Ideas For Better Housing Code Enforcement

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of housing: an increasingly difficult quest in the contemporary urban United States, where crime, urban blight, and continuing capital decay undercut the advantages of city living. The American dream has moved to the suburbs; the nightmare of our cities prompts new recognition both in the president's cabinet and the college curriculum. The editors of this book have updated their acclaimed earlier collection, providing new introductory articles; new papers, such as, Discrimination in Housing Prices and Mortgage Lending, A Summary Report of Current Findings from the Experimental Housing Allowance Program, Alternative Mortgage Designs and Their Effectiveness in Eliminating Demand and Supply Effects on Inflation; and a new bibliography of the literature. Additional chapters focus on differing strategies for improved urban housing and renewal by providing concrete suggestions for distributing existing resources and allocating new funding. The bibliography provides the best single guide to the current literature on housing. Housing Urban America, in this new edition, is an important guide to those students and scholars fascinated by the essential questions of adequate housing: its social costs, and the source of the revenues to provide it.

The so-called housing problem is not national; it is local. Municipalities practice exclusionary zoning that prevents cheap, multifamily housing from being built. Municipalities initiate strict building-code enforcement campaigns that often result in the closing of single-room-occupancy hotels and other cheap housing in inner cities. And municipalities impose rent control -- the surest way to produce a housing crisis. William Tucker examines the history of such municipal actions in several California communities and concludes that zoning and rent control restrict the supply of affordable housing. In cities with rent control there is an ongoing war between landlords and tenants; lawyer-tenants exploit blue-collar landlords through tricky legal procedures, and landlords torch their unprofitable, unsalable buildings. Rent control and zoning are products of the tyranny of the majority that prevent people from exercising their right to buy and sell in a free market. Zoning, Rent Control and Affordable Housing is a must read for anyone worried about making affordable housing available to all Americans.

Considers. S. 2331 and H.R. 10079, to provide for repair by D.C., at owner's expense, of buildings violating D.C. housing regulations, and to make tenants evicted from unsafe and unsanitary buildings in D.C. eligible for relocation payments. S. 3549, to amend provisions of the Act establishing a code of law for D.C., approved Mar. 3, 1901, relating to landlords and tenants. S. 3558, to require the publication of names of owners of rental property in D.C. which is used for residential purposes.