What Can Be Done About America’s Housing Crisis?

Homes on N. 56th St. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Lessons from congestion pricing fight: After fighting for congestion pricing and pushing back on the negative narrative, Joe Liesman of the Environmental Defense Fund shares strategies for other advocates considering pushing for the program in their cities. The keys are making sure to collect and report the data to counteract skepticism, building a broad coalition of advocates young and old, and sustaining the organizing through the initial implementation when the lawsuits and opposition pushes back hard. (Joe Liesman | Environmental Defense Fund)

Fixing America’s housing problem: Housing for many is getting further and further out of reach. And the places where people want to live most, are making it harder to build the housing that would support them. But a new group of lawmakers sees the challenge ahead and is fighting it heat on, hoping to provide affordable housing and change the discussion about housing from something that is available if you can afford it, to the need to make it a human right as other countries around the world have done. (Ryan Biller | Dame Magazine)

The great American property tax freakout: Discussions around reducing or completely getting rid of property taxes are increasing in states around the country, but the media is largely missing the huge impacts changes in property tax collections will have for public services and the cost of housing. Additionally there’s a underdiscussed shift of how a decrease in property taxes for homeowners will impact commercial property owners and renters as well as city budgets around the country. (David Schleicher | SSRN)

Rethinking urban river restoration: A USC project, in partnership with the City of Los Angeles, is focused on taking an old railyard along the Los Angeles River and repurposing it to build a healthier flood protection system. The research and design looked at different scenarios and created a data and model driven program to help the city determine what might work in changing a concrete channel system and industrial yard into a responsive sustainable system. (Trenise Ferreira | USC Today)

Creating more monetary equity for tenants: The most common way to build wealth in the United States at this time is homeownership. However, homeowners hold 40 time more wealth than renters who have not been afforded the same opportunity to build it. But several states have created the possibility for this to change through what is called a tenant equity vehicle, which is a system for allowing renters that pay for housing to collect some of the long term value they often help others build by paying rent. (Katie Deal | Stanford Social Innovation Review)

Quote of the Week

Imagine a scenario where you’re sitting in traffic, and you look to your right, and there’s an empty Waymo, look to your left, and there’s an empty Waymo, and you’d be like, what the hell! I’m sitting here caught in a bunch of empty vehicles. I think there’s absolutely an angle there [for taxing empty vehicles].

–Nico Larco, professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Oregon, in Government Technology discussing the possibility of using congestion pricing to regulate robotaxis.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Former head of LA Metro’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation Joshua Schank to talk about his book New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector.

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