Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems

“Fixer-Upper” is a book about our dysfunctional housing market, what caused rents and homeownership costs to become so unaffordable, and what can be done to fix things.

Jenny Schuetz is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metro research program.

The big ideas for Urban Atlanta:

1. Our housing market is broken. We are not building enough housing. And where we are building housing, we are building the wrong kinds, often in the wrong places. 
2. Local governments are the main cause of the brokenness. They regulate the quantity and types of housing built and where they are built. Under pressure by local antigrowth groups, they tend to favor only houses that are too big and too expensive.
3. We need the state to respond in two ways: First, by setting rules requiring that cities and counties zone for a variety of housing types at a variety of rents and home prices. Second, by requiring that cities and counties speed up their construction permitting process. For this to be effective, the state must offer incentives for localities that comply and penalties for those that do not.
4. More housing would ease some of the burden for low-income families, but we need more: a rethinking by the federal government of housing assistance, involving better designed tax credits and an expansion of housing vouchers.