The essential reforms needed to fix the housing crisis

America is in the grip of a severe housing crisis. Tenants have seen rents rise 26 percent while home prices have soared by 47 percent since early 2020. Before the pandemic, there were 20 US states considered affordable for housing. Now there are none. And 21 million households—including half of all renters—pay more than one-third of their income on housing. Harvard Kennedy School Associate Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and former Burlington, Vermont Mayor Miro Weinberger say that’s because homebuilding hasn’t kept up with demand. They say housing production is mired in a thicket of restrictive zoning regulations and local politics, a “veto-cracy” that allows established homeowners—sometimes even a single disgruntled neighbor—to block and stall new housing projects for years. Weinberger, a research fellow at the Taubman Institute for State and Local Politics, and de Benedictis-Kessner, whose research focuses on urban policy, say even well-intentioned ideas like so-called “inclusionary zoning” laws that encourage mixed-income housing development may also be contributing to the problem. They join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to discuss how housing became a affordability nightmare for millions of people. During this episode, they offer policy ideas on how streamline the inefficient and often subjective ways home building projects are regulated and how to level the democratic playing field between established homeowners and people who need the housing that has yet to be built.

Miro Weinberger’s policy pecommendations:

• Remove subjective standards such as “neighborhood character” from housing approval processes in favor of objective, measurable ones.
• Loosen zoning restrictions that enforce suburban-style housing development in favor of creating denser, more urban environments that historically provided more housing and are popular today.
• Encourage leaders of municipal governments to take an active role in housing development, seeing themselves as developers taking an active role in more housing being built.

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner’s policy recommendations:

• Integrate housing policy with other related policies including transportation and economic development in a holistic way that drives across-the-board progress.
• Transfer approval power currently exercised by appointed boards and elected city councils to municipal housing and planning staff experts and empower them with objective standards. 

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His current research focuses on some of the most important policy areas that concern local governments, such as housing, transportation, policing, and economic development. His research also examines how citizens hold elected officials accountable, how representation translates the public's interests into policy via elections, and how people’s policy opinions are formed and swayed.He also leads courses on urban politics and policy, including an experiential field lab that partners student teams with cities and towns to work on applied urban policy problems. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association. He earned his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.A. in Government and Psychology from the College of William & Mary.

Miro Weinberger MPP ‘98 served as the Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, from 2012 to 2024. The longest-serving mayor in the city’s history, Weinberger led significant initiatives that transformed Burlington, earning recognition for his leadership in sustainability, economic development, and public health. Under h