Edwin A. Stromberg
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Office of Policy Development and Research

The recently released U.S. Housing and Development (HUD) report, “Why Not in Our Community?”: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing, has found that over the past 13 years many of the regulatory barriers originally documented in the 1991 report, “Not in My Backyard”: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing, still exist and may have worsened. The new report identifies how discriminatory, exclusionary, and unnecessary regulations continue to constitute barriers to affordable housing in communities throughout the United States. Because few significant and lasting improvements have occurred over the past decade, HUD realized that effectively addressing and redressing these barriers would require a concerted, nationwide, multifaceted effort.

Confronting the challenge of such an effort, HUD made a major commitment to barrier removal by launching the American Affordable Communities Initiative. Under this initiative, the Department assumed a leadership role in working with states and local communities to identify strategies to reduce regulatory barriers and mitigate their impact. The initiative’s ambitious agenda includes working with governments, local housing groups, associations, and housing advocates on strategies for reducing regulatory barriers, including model regulatory approaches and systems; encouraging a public/private partnership to develop state and local coalitions and policies that can reduce barriers at the state and local level; and ensuring that the federal government, and HUD in particular, gets its own “house” in order by working to remove or reduce federal barriers to housing affordability. As part of this initiative, the Department is developing and implementing efforts to disseminate best practices, building coalitions interested in reducing barriers, reducing barriers at the federal level (particularly at HUD), and continuing to conduct and support much-needed research into regulatory barrier issues. Consequently, the initiative calls for working with HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) to coordinate a large research effort to better understand the impacts of regulatory barriers and assess the success of strategies aimed at reducing them.

In seeking to craft an effective regulatory barriers research strategy, we in PD&R realized the first order of business was to assess the state of play of regulatory barriers research in this country. Although useful research on regulatory barriers certainly has been undertaken, the research typically is small in scale, narrowly focused, and intermittent. Moreover, only a small part of the potentially large research community has been engaged in regulatory barriers research. Consequently, the amount of sound, policy-oriented research has been disproportionately small compared to the seriousness of the problem.

An integral component of any such effort is sound, credible, persuasive research pinpointing the harmful impacts of these barriers on the affordable housing needs of communities and helping to point the way to overcoming these barriers.

To carry out this review and assessment of the state of play of regulatory barriers research, PD&R sponsored a meeting of the leading researchers to review what is known and what needs to be known about regulatory barriers research for such research to have a meaningful policy impact. This meeting, the Research Conference on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing, convened on April 22, 2004, in Washington, D.C.

By all measures, the Research Conference on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing achieved its objectives. The presenters’ articles in this issue of Cityscape shed considerable light on what is known and offer a clear roadmap for future research endeavors; the commenters’ articles in the Appendix sharpen and embellish the guidance for an effective regulatory barriers research agenda. Moreover, the introductory and wrap-up articles by Professor Michael H. Schill and the policy reflections of Jeffrey M. Lubell neatly summarize and frame the state of knowledge and the directions that regulatory barriers research can fruitfully take. We firmly anticipate that this volume can and will serve as a blueprint for much-needed research on this important issue.

For all those who contributed to this volume—the article writers and presenters, the commenters, the moderators, and other discussants—we extend our thanks and appreciation.