UCLA Housing Voice

Rapid rehousing provides short-term rental assistance to help people experiencing homelessness find market-rate housing. Brian Blackwell shares new research finding that it may be more effective than we thought.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Blackwell, B., & Gross, M. (2026). Does Rapid Re-Housing reduce homelessness? Journal of Urban Economics, 154, 103889.
• Episode 64 of UCLA Housing Voice: Ending Family Homelessness with Beth Shinn.
• Episode 66 of UCLA Housing Voice: Chronic Homelessness and Housing First with Tim Aubry.
• Episode 87 of UCLA Housing Voice: Rental Voucher Lease-Up Rates with Sarah Strochak. 
• Evans, W. N., Sullivan, J. X., & Wallskog, M. (2016). The impact of homelessness prevention programs on homelessness. Science, 353(6300), 694-699.
• Cohen, E. (2024). Housing the homeless: the effect of placing single adults experiencing homelessness in housing programs on future homelessness and socioeconomic outcomes. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 16(2), 130-175.

Last time we talked about what preapproved building plans are and how the existing U.S. programs are going. This time we talked with Alkarim Devani and Eric Kronberg, two practitioners who are designing and implementing preapproved plan programs across North America.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Alkarim’s company, mddl.
• Eric’s companies, Kronberg Urbanists + Architects and Inc Codes.
• The Incremental Development Alliance.

Preapproved plan programs promise to speed up permitting and lower the cost of building new homes. How do they work—and are they working? Seva Rodnyansky shares findings from a review of more than 40 existing programs.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Rodnyansky, S., & Su, D. (2026). Preapproved Building Plans Help Cities Improve Housing Affordability. Pew Charitable Trusts.
• Animated intro for The Irony of Fate, which depicts architects having their building designs rendered increasingly bland and uniform by Soviet bureaucrats.
• The pattern book for New South Wales, Australia, with plans for buildings up to 216 units!
• The province-specific housing catalog produced by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Why is exclusionary zoning, which restricts land to expensive single-family houses, so commonplace in the US compared to other countries? Alexander Sahn shares strong evidence that local responses to a wave of migration by Southern Blacks in the middle of the 20th century played a big role.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Sahn, A. (2025). Racial diversity and exclusionary zoning: Evidence from the Great Migration. The Journal of Politics, 87(4), 1302-1318.
• Boustan, L. P. (2007). Black migration, white flight: the effect of black migration on northern cities and labor markets. The Journal of Economic History, 67(2), 484-488.
• Derenoncourt, E. (2022). Can you move to opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration. American Economic Review, 112(2), 369-408.
• Grant, K. N. (2014). Relocation and Realignment: How the Great Migration Changed the Face of the Democratic Party. Syracuse University.
  Cui, T. (2024). Did race fence off the American city? The great migration and the evolution of exclusionary zoning [working paper].
• Gallagher, R., Shertzer, A., & Twinam, T. (2026). Zoning and the American Suburb (No. 26-37). Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
• Lens, M. C. (2024). Where the hood at?: Fifty years of change in black neighborhoods. Russell Sage Foundation.
• Episode 23 of UCLA Housing Voice, on political representation and housing supply with Michael Hankinson.

This episode features clips from a few episodes of Michael Andersen's one-shot podcast series, YIMBY Country: "A podcast mini-series about what happens after you legalize housing. In this case, in New Zealand."

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Listen to YIMBY Country on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Episode 45 of UCLA Housing Voice: What Happened When Auckland Upzoned Everywhere with Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy.
• Episode 81 of UCLA Housing Voice: How New Zealand Passed Its Ambitious Zoning Reforms with Eleanor West. 
• Part 1 of the New Zealand Initiative's three-part series.

When cities adopt exclusionary zoning, their housing stock becomes scarcer and less affordable over time. Matt Mleczko shares research suggesting that the impacts extend beyond exclusionary jurisdictions’ borders, hurting poor communities that have no say over their neighbors’ land use policies.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Mleczko, M. (2026). The Cumulative Exposure to Exclusionary Zoning in Impoverished Neighborhoods. Demography, 63(1), 213-239.
• The National Zoning and Land Use Database.
• Jones, P. (2010). The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee. Harvard University Press.
• Wikipedia page on ‘Sewer Socialism,’ a movement that started in Milwaukee.
• Perry, E. M. (2017). Live and Let Live: Diversity, Conflict, and Community in an Integrated Neighborhood. University of North Carolina Press.
• Fischel, W. A. (2015). Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
• Goetz, E. G., Damiano, A., & Williams, R. A. (2019). Racially concentrated areas of affluence. Cityscape, 21(1), 99-124.
• Taylor, K. (2019). Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. University of North Carolina Press.
• Connolly, B., & Kazis, N. (2026). Rezoning the Rust Belt [working paper]. SSRN.

Supply skeptics don’t believe that building more homes improves affordability. Vicki Been tells us what the latest research says about their main arguments.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Been, V., Ellen, I. G., & O’Regan, K. (2025). Supply skepticism revisited. Housing Policy Debate, 35(1), 96-113.
• Been, V., Ellen, I. G., & O’Regan, K. (2019). Supply skepticism: Housing supply and affordability. Housing Policy Debate, 29(1), 25-40.
• Fang, L., Kim, E., & Tyndall, J. (2025). The downmarket impact of new multifamily housing: Evidence from a Honolulu condo tower. Real Estate Economics.
• Grabar, H. (2026). High-End Construction Really Does Help Everyone. The Atlantic. 
• Shane’s Substack post on the share of households living in recently-built housing who come from the same/different metro area or from within 50 or 100 miles of their new home.
• Pew Charitable Trusts Youtube video: “Building More Housing Creates 'Moving Chains' of Affordability”.
• Rollet, V. (2025). Can We Rebuild a City? The Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment [working paper].
• Giacoletti, M., Korevaar, M., & Qian, F. (2025). How Housing Supply Expansions Reshape Cities [working paper].
• Furman Center Land Use Reform Tracker.
• Soltas, E., & Gruber, J. (2026). How Costly Is Permitting in Housing Development? [working paper].

Transit agencies are using microtransit services to increase the reach and access of their overall service. We talk with Mike Hyland about how agencies can think about pricing and fleet sizing to balance cost and service. Also, how should agencies measure the overall success of their microtransit services?

Show notes:

• Hyland, M., Saha, R., & Hu, S. (2026). Peak Pricing and Transfer Discounts Can Make Microtransit More Efficient. UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7922/G2HT2MPD
• Saha, Ritun and Hu, Siwei and Hyland, Michael, Optimal Fare Policy and Fleet Sizing for an Integrated Fixed-Route Transit and Microtransit System (August 02, 2025). Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5382012 
• Hyland, M., Watkins, K., Shaheen, S., & Martin, E. (2026). What Should Agencies Measure to Decide If Microtransit Is Working? UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7922/G2ZW1JBF
• Hyland, M. F; Pike, S.; Hu, S.; Berkel, J.; Xing, Y.; Saha, R., et al. (2024). Integrating Microtransit Service with Traditional Fixed-Route Transit Costs More but Greatly Improves Access to Jobs. UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7922/G2TH8K2W
• Slosky, J., Silver, F., Schuchard, J., Schuchard, R., and Welsh, D. (2022) Microtransit definitions, trends, and applications. Calstart https://calstart.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/CALSTART-Microtransit-Overview.pdf
• Miriam Pinski, Anne Brown, Nicholas Perloff-Giles (2026). Is microtransit a cost-effective alternative or a costly competitor to public transit?, Cities,Volume 169, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2025.106490.

Does building housing near rail stations reduce driving, even if it prices out lower-income residents? Dan Chatman's research suggests the answer hinges not on who lives there, but on how much housing gets built. 

• Chatman, D. G., Xu, R., Park, J., & Spevack, A. (2019). Does Transit-Oriented Gentrification Increase Driving? Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39(4), 482-495. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0739456X19872255
• Chatman, Dan (2015) Does Transit-Oriented Development Need the Transit? Access Magazine. https://accessmagazine.org/fall-2015/does-transit-oriented-development-need-the-transit/
• Chatman, D. G., Rodynansky, S., Boarnet, M., Comandon, A., Snyder, B., Patel, K., & Atkins, J. (2025). Assessing the Quantification Methodology for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99j4s0bp

Part 3 of our book club series on Yoni Appelbaum's 'Stuck', covering chapters 9–10. Appelbaum himself joins us to wrap up the series. 

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at [email protected] and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Appelbaum, Y. (2025). Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Penguin Random House.
• UCLA Housing Voice episode 112: ‘Stuck’ Book Club pt. 1 with Attorney General Rob Bonta.
• UCLA Housing Voice episode 114: ‘Stuck’ Book Club pt. 2 with Giselle Hale.
• Sahn, A. (2025). Racial diversity and exclusionary zoning: Evidence from the great migration. The Journal of Politics, 87(4), 1302-1318.
• Reny, T. T., & Newman, B. J. (2018). Protecting the right to discriminate: the second great migration and racial threat in the American West. American Political Science Review, 112(4), 1104-1110.
• The Ezra Klein Show: What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’ (YouTube) (Apple Podcasts)
• Stephanie Nakhleh’s chapter-by-chapter review of Stuck (part 1).
• Books: 
  • Leah Boustan, Streets of Gold
  • Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
  • Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman
  • Public Citizens, Paul Sabin
  • Urban Fortunes, John Logan and Harvey Molotch