U.S. housing scholarship, planning, and policy since 1968 : an introduction to the special issue

Problem: How have the main themes of housing scholarship, planning, and policy evolved since 1968, and how do they inform current scholarship? Purpose: This introduction explores how housing issues have changed over the last 40 years, to provide a holistic context for this special issue on the future(s) of housing. Methods: I review secondary sources, and draw on them to synthesize the important themes that shape housing policy and this special issue. Results and conclusions: Increasing owner-occupied housing is still the primary housing goal, as it was 40 years ago, but recent innovations in mortgage finance that appeared to move it nearer may have backfired. How scholars and policy and planning professionals view the housing problem for lower-income households has evolved from simple housing quantity and quality inadequacies to something more complex: lack of affordability and homelessness, inadequate coordination of existing programs, and housing as an obstacle to economic opportunity. Despite current federal indifference, improvements in legal infrastructure and enforcement capacity have reduced, but not eliminated, housing discrimination since 1968. Federal funding diminished for public and, later, private supply-side initiatives in rental housing, and federal funds now support demand-side initiatives, small amounts of public housing, and grants to support increasingly important and autonomous state, local, and nonprofit sector efforts. Takeaway for practice: The articles in this special issue recommend that planners and policymakers systematically assess the degree to which buildings promote and protect human health, and that they encourage innovation in housing construction, and age and economic diversity in residential areas. In existing neighborhoods that may be threatened by concentrated foreclosures or creeping blight, the authors in this issue encourage stimulating community reinvestment lending and preventing foreclosures. They also advocate improving the design and coordination of the increasingly diverse array of programs at various levels of government. Their recommendations build on the history of 40 years of housing scholarship and policy I summarize here.