Federal Incentives, State Preemptions, and Local Politics: Implementing Inclusionary Housing Policies in India and the United States

Abstract

Cities around the world are experiencing increasing affordable housing shortages and socio-economic segregation. To encourage integrated and inclusive production of affordable housing, cities are increasingly turning to market-led housing strategies such as inclusionary housing. Inclusionary housing (IH) policy requires or incentivizes market housing developers to designate a certain percentage of units as income-restricted units. IH policies have strong supporters and opponents, given their underlying redistributive principles. IH literature has so far focused on how national governments in countries such as the U.K., the Netherlands, and American states like New Jersey and California have encouraged local IH policy adoption through legislation and dedicated funding. But what happens when federal governments cannot legislate IH policies and state governments oppose them? How do local regime politics shape IH policy design and implementation? How then do the federal, state, and local level actors and priorities come together in implementing IH policies? This dissertation responds to these questions by examining IH policies in diverse structural and sociopolitical settings that have so far been ignored in IH policy scholarship. Four papers informed by a total of 111 semi-structured interviews, extensive document analysis, site visits, archival research, and participant observation of public meetings, nuance the importance of federal and state roles in local IH policy implementation in India and the United States in different case contexts. These cases offer valuable insights into the politics of urban regimes, alternative IH mechanisms, and intergovernmental relations between multiple levels of governments, the civic sector, and developer associations. This dissertation contributes to urban politics and governance literature by demonstrating the need for studying local initiatives within multi-level governance systems. The first paper focuses on India, where the federal government has no direct legal mandate for IH policy. The paper reviews the success of alternative tools employed by the federal government by examining Andhra Pradesh state’s response to federal IH reform initiatives. The second paper discusses how states and cities creatively leverage federal housing grants while evading federal IH intent through detailed cases of federal affordable housing projects implemented in Vijayawada city, Andhra Pradesh state. The third paper discusses the importance of the state policy environment on local planning and housing policies and offers an analytical framework to categorize the range of state-IH policy positions. It specifically discusses three states – Oregon, Texas, and Tennessee – that have a history of explicit legislative restrictions, called ‘state preemptions’ against city IH policies. The fourth paper focuses on three cities that faced state IH policy preemptions – Austin, Texas, Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee – to investigate how state restrictions impact local IH policy and their subsequent policy choices. The concluding chapter reflects on the similarities and dissimilarities of IH policy experiences in the U.S. and India and offers ideas for exchange. The four papers collectively situate IH policies within a comparative intergovernmentalism framework and provide new dimensions to our understanding of IH policies by problematizing the related political, structural, ideological, and social issues.