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Housing and Cities
How an Environmental Law Became a Weapon Against Student Housing The People's Park fight in Berkeley shows how lawsuits under California's environmental review law stalled student housing, and how the state rewrote the rules in 2023 and 2025. The Housing Act of 1949 and Its Promise of a Decent Home for Every Family Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949 promising a decent home for every American family. Here is how its public housing goals were cut, delayed and steered by local politics. California's Duplex Law Promised Homes on Every Lot and Delivered Few SB 9 let California homeowners split lots and build duplexes almost anywhere. Few did. Here is why costs, local rules and financing blunted the law, and what California tried next. Housing First and the Thirty Years of Evidence Behind It Housing First began in 1992 New York with a simple bet: give people a home without preconditions. Three decades of trials show it keeps people housed. Here is the case and its limits. How Euclid v. Ambler Made Exclusionary Zoning the Law of the Land A 1926 fight over 68 acres outside Cleveland gave every American town the power to ban apartments. Here is how that happened and what reformers are doing about it. Levittown Sold the Postwar Dream and Wrote Black Buyers Out of It Levittown made the suburban house affordable for millions of white veterans while its contracts and federal mortgage rules kept Black families out. The gap it built never closed. New York's 2019 Rent Law and the Rules It Rewrote for Stabilized Apartments What the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 changed for New York's rent-stabilized apartments, what owners lost, and why the fight over it never stopped. Oregon Became the First State to Cap Rent Increases Statewide How Oregon's 2019 law, SB 608, limited yearly rent hikes and no-cause evictions, why it is not classic rent control, and what the cap has and has not done for renters. Pruitt-Igoe and the Myth That Public Housing Was Doomed to Fail The 1972 implosion in St. Louis became the symbol of failed public housing. The record shows the towers were starved of money and residents, not doomed by the idea itself. Rent Control and What the Economists Actually Found in San Francisco San Francisco's 1994 vote extended rent control to small buildings. A Stanford study found it kept tenants in their homes and shrank the rental supply. Both findings matter. The Fair Housing Act Passed One Week After Dr. King Was Killed Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in the week after Dr. King's assassination, then gave it almost no teeth. How enforcement stayed weak for twenty years and what changed after. The Supply Debate Splitting Progressive Housing Advocates Montana's Republican legislature passed sweeping zoning reform in 2023 while progressives still argue over supply. Here are the build-more and protect-tenants camps, stated fairly.