolitan areas for new housing development. And that's due in significant part to local zoning restrictions, but also other other laws as well that are passed by state and local governments.”

“In many parts of the country, it's virtually impossible to track new housing construction. If you are a citizen of a community, you have no way of knowing how many new housing units are proposed in your community or how many have been approved by your local government. How many have actually been constructed? So what we proposed was to take that idea and create a national dashboard that would allow us to track that information as well as track, you know, are the housing units affordable housing units? Are they high-end housing units? And then in particular, for housing units that are proposed but aren't ultimately constructed, we were trying to understand why that is, whether it's market conditions, or zoning rules. And so having a dashboard like this would certainly help with that.”