Housing Brass Tacks: Affordability

Understanding housing policy, finance, and regulation can be daunting, requiring us to wade through a sea of acronyms, untangle public and private interests, trace knotty financial flows, and decrypt complex bureaucracies. In our new Housing Brass Tacks series, we’re going back to basics to get a grasp on this unwieldy topic.

In the second Housing Brass Tacks discussion, housing scholar Matthew Lasner, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Hunter College, laid out the history of the fight to make housing affordable: from zoning codes to co-ops, it’s always been hard-won. Here are a few things we learned about the long battle against privation in the US.