The YIMBYs are coming, to the suburbs
Fed up with the hostile reception to new development in Franklin, Frongillo and a group of other residents formed what was once a rare breed of advocacy organization in Boston-area suburbs: a pro-housing group, whose members go to public meetings to say yes to more housing development, instead of no. Katherine Einstein, a Boston University researcher who has studied housing politics in Massachusetts, said the new advocacy groups can wield a lot of influence. Even showing up at public meeting to speak in favor of projects is helping to offset longstanding dynamics that have shaped decisions about local housing policy.
A BU Class Tackles the Massachusetts Housing Crisis
Not-so-fun fact: if you plan to stay in Boston after BU, it could take you nine years to save enough to buy a starter home. That’s if you’re coupled. Stay single, and you can quadruple that wait. The depressing numbers, from a study by real estate news and research site Point2, testifies to Massachusetts’ affordable housing crisis—one of the topics of this spring’s College of Arts & Sciences political science class Urban Politics and Policy. Several students taking the course, taught by Katherine Levine Einstein, a CAS associate professor of political science, focused their final project on ground zero in the state’s housing wars, Milton.
The Homevoter Hypothesis: A New Generation Gap?
We know that older people vote more than younger people and that homeowners vote more than renters; but are older homeowners, as a class, overrepresented in local elections? Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, Ellis Hamilton, and Ethan Singer analyzed the intersections of age, race, home tenure, and election scheduling to find out, publishing their findings as The Gray Vote: How Older Home-Owning Voters Dominate Local Elections.
Who Represents the Renters?
Katherine Levine Einstein finds that renters are starkly underrepresented by a margin of over 30 percentage points — a gap that persists across a variety of institutional and demographic contexts.
The complexities of gentrification and its planetary dynamics
An international conference about gentrification gathered scholars, activists, and practitioners to discuss worldwide urban changes displacing poorer residents to develop upscale areas.
CISS Affiliates Testify in Support of New Massachusetts Law Incentivizing Towns Along Public Transportation
Two global trends collided in 2023: the warming of the atmosphere and the growth of urban areas. Phoenix, Ariz., the fifth-largest city in the US, reached 110 degrees on 31 consecutive days. Heat-related hospitalizations spiked and people burned themselves on scorching asphalt. Texas, home to several of the country’s largest and fastest-growing cities, experienced the second-hottest summer ever, leading to a BBC headline that asked if the Lone Star State could “become too hot for humans.”
Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick: Defensible space
In Episode 26/3 of A is for Architecture, Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick speak about their book, Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice, published with Wiley in 2022. We discuss a few of its themes, including the emergence of the concept in America with Oscar Newman and others, its transference to Britain and its articulation and deployment by geographers, architects and policymakers, not least Alice Coleman, in the later twentieth century.
Episode 33: Neighbourhood Defenders
Today, we welcome Dr. Katherine Einstein, Dr. David Glick, and Dr. Maxwell Palmer from Boston University. We discuss their book: Neighbourhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis; published in 2019. The book is premised on how local political inequalities can end up limiting the housing supply and contribute to the current housing crisis. Participatory institutions like local neighborhood committees often notify neighbours themselves and solicit comments on proposed housing developments, taking an active role for better or worse.
Geography Colloquium: Loretta Lees, Boston University
In this talk, Professor Lees will discuss Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice co-authored with Elanor Warwick (RGS-IBG Book Series, Wiley, 2022). She will evaluate the geographical/spatial concept of Defensible Space, which has been influential in designing out crime and has been applied to housing estates in the UK, North America, Europe, and beyond.
There are even fewer affordable apartments in Massachusetts than we thought, according to new data
A new, publicly-available database is backing up what many frustrated Massachusetts residents already know: the state’s shortage of affordable housing is even worse than previously known. The data dashboard was released Tuesday by the nonprofit group Housing Navigator Massachusetts, which also runs an online search tool intended to help renters find affordable housing options.