Alan Mallach
Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress and the National Housing Institute, is the author of many works on housing and planning, including Bringing Buildings Back, A Decent Home, and Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective. He served as director of housing and economic development for Trenton, New Jersey, from 1990 to 1999, and teaches in the City and Regional Planning program at Pratt Institute.
Is the Solution to Homelessness Obvious?
Some say yes. But simply making it easier to build will not reach those who are unhoused.
Densifying Suburbs Is the Better Path to Housing Affordability
Alan Mallach responds to critiques of his assessment of urban versus suburban upzoning.
More Housing Could Increase Affordability—But Only If You Build It in the Right Places
Building more units has been touted as the solution to the housing crisis, but the location of those units may be just as important as the number.
Skating the Surface of Gentrification
A review of Newcomers: Gentrification and Its Discontents, by Matthew L. Schuerman.
Rents Will Only Go So Low, No Matter How Much We Build
Why doesn't market rate housing seem to bring rents down to where the lowest income people can afford them?
What Is the Future of the Black Urban Middle Neighborhood?
What does the future hold for urban Black middle and working class neighborhoods in cities, and is there any way to shape it?
Whose Affordable Housing Crisis?
Being priced out of appreciating neighborhoods is not the housing affordability problem most Americans face. But they are facing one.
The Two Vacancy Crises in America’s Cities
Vacant properties are a serious problem in two kinds of neighborhoods. To address them, we need to know which kind we’re looking at.
What Future For America’s Small Cities?
These books not only offer something of a window on what is—or is not—going on in small cities, but useful pointers for practitioners working in the types of cities described.
The Fate, and Power, of Cities: A Review of The New Localism
The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak. Brookings Institution Press, 2018, 304 pp., $25.99 hardcover, also available on e-book.
Purchase a copy at brook.gs/2LOjunA
Lots of Maps, Little Insight in Richard Florida’s Latest
The New Urban Crisis treats a complicated and demanding subject with depressing inadequacy, offering little or nothing in the way of constructive, creative insights or strategies for advocates or practitioners seeking to combat these trends.
Housing and The “Flyover” Mentality
Right around the New Year, an article by Wired’s Emily Dreyfuss popped up on one of my newsfeeds titled, “The Middle Class Can’t Afford...
Myths and Realities About Cycles: Avoiding the Inevitability Trap
About a year ago I wrote a post about Paul Krugman and whether building luxury housing could mitigate the...
Malign Neglect? Urban Policy in the Trump Era
To paraphrase physicist Niels Bohr, (or maybe it was Yogi Berra), “predicting is difficult, especially when it’s about the...
How Not To Do Economic Development
Camden is one of the most distressed cities in the United States, and if any city needs state help...
Does Place Matter Anymore? Cities and the 2016 Election
I’m not the only one, I suspect, who’s been struck by how little, if at all, cities have figured into the 2016 presidential election up to now.
Millennials, Revisited
As both Joe Cortright of the City Observatory and I have written, Millennials—people who have reached adulthood since the beginning of the millennium—and...
Don’t Build Mixed-Income Communities, Buy Them
Building when you could buy is inefficient—and contributes to economic segregation.
Canada Is Looking Better and Better (The Regent Park Story)
High-density public housing may seem like an idea whose time has come and gone, buried along with the ruins of notorious projects like St....
Using the Wrong Tools to Build Affordable Housing
Along with most Rooflines readers, I believe that having some portion of a community’s housing as long term or permanently affordable is a desirable...