Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships. 

It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the San Francisco Bay Area.

The report is essentially a response to the debate around whether increasing market-rate housing production alone can address affordability and displacement concerns, or whether the only way to do it is through subsidized housing. What they found was that both matter, but…

“What we find largely supports the argument that building
more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will
reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized
housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement
than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate
development is important for many reasons, including
reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing
large segments of the population. However, our analysis
strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even
more important when it comes to reducing displacement of
low-income households.”

If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend reading the full brief. It’s only 12 pages. I particularly liked the information around filtering and how new housing steps down over time to ultimately serve lower-income households.