An older white man with a full gray beard.

Alan Mallach

79 Posts

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.
Housing

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 to Live In Cities Anymore.” My […]

Neighborhood Change

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 effects of gentrification. For whatever reason, I just noticed one of […]

Policy

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 future.” One would think even more so, looking at this subject, […]

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 to build its economy, it’s Camden. While the state of New […]

The 2016 election: Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

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.

Neighborhood Change

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 their in-migration, are largely driving the changes […]

A white three-level building.
Housing

Don’t Build Mixed-Income Communities, Buy Them

Building when you could buy is inefficient—and contributes to economic segregation.

Housing

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. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe and Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. Since […]

Housing

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 policy goal. That said, though, I’ve […]

Housing

The REAL Rental Housing Issue

We know a few things about the majority of very low-income renters: They live in private market housing, not tax credit projects or public housing. They receive no housing subsidies. […]

A fenced lot on a city street.
Housing

Even Homer Nods: Paul Krugman Gets It Wrong on Housing

As the saying goes, even Homer nods. Paul Krugman must have been having an off day at the end of November 2015, when he devoted his op-ed column in The […]

Homeownership

Do Urban Neighborhoods Need Homeowners?

At a conference I attended last week, one of the speakers, a colleague whose judgment and knowledge I respect, offered his take on the future of urban single family neighborhoods. The lower income families who have the credit and can get together the down payment to become homeowners are buying in the suburbs. People working […]