Submission to special issue of Journal of the American Planning Association: The Future(s) of Housing

Researchers in urban housing and community development face significant challenges in evaluating the success of efforts to improve urban neighborhoods, and identifying underlying theories that might predict the success of future initiatives. Practitioners in this field confront political considerations, restrictive administrative guidelines and limited funding. In the face of these challenges, prescriptive decision models have the potential to improve policy responses to challenges such as affordable housing, race and class segregation, ineffective and/or inequitable economic development, and urban sprawl. We first review previous research in these areas across multiple disciplines and identify important limitations and modeling opportunities. We then describe recent work on tools and methods to assist policymakers to design effective and sustainable housing and community development strategies. These strategies are based on explicit values of maximization of social welfare and social equity and use best-available evidence regarding impacts of housing and community development policies on program participants and non-participants. Our discussion is animated by a case study of a hypothetical affordable housing policy initiative for a diverse metropolitan area that we analyze from three perspectives. The first is a long-ter