Building Better Affordable Housing

Abstract

There remains a widely-held belief that affordable housing of various types, and under various federal programs, lowers neighboring property values. However, recent methodological improvements seriously undercut this conclusion. While gaps in the research remain, there is now a clear path for how future research in this area should proceed, and a better understanding of which forms of affordable housing might be more positive. This paper serves primarily as a review of the literature, with some conclusions about how the data impacts housing policy.