UCLA Housing Voice

Usually, cities with lots of vacant housing have slow rent growth (or low rents), while lower vacancy rates are associated with higher rents. But many Indian cities have an unusual, seemingly paradoxical problem: high vacancy rates and high rents. Why? According to research by Dr. Sahil Gandhi and Professor Richard Green, a major contributor is insecure property rights — specifically, very strict rent control regulations and an inadequate supply of judges to rule in tenant eviction cases. We discuss how policies that increase risk and reduce profits — beyond a certain point, anyway — can lead some landlords to keep their units vacant rather than rent them out, with negative consequences for the entire housing market. We also explore the differences between “first generation” and “second generation” rent controls, and the reasons many cities across the world have shifted from the former to the latter.

Show notes:

• Gandhi, S., Green, R. K., & Patranabis, S. (2022). Insecure property rights and the housing market: Explaining India’s housing vacancy paradox. Journal of Urban Economics, 131, 103490.
• Tandel, V., Patel, S., Gandhi, S., Pethe, A., & Agarwal, K. (2016). Decline of rental housing in India: The case of Mumbai. Environment and Urbanization, 28(1), 259-274.
• Diamond, R., McQuade, T., & Qian, F. (2019). The effects of rent control expansion on tenants, landlords, and inequality: Evidence from San Francisco. American Economic Review, 109(9), 3365-94.
• Phillips, S. (2020). Does the Los Angeles region have too many vacant homes? UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
• Arnott, R. (1995). Time for revisionism on rent control? Journal of economic perspectives, 9(1), 99-120.
• Sims, D. P. (2007). Out of control: What can we learn from the end of Massachusetts rent control? Journal of Urban Economics, 61(1), 129-151.
• Another conversation on video between Sahil Gandhi and Paavo Monkkonen on rent control in India (click the tab “India: Rent Control” on the left).

In this episode we do a deep dive into the history of Atlanta’s public housing program, from its inception in 1934 to the eventual demolition and redevelopment of many sites in the 1990s and onward. But Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez’s focus isn’t the public housing developments themselves. Rather, it’s on the tenants — overwhelming Black, and disproportionately women-led — who called public housing communities home, organized and built political power within them, and used that power to make demands of the government. It’s a complex history without clear or consistent “good guys” and “bad guys,” and it complicates the narrative which argues that housing vouchers (or “Section 8”) are a complete substitute for the decline in public housing across the country. Whatever your connection to Atlanta or your knowledge of the US public housing program, there’s a lot to be learned from this case study on the politics of public housing in Atlanta.

Show notes:

• Rodriguez, A. D. (2021). Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing. University of Georgia Press.
• Pritchett, W. E. (2010). Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer. University of Chicago Press.
• Parson, D. C. (2005). Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles. University of Minnesota Press.
• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (documentary).
• Ingram, H., Schneider, A. L., & DeLeon, P. (2019). Social Construction and Policy Design. In Theories of the Policy Process (pp. 93-126). Routledge.
• W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study of the Atlanta University Federal Housing Area, 1934.
• Chaskin, R. J., & Joseph, M. L. (2015). Contested space: Design principles and regulatory regimes in mixed-income communities in Chicago. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 660(1), 136-154.
• 70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green (documentary).

How do we respond when regulations intended to help vulnerable tenants end up disadvantaging them even further? Professor Meredith Greif joins us to discuss her research and new book, Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis, which explores how penalties levied against landlords can lead to stricter screening, harassment, and informal eviction of renters who may already struggle to find adequate housing. Far from proposing that we do away with tenant protections, Greif asks us to consider the trade-offs inherent in many policy decisions. Before we can come up with better solutions, we first need to grapple with these unintended (but often predictable) consequences — and recognize how our policies and regulations may be producing exactly the behaviors we say we want to discourage.
Show notes:

• Greif, M. (2018). Regulating landlords: Unintended consequences for poor tenants. City & Community, 17(3), 658-674.
• Greif, M. (2022). Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis. Russell Sage Foundation.
• Background on the expansion of criminal nuisance laws and their disparate racial impacts in California: Dillon, L., Poston, B., & Barajas, J. (Nov 19 2020). Black and Latino renters face eviction, exclusion amid police crackdowns in California. Los Angeles Times.
• Mead, J., Hatch, M., Tighe, J. R., Pappas, M., Andrasik, K., & Bonham, E. (2017). Who is a nuisance? Criminal activity nuisance ordinances in Ohio.
• Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city. Crown.
• Our earlier episode on landlords with Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden.

“We are at a point in Los Angeles and California, where we are seeing the population plateau or even decline for the first time since the 18th century. That is not only a statistical change it is a shift in how we define ourselves and our civic identity.” So says Christopher Hawthorne, one of many housing experts interviewed for a recently report published by the California 100 initiative. What are we going to do about it? In this final episode of season one, Shane is joined by Dana Cuff of UCLA cityLAB and Carolina Reid of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center to talk about their new report (co-authored with the Lewis Center). It outlines the facts that define California’s housing crisis, the history that got us here, and a vision for a more affordable, inclusive, socially and environmentally just future. The report calls for increased homebuilding and a greater emphasis on housing’s role in promoting the public good, not just private gain. Without both, California will fall short of its aspirations, and the rest of the U.S. may follow it down a path to worsening affordability, rising housing instability and homelessness, and declining economic and environmental sustainability.
Show notes:

• Report with Policies and Future Scenarios: Phillips, S., Reid, C., Cuff, D., & Wong, K. (2022). The Future of Housing and Community Development: A California 100 Report on Policies and Future Scenarios. California 100 Initiative.
• Full report on Facts, Origins, and Trends: Phillips, S., Reid, C., Cuff, D., & Wong, K. (2022). The Future of Housing and Community Development: An In-Depth Analysis of the Facts, Origins and Trends of Housing and Community Development in California. California 100 Initiative.
• Roadmap and Summary of report (four pages).
• Visual representation of the four scenarios, created by cityLAB.
• A Terner Center report on the likely impacts of Senate Bill (SB) 9.
• Baldassare, M., Bonner, D., Dykman, A., & Lopes, L. (2018). Proposition 13: 40 Years Later. Public Policy Institute of California.
• Update: Project Homekey expanded in 2022.
• See more of the Terner Center’s work.
• See more of cityLAB’s work.

When eviction cases go to court, it’s typical for more than 90% of landlords to have legal representation, but less than 10% of tenants. This puts tenants at a considerable disadvantage, and helps to explain why few renters win their eviction cases; many don’t bother showing up for court hearings at all. Advocates argue that providing free legal representation to tenants — a policy known as “right to counsel” or “universal access to counsel” — would reduce evictions, but there have been few opportunities to study it in an experimental setting. Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU joins us to talk about the impacts of the policy in New York City, the first U.S. city to adopt a right to counsel, starting with 10 ZIP codes in 2017 and expanding in subsequent years. We learn how the program has affected eviction filings, the share of tenants who receive legal representation, and the number of evictions executed by the court, and we discuss the wider context of housing instability and eviction — including the limitations and harder-to-measure benefits of a lawyer-based eviction reduction strategy.

Show notes:

• Ellen, I. G., O’Regan, K., House, S., & Brenner, R. (2021). Do lawyers matter? Early evidence on eviction patterns after the rollout of universal access to Counsel in New York City. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 540-561.
• The New York City Tenement Museum website.
• UCLA Housing Voice episode 29 on landlords, discrimination, and serial eviction filings with Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden.
• Abramson, B. (2021). The Welfare Effects of Eviction and Homelessness Policies. Job market paper.
• Cassidy, M. T., & Currie, J. (2022). The Effects of Legal Representation on Tenant Outcomes in Housing Court: Evidence from New York City's Universal Access Program (No. w29836). National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Collinson, R and Reed, D. (2018). The Effects of Evictions on Low-Income Households.
• Hoffman, D. A., & Strezhnev, A. (2022). Longer Trips to Court Cause Evictions. U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 22-29.
• Lens, M. C., Nelson, K., Gromis, A., & Kuai, Y. (2020). The neighborhood context of eviction in Southern California. City & Community, 19(4), 912-932.
• Nelson, K. R. (2022). Litigating the Housing Crisis: Legal Assistance and the Institutional Life of Eviction in Los Angeles. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
• Nelson, K., Gromis, A., Kuai, Y., & Lens, M. C. (2021). Spatial concentration and spillover: Eviction dynamics in neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, 2005–2015. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 670-695.
• 2021 press release on NYC program expansion: New York City's First-in-Nation Right-to-Counsel Program Expanded Citywide Ahead of Schedule.