Publications : Briefs

The District of Columbia Housing Monitor provides a quarterly look at the Washington, D.C., housing market, tracking home prices, real estate listings, new construction, and affordable housing. This issue's special section examines mortgage lending trends through 2005 and highlights the declining share of low income home buyers in neighborhoods throughout the city.

Gentrification presents a quandary for government officials and urban planners concerned about the welfare of low-income families. How can policymakers encourage development in depressed urban neighborhoods without pricing out their residents? The existing strategies—doing nothing, mandating rent control, subsidizing rental housing, decreasing barriers to building low-cost units, and promoting homeownership by low income families—are all problematic. By creating a market for rent options or insurance against rising rental costs, policymakers could preserve housing for low-income people while giving them a stake in improving their neighborhoods. Such financial instruments can also insure builders, preserving and increasing development of affordable housing.

The District of Columbia Housing Monitor provides a quarterly look at the Washington, D.C., housing market, tracking home prices, real estate listings, new construction, and affordable housing. This issue's special section, "Who Owns the Neighborhood?" examines ownership of residential and nonresidential property in the city's wards and neighborhoods by different types of private and public owners.

Social Security's projected financial shortfall has spurred discussions about increasing the age at which workers can first receive retirement benefits. This brief examines the future distributional impacts of raising the retirement age by about three years. Raising the retirement age hits lower-income workers less hard than other groups because the disability program provides some protection. However, it still increases poverty rates. Combining the retirement age change with an enhanced minimum benefit increases lifetime benefits for the lowest earners and substantially cuts the Social Security deficit without significantly increasing poverty rates.

The prime mortgage market largely fueled America's first housing burst after World War II. Low- and moderate-income households, largely excluded from this earlier movement, are getting swept into the second housing boom. This brief details how homeownership has again expanded, this time fueled by the development of the subprime market. Rising interest-payment burdens for many subprime borrowers, however, might mean delinquencies and foreclosures.