New York City once set the standard for subsidized housing. The city started out building and maintaining tens of thousands of apartments for working families, sponsoring job training and social programs. It ran a budget surplus. [...] Now the Village is like a gated playground for runaway wealth. Subsidized apartments all across town are converting to market-rate rentals and condos faster than City Hall can build affordable units or preserve old ones. — nytimes.com

But if L.A. is going to remain a creative capital, its civic and cultural leaders are going to need to do more than offer really great talk about how great we are...This can start with the Otis Report on the Creative Economy...If this report is to be more than just a feel-good data dump, it could use some solid recommendations on how L.A. compares to other cities culturally and how we might improve the situation for artists and cultural organizations, both small and large. — Los Angeles Times

Americans living in rentals spent almost a third of their incomes on housing in the second quarter, the highest share in recent history. Rental affordability has steadily worsened, according to a new report from Zillow, which tracked data going back to 1979...While mortgages remain relatively affordable, landlords have been able to increase rents because demand for apartments remains strong. The U.S. homeownership rate fell to the lowest level in almost five decades in the second quarter. — Bloomberg

Melbourne is now a more expensive place to live than New York. The increasing cost of living, and in particular, the cost of housing risks seriously undermining the city’s liveability.

Plan Melbourne, the new metropolitan strategy for the city, recognises that housing affordability is one of the pressing issues facing Melburnians. The strategy offers a set of concepts aimed at shaping the city’s future and – the government hopes – addressing housing affordability and choice. — thisbigcity.net

We cannot rely on visionaries and authoritarians to generate more, and better, housing. They might deliver, with enormous risk and perseverance, through personal connections and their willingness to invest their own equity or to defer their developers’ fee, as BHC has done. But visionaries and authoritarians are few and far between. Rather, we need to formalize ways of rethinking and requantifying net-to-gross, studio-to-three-bedrooms, block-and-plank formulas. — urbanomnibus.net

The study from UCLA's Ziman Center for Real Estate shows that the average renter in Los Angeles, which has the highest percentage of renters in the country, devotes 47 percent of his or her paycheck to rent. [...]

It's the latest depressing news about L.A.'s rental market, and it comes with a twist: affordability is not a new post-recession problem, but one that has been getting worse for decades.

“Our studies show a severe housing burden among poor renters has existed since 1970 — scpr.org

Cars offer more than just convenience: they can give lower income Americans an economic leg up. [...]

While tracking households that had participated in two federal housing voucher programs, [a study] found that car owners were twice as likely as transit users to find jobs and four times likelier to retain them. Car-owning households were also able to locate near better neighborhoods and schools. This reaffirmed previous work ... arguing that car ownership plants the seeds for upward mobility. — thedailybeast.com