#  Affordable Housing: Rent Control or “Abundance” 

 



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####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 16, 2026** 

 05:00PM - 06:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Thompson Room, Barker Center**  



 

 [ REGISTER HERE arrow\_circle\_right ](https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/wj633g7) 

 



 

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**, PhD, served from 2017 to 2026 as the 15th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where he was is responsible for all the bank’s activities, including monetary policy, bank supervision and regulation, and payment services, and he served on the Federal Reserve’s chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee. From 2009-2012, Bostic served as the Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for policy development and research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. In that capacity, he led a 150-person interdisciplinary team with his broad expertise in housing, community development, and economic development. For 16 years, he was on the faculty of the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy. At USC Price, Bostic served in many capacities, including as the founding director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast, the chair of the Governance, Management and Policy Process Department, and chair of USC’s Bedrosian Center on Governance. Bostic’s work has appeared in leading economic, public policy, and planning journals.

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 both 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.

**Morris A. Davis** is the Paul V. Profeta Chair of Real Estate and Professor of Finance and Economics at Rutgers Business School, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Real Estate. A leading expert on housing markets, real estate finance, and urban economics, in 2025 Dr. Davis was the Chief Housing Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors to the President (CEA), and earlier in his career he held the James A. Graaskamp Chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board. Dr. Davis is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago and Minneapolis is an independent director of the AGNC Investment Corp. (ticker: AGNC) mortgage REIT and BOXABL, Inc. (ticker: BXBL). Dr. Davis is a sought-after commentator and lecturer on U.S. housing and macroeconomic trends and has been featured in major media outlets such as Freakonomics, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and his influential research, cited over 5,600 times, has been published in top academic journals including Econometrica, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.

**Marc J. Dunkelman** is a resident scholar at the Searchlight Institute and a fellow at Brown University’s Watson School for International and Public Affairs. During more than a decade in Washington, he worked for Democratic members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The author of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back (Hachette/PublicAffairs, 2025) and The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community (W.W. Norton, 2014), Dunkelman’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Politico, among other publications. 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.



 

*This event is part of Harvard University’s ongoing efforts to advance free inquiry.*



 

 

 



 

 

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