My good friend Taya Cook (of Urban Capital) and her development partner Sherry Larjani were featured in the New York Times today as a result of their Reina project and their remarkable efforts to gender balance the male-dominated commercial real estate industry. I am thrilled that their work is getting the attention that it deserves.
Here's an excerpt:
That’s because, despite progress in many other professional realms, women remain severely underrepresented in real estate development and investment, particularly in senior roles.
Women held just 4 percent of senior investment roles at major real estate firms, according to a widely circulated 2011 study, and their numbers have improved only “marginally” since, said the study’s author, Nori Gerardo Lietz, who is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and a longtime real estate investor.
The Penn Institute for Urban Research has just launched a new initiative called, Cities and Contagion: Lessons from COVID-19. The inaugural piece is a special edition of its Urban Link publication. But going forward, the initiative is planned to include not only publications, but a resource library, convenings (online and offline, when appropriate), and research projects. The objective is to bring together experts from different disciplines to discuss the impacts of this pandemic on cities, as well as the possible responses going forward. You can find the first set of articles, here. Some of the contributions include, "Agglomeration economies are not going away" (Jessie Handbury) and, "There's no substitute for cities" (Richard Voith and Susan Wachter). The titles alone should give you a taste of what you can expect from this first publication.
Ms. Lietz reviewed the senior ranks of 82 major real estate investment firms for the study, as well as many more private equity and venture capital firms, and found that women were noticeably absent from the most highly paid, “touch the money” jobs.
There's a lot of debate within urbanist circles about whether or not supply alone can solve or at least mitigate housing affordability concerns. Richard Florida and others will say that, while beneficial, increasing supply isn't the be all end all. We need to be building affordable housing.
Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and others have, on the other hand, argued that middle-income housing is a supply problem and that low-income housing is quite simply a demand-side problem, which could be solved through things like a housing voucher program.
In other words, the cost of housing isn't necessarily the problem, it's the low income levels. One of the benefits of supplementing people's incomes is that it empowers mobility. People can then move to where there are jobs, as opposed to being tied to a specific neighborhood or city.
But this debate is arguably just about the extent of the supply benefits. Intuitively, it makes sense to try and match new housing supply with demand and economic growth. But how far can that take us, particularly in high demand and high productivity cities?
Glaeser (Harvard) and Gyourko (Penn) have a relatively recent paper out called, The Economic Implications of Housing Supply, which looks at, among other things, the "implicit tax" imposed on development as a result of land use restrictions and other supply constraints.
Here are two excerpts:
We will argue that the rise in housing wealth is concentrated in the major coastal markets that have high prices relative to minimum production costs, and it is concentrated among the richest members of the older cohorts—that is, on those who already owned homes several decades ago, before binding constraints on new housing construction were imposed.
But in a democratic system where the rules for building and land use are largely determined by existing homeowners, development projects face a considerable disadvantage, especially since many of the potential beneficiaries of a new project do not have a place to live in the jurisdiction when possibilities for reducing regulation and expanding the supply of housing are debated.
If you're interested in this topic (and sufficiently nerdy), you can download a PDF copy of the paper here.
