Previous Events

The Center’s State of the Nation’s Housing 2022 report, which was released in June, noted that after a record-shattering year in 2021, the housing market appeared to be at an inflection point. In this presentation, Daniel McCue and Alexander Hermann, senior researchers at the Center, will discuss whether and how the housing market has changed since the report was released.

GSD students (and other graduate students at Harvard) are invited to learn about our Center, which advances understanding of housing issues, informs policy, and helps train the next generation of housing leaders.

Housing markets had another record-shattering year in 2021. With demand far outstripping supply, both home prices and rents rose at their fastest pace in decades. Join us for the release of our 2022 State of the Nation's Housing report.

Efforts to improve America's $14 trillion housing finance system should start by candidly identifying the system’s great strengths and its considerable weaknesses and then developing implementable plans that build on the former and address the latter. In his final talk as a Senior Industry Fellow, Don Layton will take on this challenge.

In this talk, Don Layton, former CEO of Freddie Mac and a Senior Industry Fellow at the Center, will discuss the history of the homeownership rate, its decades-long stagnation, and his proposals to increase the rate through well-targeted and sizeable subsidies, including the likely impact on longstanding racial homeownership gaps.

Why are retail vacancies increasing in New York City, and what impacts might a proposed vacancy tax have? In this talk, Erica Moszkowski, a PhD candidate in Business Economics and a Meyer Fellow, will discuss research she conducted with Daniel Stackman, a doctoral student in Economics at NYU Stern.

The share of small (one-to-four unit) rental properties owned by corporate entities has grown steadily over the past several decades, rising from around 3 percent in 1990 to approximately 18 percent in 2018. To date, however, there has been little research into key questions about the types of entities that own the properties and where they are located.

Just as the design of user experience for AI and its related technologies are vital concerns for architects and designers, so too are questions about ethics and AI. In this talk, which will kick off the Center’s symposium on Bringing Digitalization Home: How Can Technology Address Housing Challenges?, Molly Wright Steenson will explore whether AI ethics, in practice and in public, is really about “ethics” and also discuss the role that design can, and has to, play in the decisions about AI and ethics.

At this three-day symposium, leading scholars and experts discussed the nature and extent of technologically-driven changes in housing and whether these changes are likely to further (or hamper) efforts to address economic, social, and environmental challenges, such as housing affordability, discrimination, and climate change.