A Blog With a View

Let me start by describing my current street view: rows of lush, attractive streets lined with luxury buildings standing cheek by jowl with crowded and poorly constructed housing, abandoned properties, oversubscribed shelters, and large numbers of people who simply do not know where their next bed is located. I am watching urban growing pains unfold not in Bangkok or Bangalore but in Boston's South End, where three decades of gentrification have threatened the neighborhood's long history as a mixed-income melting pot and epicenter for the city's Puerto Rican and gay communities. A casual glance down Washington Street catches both the greatest challenges U.S. housing policy faces and some of the most promising solutions to the availability crisis of affordable housing that has perpetuated so much economic inequality. The notion that access to housing is a problem reserved for planners and policymakers in the developing world ignores the reality that we face in this country every day. This blog is a place to discuss policies that create more sustainable, attractive affordable housing options, to share exciting projects and partnerships that are cropping up around the country, and examine laws (from the admittedly formative and inexperienced viewpoint of a stressed law student) that are shaping and redefining how we plan our cities and suburbs and how we live while inching towards the goal of affordable housing for all those in need.