Affordable Housing: Rent Control or “Abundance”

Housing costs have soared since the global financial crisis, and rents are exorbitantly high in cities like San Francisco and New York. Two rival approaches to this challenge have emerged. Rent control is enjoying a renaissance, with Mayors such as Zohran Mamdani championing hard limits on price increases. An alternative school emphasizes the need to unleash the builders and generate an “abundance” of new housing units. In this panel, we discuss these rival approaches. 

Moderator: 

Dr. Raphael W. Bostic became the 15th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta on June 5, 2017. He retired on February 28, 2026. 
 
From 2012 to 2017, Bostic was the Judith and John Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC). 
 
He arrived at USC in 2001 and served as a professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. His research has spanned many fields, including home ownership, housing finance, neighborhood change, and the role of institutions in shaping policy effectiveness. He was director of USC's master of real estate development degree program and was the founding director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast. 
 
Bostic also served USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate as the interim associate director from 2007 to 2009 and as the interim director from 2015 to 2016. From 2016 to 2017, he was the chair of the center's Governance, Management, and Policy Process Department. 
 
From 2009 to 2012, Bostic was the assistant secretary for policy development and research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In that role, he was a principal adviser to the secretary on policy and research, helping the secretary and other principal staff make informed decisions on HUD policies and programs, as well as on budget and legislative proposals. 
 
Bostic worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1995 to 2001, first as an economist and then as a senior economist in the monetary and financial studies section, where his work on the Community Reinvestment Act earned him a special achievement award. 
 
Bostic graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a combined major in economics and psychology. He earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1995. 

Panelists: 

Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Faculty Director at the NYU Furman Center. Professor Ellen has written numerous peer-reviewed articles related to housing policy, neighborhood change, segregation, and the effects of housing and neighborhood environments on life chances. She is also author of Sharing America's Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press, 2000), co-editor of How to House the Homeless (Russell Sage, 2010), and co-editor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019).  Professor Ellen has served as President of the Association for Public Policy and Management and the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.  She has held visiting positions at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. She attended Harvard University, where she received a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics, an M.P.P., and a Ph.D. in public policy. 

Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson School for International and Public Affairs and a former fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. During more than a decade working in politics, he worked for Democratic members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation. The author of Why Nothing Works and The Vanishing Neighbor, Dunkelman’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Atlantic, and Politico. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught economic theory and urban economics since 1992. He also leads the Urban Economics Working Group at the National Bureau of Economics Research, co-leads the Cities Programme of the International Growth Centre, and co-edits the Journal of Urban Economics. He has written hundreds of papers on cities, infrastructure and other topics, and written, co-written and co-edited many books including Triumph of the City, Survival of the City (with David Cutler) and Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference (with Alberto Alesina). He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Chair of Harvard’s Economics Department. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Econometric Society, and he received the Albert O. Hirschman prize from the Social Science Research Council. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1992.