Previous Events

Node Date

Improving America's Housing Finance System: Strengths to Build On, Weaknesses to Address

Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2022
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.

What Housing Finance Can and Can’t Do to Increase Homeownership

Date: Thursday, April 14, 2022
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.

Can Retail Vacancy Taxes Reduce Storefront Vacancies?

Date: Friday, April 8, 2022
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.

Assessing the Landscape of Corporate Ownership for Small Rental Properties

Date: Friday, April 1, 2022
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.

Bringing Digitalization Home: How Can Technology Address Housing Challenges?

Date: Thursday, March 24, 2022 to Saturday, March 26, 2022
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.

Designing AI Ethics, in Practice and in Public

Date: Thursday, March 24, 2022 to Thursday, March 24, 2022
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.

Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems

Date: Friday, March 18, 2022
The nation’s growing geographic, economic, and demographic divides are reflected in and exacerbated by inequalities in housing markets, argues Jenny Schuetz in her new book, Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems. At this event, Schuetz will discuss the structural problems within US housing systems that contribute to widely disparate outcomes

Have More People Moved During the Pandemic?

Date: Friday, March 4, 2022
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 seemed to reverse a longstanding decline in the share of Americans who move each year. Media narratives painted a picture of a nation on the move, with suburbs, rural areas, and vacation towns inundated with people fleeing dense population centers. But is there evidence of that spike?