A version of this story, authored by Carol Jackson, originally appeared on the Sanford School of Public Policy website on April 10, 2025.
The price of housing has skyrocketed in recent years. Scholars estimate we are short between two and five million homes nationwide. Warren Lowell spent the last several years immersed in American housing policy as part of his PhD studies at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. For one study, he interviewed real estate developers and investors. He joins Sanford interim Dean and DUPRI Scholar Manoj Mohanan on a podcast to talk about what he learned.
Conversation Highlights
Responses have been edited for clarity.
ON THE ORIGINS OF THE HOUSING SHORTAGE
Coming out of the housing crisis of the late 2000s, production hasn't been able to keep up with the growing population. When slowdowns happen, like they did in 2008, 2009, 2010, we weren't able to come back from that. We are now developing housing at a rate that's pretty healthy, but it's below where we need it to be because of the slowdowns in the late decades.
ON THE LACK OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING BEING BUILT
In the US, most if not all development, with very few exceptions, laws and regulations for development are set by municipalities. In cities like Durham, for example, the local government creates zones based on what housing or types of development they want to see in different areas.
Inevitably, these policies also were created to, at least in part, reinforce patterns of segregation that we were seeing in cities. We know that multifamily housing is cheaper than single-family housing, in particular because you're renting versus buying. Zones that allowed for multifamily housing were sited in locations that had higher concentrations of Black residents, higher concentrations of other populations that were being discriminated against within the market.
Those zones have largely actually continued to today. Most of the land outside of city centers is only zoned for single-family homes. These are really nice bundles of goods for people who can invest in them and grow their wealth, but most urban scholars think of them as pretty inefficient when it comes to land usage.
ON HOW LOCAL GOVERNMENTS MIGHT SPUR MORE AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Much of my dissertation work takes place in Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina. I make the argument that these are rapidly-growing cities that are disproportionately facing higher incremental costs in housing for consumers. Across the three cities that I studied where I was interviewing real estate investors and developers, they each passed laws that changed their zoning in some way (that helped spur affordable housing).
For example, in Charlotte, where there was once only allowable single-family homes, triplexes were suddenly allowed. If you were an investor buying and selling properties and suddenly you had the option to build a triplex, it might be in your interest to then go on and build three units instead of one.
In Durham, similar but different laws got passed. In particular, one (law) allowed for developers to subdivide land (where they could) take one plot and turn it into two, (and then developers) could build two homes instead one. These are the kinds of policy tweaks that cities are trying to tool around with to encourage higher density, and to encourage more housing production.
Warren Lowell is a scholar of urban sociology, housing policy, population science, and child wellbeing.