Event Description

More jobs and more affordable housing are top social goals. There is also a desire to remedy traffic congestion, environmental damage and the budget strain associated with wasteful and expensive infrastructure duplication associated with urban sprawl. This short course examines solutions to common economic incentives that inadvertently promote sprawl, economic decline (unemployment), inflated housing prices, and involuntary displacement (both gentrification and demolition by neglect). 

Surprisingly, public infrastructure intended to facilitate development can motivate sprawl and decline.  This “infrastructure conundrum” happens because well-designed and well-executed infrastructure inflates the price of well-served (prime) sites.  High land prices chase development away to cheaper, but more remote sites (sprawl).  Likewise, policies and programs intended to assist distressed communities can lead to higher land prices (rents) and the displacement of the intended beneficiaries. 

In rust-belt cities, housing tends to be cheap by national standards.  Yet, because of closed factories, many people in these cities are unemployed.  For the unemployed, even a cheap house can be unaffordable.  In Silicon Valley, the economy has been booming.  Yet there, households earning six-figure incomes have difficulty finding decent affordable housing.  It appears that we are on a “jobs-housing hamster wheel” where improvements in employment and income are offset by increases in housing prices.

Finally, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, local economies are suffering and government revenues are drying up.  The need to generate economic recovery without additional spending (or additional revenue losses) is paramount to community wellbeing.

This course  addresses the market forces responsible for the “infrastructure conundrum,” and the “jobs-housing hamster wheel”.  Participants will learn innovative and effective  policy solutions that can promote economic recovery without additional public spending or loss of revenue.  Attendees will learn that HOW we collect public revenue is just as important as HOW MUCH revenue we collect.

Receive a GWU School of Engineering and Applied Science 

Professional Education Certificate