Emily Hamilton weighs in on whether special zoning districts, which are created to slow gentrification, actually make the housing crisis worse. Listen on Soundcloud.

Emily Hamilton gets to the root causes of the housing supply problem. Listen on Soundcloud.

Emily Hamilton concludes her segment on housing policy. Watch on Vimeo.

Emily Hamilton continues responding to calls from viewers. Watch on Vimeo.

Emily Hamilton takes calls from viewers and responds to their questions and concerns on the topic of housing policy. Watch on Vimeo.

Emily Hamilton discusses the 46th president’s plans for housing policy. Watch on Vimeo.

Demand for housing is high, but the supply remains low. Emily Hamilton has some ideas to fix this situation. Listen on Soundcloud.

Emily Hamilton examines the best practices that would help Tysons achieve its goal of becoming "downtown Fairfax." Read more at Greater Greater Washington.

The DC Metro’s ridership is way down due to the pandemic, and they’re considering cutting service. Emily Hamilton has a better idea. Listen on SoundCloud.

The median house price in Arlington has hit $750,000, and the county wants to bring it down. Fortunately, Emily Hamilton has a few solutions in mind. Read more at InsideNoVa.

Behold the stickplex: a multifamily dwelling built with cheap materials that uses 2,500 square feet of land or less per unit. For jurisdictions aiming at liberalization and housing affordability, stickplexes could be a game changer. Read more at Market Urbanism.

As Tysons expands, city planners seek to balance access to green space with easy walkability. Read more at Greater Greater Washington.

Who says you have to move to the suburbs to raise a family? Read more at Greater Greater Washington.

Emily Hamilton discusses the need for comprehensive reforms in order to increase the supply of affordable housing. 
Read it in Bloomberg CityLab.

Emily Hamilton looks at the successes of the Tysons Corner, Virginia redevelopment project.
Read it at Greater Greater Washington.

Emily Hamilton discusses the redevelopment of Tysons Corner, Virginia and if it is reaching development goals.
Read it in the Washington Post.

Emily Hamilton discusses the Silver Line Metrorail and how it has impacted Tysons Corner, Virginia and the Washington DC area metro system as a whole.
Read more in Greater Greater Washington.

Emily Hamilton discusses the redevelopment plans for Tysons Corner, Virginia and how well the goals are being met.
Read it in Greater Greater Washington.

Emily Hamilton evaluates how two different bills in Virginia could impact the supply of affordable housing.
Read more in Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Policymakers in Fairfax County, Virginia, passed an ambitious redevelopment plan for the Tysons area in 2010, in anticipation of a new Metrorail line, hoping to transform a suburban, car-oriented area into a walkable, transit-oriented downtown. Notably, the plan reformed zoning rules to allow for much more development, especially the construction of high-rise multifamily housing, in this wealthy suburban community on the outskirts of Washing­ton, DC.
In “The Politics of Redevelopment Planning in Tysons and Outcomes 10 Years Later,” Emily Hamilton finds that the Tysons area has been more successful in its progress toward the goal of housing construction than the goal of walkability.
Good Progress Toward the Residential Construction Objectives in Tysons
The shortage of housing in the places

Last week, following a long markup session, the House Surface Transportation Bill passed on a party-line voice vote. The current version has little chance of being adopted by the Senate, but both chambers will have to develop a compromise in order to reauthorize surface transportation spending. The bill includes major increases in transit spending relative to highway spending. But beyond the headline numbers, the marked-up bill includes amendments that would both help and harm urban transportation.
One of these amendments includes language similar to the Build More Housing Near Transit Act, which Representative Scott Peters (D-CA) introduced last year. This language would require the Federal Transit Administration to consider land use policy for the location where transit would be built

Emily Hamilton writes on inclusionary zoning in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
Read it at the Baltimore Sun.

Chair Heretick and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me here today to comment on the important issues of accessory dwelling units and land use regulations more generally. I’m Emily Hamilton. I’m a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where I study housing affordability and land use regulations in the Mercatus Center’s Urbanity Program. Today, I have three key points to make on the issue of preempting local prohibitions of accessory dwelling units:
Restrictions on the right to build housing in Virginia are responsible for high housing costs.
Allowing homeowners across the state to build accessory dwelling units would be an important step toward permitting a relatively affordable type of housing to be built.
State policymakers have an important

Chair Heretick and members of the subcommittee, thank you for again inviting me to speak. In my testimony on HB 151, I covered the problem of housing affordability in Virginia and the role that local land use regulations play in constraining housing supply and causing high and rising house prices. With respect to HB 152, I have two additional points to make:
Allowing duplexes to be built where only single-family homes are currently allowed has the potential to increase the supply of housing in locations where demand for housing is high and to improve affordability.
Preempting single-family zoning is an appropriate step for state policymakers to take.
Housing Affordability and Duplexes
HB 152 would give property owners across the state the right to build two homes anywhere that local zoning

Housing affordability is a serious problem across the country. Nationally, most households in the lowest income quintile are extremely rent-burdened, meaning that they spend half or more of their income on rent. In coastal cities, where land use regulations severely limit housing construction, housing costs are a problem for middle-income households as well. In the Bay Area, even households earning $100,000 will struggle to find housing that costs 30 percent or less of their income in most zip codes.
In response to these affordability challenges in both high- and low-cost cities, local governments have adopted inclusionary zoning programs. These policies require or incentivize developers to designate a portion of new housing units as affordable for households making low or moderate incomes

Until the mid-twentieth century, boarding houses provided a key source of housing for women moving to American cities. They also provided an opportunity for women to earn income by owning and operating boarding houses during a time when they were shut out of many other industries. But since then, zoning rules have outlawed most boarding houses along with other low-cost housing options, eliminating a low rung on the economic ladder for women seeking to begin their careers in urban job centers.
Boarding houses are homes that were built for a single family, or larger purpose-built housing, where guests rent out rooms for a short or long period. You may be familiar with fictional characters who lived in boarding houses, including Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Mattie Ross in

This is the second in a two-part series by Brent Skorup and Emily Hamilton discussing the future of autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise many potential benefits in terms of safety and increasing access to transportation. In an effort to speed the arrival of AVs, some cities are pursuing plans to build "smart streets" that broadcast information about roads and potential hazards to autonomous vehicles. Rather than attempting to design cities to promote AV adoption, cities should recognize that the market for AVs is innovating rapidly and that municipal investments in the industry are likely to be outdated by the time that they’re built. But leapfrogging isn’t the worst potential outcome of smart street investment. Municipal smart streets could further entrench

Emily Hamilton argues that Arlington should deregulate housing development to provide affordable housing.

Emily Hamilton explains why businesses like Airbnb bring net benefits to Maryland in a recent opinion at the Daily Record.
Read it here: Home sharing is a boon to Baltimore

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Ben Carson has put forward a new plan to roll back the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing policy (AFFH). The AFFH is a tool to withhold federal Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), funds meant to improve housing conditions for low- and moderate-income people, from jurisdictions that fail to achieve targets for integrating neighborhoods and city services based on race and income. Carson’s stated goal is to both increase local control of land use planning and improve housing affordability. This may be impossible, however, because local development restrictions have created the affordability problems we have today.
AFFH was designed to expand the scope of the Fair Housing Act, a provision of the Civil Rights Act