Economic Prosperity and Housing Affordability in the United States: Lessons from the Booming 1990s

The United States is facing an acute shortage of reasonably priced housing with over 35% of households paying more than 30% of their income for housing costs in 2015. As the U.S. economy recovers from the Great Recession, will housing become less unaffordable as incomes rise and households could potentially pay a lower share of their income for housing costs? To see if this is likely, I examined the change in housing affordability in the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States between 1990 and 2000, a period of exceptional economic prosperity. I used the percentage of housing cost-burdened households (those that pay more than 30% of their gross income on ownership or rental costs) as a measure of the availability of reasonably priced housing. I used discriminant analysis techniques to detect statistically significant differences in the percentage of cost-burdened households in the 100 MSAs based on a variety of factors. I found that despite the phenomenal economic prosperity of the 1990s, about 30% of households were cost-burdened both in 1990 and 2000. High MSA median income was correlated with a greater shortage of reasonably priced housing. Neither economic growth rate nor poverty rate nor population growth rate distinguished high-shortage MSAs from low-shortage ones. Large MSAs and MSAs in the West had greater shortages than other MSAs. Economic prosperity did not alleviate the problem of lack of reasonably priced housing in the past, and is not likely to do so in the near future. Planners and policy-makers need to enact new policies at local, regional, state, and federal levels to effectively address America’s chronic affordable housing shortage.     

Defining Mediator Knowledge and Skills

A two-year collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and advisers from the major national organizations of mediators produced a job analysis relevant to mediators involved in interpersonal disputes (i.e., divorce, community, formal parent-child mediation, etc.). One byproduct of the job analysis is an extensive list of the knowledge areas and skills important to effective job performance. This essay defines the knowledge and skill areas that emerged from the analysis.     

On ensuring the availability of evaluative data for secondary analysis

This paper is based on a programmatic effort to elicit and reanalyze data stemming from the evaluation of social programs. The stress is on identifying problems and negotiating for data and analyzing it. This includes: researchers' reluctance to disclose data for documentation and data control systems; vague or nonexistent policy for assuring access. The possible solutions presented here are based on governmental regulation and policy for publicly supported evaluation.Individuals who kindly provided their reactions to earlier drafts of this paper and/or advice and information in other ways include: Ole Engberg, John Evans, Harold B. King, Sheldon Laube, William Madow, Richard Marciano, Margaret E. Martin, Keith Marvin, Marjorie Powell, Alice Robbin, Peter Rossi, Lee Sechrest, Ernst W. Stromsdorfer, and Frederick Mosteller. Not all their reactions and criticisms have been accommodated, and we alone bear responsibility for the opinions registered here.Development of this paper has been supported by NIE Contract C-74-0115. All unpublished documentation discussed here is on file at the Methodology and Evaluation Research Division (Lucina Gallagher, Librarian).