David A. Smith Author Archives

Across America, the anti-exclusionary zoning rebellion is in full swing, and like many localized revolutions, it takes revolutionary thinking – like rediscovering the asset class that built 19th-century urban America, which over the last 50 years has become a capital backwater: the family storefront dwelling.

Of the brutal realities of American urban homelessness, there can be no doubt: the problem is out of control, the cities are its front lines, and they are desperate for any action.

For most Americans, the accommodation we all want most to vacate is the hospital: no privacy, noisy with sounds one would rather not hear, hard to sleep, food bland or worse and hideously expensive.

If you work in affordable rent housing, you know from personal experience that some (many?) of your tenants have unreported side hustles—flexible work or overnight guests—the revenue from which helps them pay the bills and keeps them out of eviction.

Homelessness is not a housing problem; homelessness is a symptom and byproduct of a larger underlying problem—the loss of ability to live independently—whose escalating scale exposes the collapse of an overloaded and anachronistic urban behavioral-health infrastructure.

In 1602, clever Amsterdam burghers invented the ancestor of today’s limited partnerships, the Dutch East India Company.

Affordable housing is a byproduct of a pluralistic democratic society; more than that, it is a goal whose pursuit creates and strengthens a pluralistic democratic society in ways that would gladden the heart of Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, Comte de Tocqueville.

A simple principle can have far-reaching consequences when its consistent application exposes policy or outcome inconsistencies taken for granted for decades.

How long does it take to fix an original-sin mistake?

Home is where you choose

In today’s market, a dollar of tax-exempt volume cap that funds affordable housing is more than ten times more valuable than if it funds any other property type.

For just over a third of a century, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ (JCHS) State of the Nation’s Housing has been an annual must-read for its comprehensive, omni-sourced examination of all things housing – and its disciplined just-the-facts-ma’am compilation makes it fertile ground for a guru to discover the invisible drivers of housing.