NYU Furman Center

Job alert❗ ❗ The NYU Furman Center is hiring. The NYU Furman Center is looking for a Director of Data Strategy & Operations to help us conduct vital research on some of New York City’s most pressing urban policy challenges. The Director will join our dynamic team as a thought leader, and be responsible for identifying, updating, cleaning, visualizing, and analyzing a number of datasets related to housing, zoning, real estate, health, education, and other urban policy-focused issues. An ideal candidate will have at least three years of full-stack data experience, as well as leadership, creative problem-solving, effective team-building and mentoring skills. Apply here ➡ https://lnkd.in/euefd4uJ #jobs #datajobs #researchjobs #housingjobs #academicjobs #housing #data #research

Housing Choice Vouchers can be an effective tool for housing low-income people—but too often, the program is undermined by landlords who discriminate against tenants trying to pay with vouchers. On Thursday, July 25th at 2 pm EST, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Policy Development & Research will host a hybrid event on “source of income discrimination” and local and federal efforts to prevent it. NYU Furman Center’s Housing Solutions Lab’s Executive Director Martha M. Galvez will join an esteemed panel of  researchers, municipal and state government officials, and fair housing practitioners who will share their insights. Register today for the discussion 👇 https://lnkd.in/embAUJbF #hud #hudevents #housingchoicevouchers #sourceofincome #incomediscrimination #discrimination #housing #vouchers

America’s climate crisis and housing crisis are intertwined. The federal government has committed resources to tackling these crises through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). How can communities access these funds and maximize the money’s impact locally? The NYU Furman Center’s Housing Solution Lab and the Climate and Community Project will host a free webinar July 30 at 2 p.m. ET on how communities can use the IRA to advance climate and housing goals. Joining the Lab will be Ruthy Gourevitch, Housing Policy Manager at the Climate and Community Project think tank and Sarah Ralich, Senior Energy and Construction Manager at innovative nonprofit developer ACTION-Housing, Inc. Register today below 👇 https://lnkd.in/eFbcDZ-F #climate #housing #communities #funding #ira #sustainablehousing #housing #climatecrisis

NYU Furman Center faculty directors Vicki Been and Ingrid Gould Ellen offer six principles to guide policymakers as they try to create a housing strategy that will continue to welcome a diversity of new residents and to help them climb the economic ladder via Vital City https://buff.ly/4coAwWa The first principle is flexibility. The cities that will thrive in the future are those that can reinvent themselves in the face of remote work and other unforeseen challenges to come. The second principle is openness to growth and change. Leaders should focus on making it easier to build more, and more varied, housing overall and investing heavily in means-tested, subsidized housing that can ensure some level of diversity even in the face of rapid appreciation. The third key principle is generality. The task of providing more housing —and more affordable housing— can’t fall to just a few neighborhoods, as it is now. Efficiency, fairness and political viability depend upon every community district doing its part to provide more housing. The fourth principle is equity. We must end exclusionary and unfair land use policies, reduce the city’s high levels of segregation and boost homeownership among households of color. A fifth principle is targeting the neediest. We need to focus on the lowest-income households (in part because they won’t directly benefit as much as others from new building). The final key principle is thoughtful cost control. The City needs a comprehensive and sustained all-hands-on-deck strategy to reduce the costs of developing and operating residential buildings and stretch tax dollars further. Housing affordability is key to a vibrant and sustainable future for New York. While the roots of some of the challenges are national, and even global, there is much the City can do. While the city has changed in myriad ways over the decades and centuries, one constant has been its wonderfully open doors.

Register here for the free CoreData webinar on Thursday, July 11, 2024, at 10 a.m. ET. You will learn how to use CoreData tools to understand and analyze current housing and neighborhood policy issues in New York City, as well as how to use new features.

A new study published in Housing Policy Debate finds that policies like Massachusetts Chapter 40B—a fair share policy that streamlines the permitting process for housing developments with affordable units—may be valuable complements to other major housing programs in the United States. Opening up neighborhoods that offer greater opportunities for social mobility to low- and moderate-income households remains a challenge in the United States. Exclusionary zoning practices act as a barrier to current efforts by restricting the supply of affordable housing. Focusing on Massachusetts Chapter 40B, they find clear evidence that fair share policies that seek to bypass restrictive zoning practices build affordable housing in neighborhoods with greater opportunities for social mobility. Read the paper by Hector Blanco, a former postdoctoral research fellow at the Furman Center here:

The NYU Furman Center would like to give a special thanks to our sponsors , for their generous support of our By The Numbers: The Use of Housing Choice Vouchers in NYC launch event for the release of our annual State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods report on May 21. Their generous support directly funds the work of our talented Graduate Research Assistants, who meaningfully contribute to every critical part of our State of the City. Students take responsibility for everything from analyzing data, updating our Neighborhood Data Profiles, building new interactives, communicating our findings, and of course, fundraising and executing our event. We would not be able to achieve our work without their valuable contributions. This year's State of the City Graduate Research Assistant Team: Tony B., Peter Estes, Clara Smith, Will Viederman, Junyi Li, Camille Préel-Dumas, Daria Guzzo, Shannon Flores, MPA-PNP, Danya Rubenstein-Markiewicz, Yael Gonzalez Meiler, Benjamin Hitchcock, and Chloe Fauber-Lyle. Thank you again for supporting our vital work during the city’s continued affordable housing crisis. Read our full report ➡ https://lnkd.in/dkpjQEd #newyork #newyorkcity #housing #affordablehousing #housingcrisis #research #data #housingchoicevouchers

Panelists at the NYU Furman Center’s State of the City launch event on May 21 discussed the challenges of administering a federal voucher program and proposed a range of solutions to improve its function—including expanding housing supply, offering more operational flexibility for localities, strengthening protections against discrimination from landlords, and coaching people as they navigate the program so they are empowered to move into new neighborhoods. "We need an all-of-the-above approach,” said Solomon Greene, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who spoke at a breakfast reception before the presentation and panel. “The crisis of affordable housing is too great for us to be fighting for little pieces of the solution.” Read NYU Furman Center's Benjamin Hitchcock and Yael Gonzalez Meiler's article on the panel 👇 https://lnkd.in/emtP3AeK #newyorkcity #vouchers #housingvouchers #housingchoicevouchers #data #research #affordablehousing #housing #housingcrisis

The high level of closing costs has been placed onto housing policy’s front burner by two recent events. First, President Biden recently highlighted that “anti-competitive” closing costs are worsening the already strained levels of homeownership affordability, specifically calling out title insurance. Second, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) was recently found liable in a class-action lawsuit for undermining price competition to maintain the long-standing 5 to 6 percent brokerage commission, the single largest closing cost. This new article by Donald H. Layton, Senior Visiting Fellow at the NYU Furman Center, examines the unusual concentration of closing-related transactions – of which brokerage and title insurance are just two – where prices are unnecessarily high due to the suppression of normal price competition to determine its root cause. Surprisingly, the issue is not simply that price competition in closing-related products has been subverted, as this was historically common in many industries. Nor is it a lack of reform proposals to re-establish price competition. Rather, the root cause has been the long-running blocking of reforms to reinstate price competition in housing and mortgage markets, which contrasts with other industries where such reforms have instead been successfully implemented in past decades. This blocking has been enabled by extensive political advocacy and lobbying, especially aimed at elected members of Congress and state legislatures, and stands out for how effective it has been. Fortunately, there is evidence that the decades-long track record of such blocking being so effective may finally be coming to an end. The upside would be that closing costs overall could decrease by at least one-third, and potentially even by half. This could significantly increase affordability, especially for FTHBs, and make housing transactions generally more cost-effective for both buyers and sellers. Read more here:

A new article by Don Layton, Senior Visiting Fellow at the NYU Furman Center, examines the unusual concentration of closing-related transactions – of which brokerage and title insurance are just two – where prices are unnecessarily high due to the suppression of normal price competition to determine its root cause. Surprisingly, the issue is not simply that price competition in closing-related products has been subverted, as this was historically common in many industries. Nor is it a lack of reform proposals to re-establish price competition. Rather, the root cause has been the long-running blocking of reforms to reinstate price competition in housing and mortgage markets, which contrasts with other industries where such reforms have instead been successfully implemented in past decades. This blocking has been enabled by extensive political advocacy and lobbying, especially aimed at elected members of Congress and state legislatures, and stands out for how effective it has been. Fortunately, there is evidence that the decades-long track record of such blocking being so effective may finally be coming to an end. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/erQtGe6h