About the Podcast
UCLA Housing Voice is a podcast hosted by UCLA Lewis Center’s Shane Phillips, housing initiative manager, and co-hosted alternately by professors Mike Lens, Mike Manville, and Paavo Monkkonen. Research on housing affordability, displacement, development and policy is a fast-moving field, with important implications for policy and people. But research findings don’t often get shared with those beyond academia. In every episode, our hosts talk to a different housing researcher to help make sense of their work and how it can be applied in the real world.
Meet the Hosts

Shane Phillips

Michael Lens

Paavo Monkkonen

Michael Manville
Episode Summaries and Show Notes
Episode 41: Shared-Equity Homeownership with William Cheung and Kelvin Wong
Shared-equity homeownership programs help people afford a home, but the flipside of paying back the government when you sell leaves people with less money to buy their next home, so many end up stuck in place or back on the rental market.
Episode 40: Valuing Black Lives and Housing with Andre Perry
Why are homes in Black-owned neighborhoods undervalued? What role can — or should — homeownership play in closing America’s massive racial wealth gap?
Episode 39: The Intertwined History of Class and Race Segregation in Housing with Laura Redford
Using early 20th century Los Angeles as a case study, Laura Redford discusses how developers used a combination of restrictive covenants, the judicial system, and advertising to build a divided city.
Episode 38: The Supply-Migration-Income Relationship with Peter Ganong
It no longer makes sense for many lower-income households to move to states with higher-paying jobs — after accounting for housing costs, some are actually worse off when they do so. Peter Ganong joins us to discuss his research into the relationship between land use regulation, housing supply, household migration, and income.
Episode 37: Public Housing and Tenant Power in Atlanta with Akira Drake Rodriguez
A deep dive into the complex history of Atlanta’s public housing program, especially the tenants — overwhelming Black, and disproportionately women-led — who organized and built political power.
Episode 36: Rent Control in India with Sahil Gandhi and Richard Green
Usually, cities with lots of vacant housing have slow rent growth (or low rents), while lower vacancy rates are associated with higher rents. So why do many Indian cities have an unusual, seemingly paradoxical problem: high vacancy rates and high rents?
Episode 35: Landlord Regulation and Unintended Consequences with Meredith Greif
How do we respond when regulations intended to help vulnerable tenants end up disadvantaging them even further? Professor Greif joins us to discuss these unintended consequences, asking us to consider the trade-offs inherent in many of our policy decisions.
Episode 34: Right to Eviction Counsel with Ingrid Gould Ellen
Advocates argue that providing free legal representation to tenants would reduce evictions — a policy known as “right to counsel” or “universal access to counsel”. Ingrid Gould Ellen discusses the impacts of this policy in New York City, the first U.S. city to adopt it.
Episode 33: Housing Transfer Taxes with Tuukka Saarimaa
In recent years, many cities have turned to real estate transfer taxes, which are assessed when properties are sold or otherwise change ownership, to generate additional government revenue. Professor Saarimaa discusses the benefits and drawbacks of transfer taxes.
Episode 32: Chile’s “Enabling Markets” Policy with Diego Gil
The positive and negative impacts of Chile's policy that reduced the government's role in housing provision and delegated more authority to the private sector.
Episode 31: Inclusionary Zoning with Emily Hamilton
Emily Hamilton of the Mercatus Center on how IZ programs have impacted homebuilding and housing prices in the Washington, D.C. region.
Episode 30: Skyscrapers with Gabriel Ahlfeldt
London School of Economics' Gabriel Ahlfeldt on how skyscrapers influence the built form and what's their appeal to residents and workers.