Rapidly rising homelessness in the 1980s shocked Americans and led to a flurry of studies, a deluge of news stories, and to Public Law 100-77, the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of July 1987. The McKinney Act marked the entrance of the federal government into homelessness policy,...

It is generally believed that the increased incidence of homelessness in the United States has arisen from broad societal factors, such as changes in the institutionalization of the mentally ill, increases in drug addiction and alcohol usage, and so forth. This paper presents a comprehensive...

In this paper, we use a general equilibrium simulation model to assess the potential impacts on homelessness of various housing-market policy interventions. We calibrate the model to the four largest metropolitan areas in California. We explore the welfare con- sequences and the effects on...

During the three-year period ending in July 2003, the rise in housing costs in California far exceeded the national inflation rate. Housing prices in five coastal counties increased by more than 60 percent. For the highest quintile of cities, prices increased by an average of more than thirty...

This paper assesses whether growth in the immigrant population over the past two decades has adversely affected the housing consumption opportunities of native renter households. We find that the monthly housing expenses of native renters are higher in metropolitan areas with larger immigrant...

Land-use regulation is undertaken by units of local government and is notoriously hard to measure. This paper assembles and reports the results of five complementary and overlapping surveys of local regulation in the San Francisco Bay Area. We compile measures derived from surveys of public...

This paper reviews trends in housing affordability in the U.S. over the past four decades. There is little evidence that owner-occupied housing has become less affordable. In contrast, there have been modest increases in the fraction of income that the median renter household devotes to housing....

A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area’s heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner-city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two-wave longitudinal survey of...