Alex Horowitz

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SAFE & AFFORDABLE: LEGALIZING TALLER SINGLE-STAIR APARTMENT BUILDINGS
Speakers: @alexhrwtz.bsky.social, co-author of the Pew Charitable Trusts groundbreaking research on the observed safety of modern single-stair buildings in the US, & yours truly

27 Million Fewer Car Trips: Life After a Year of Congestion Pricing How life has changed in the New York area, according to data on traffic, transit and the responses of 600 readers.

A reminder that one year in, congestion pricing has clearly been a successful policy: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Missing in the middle of WA's middle housing: Elevators A bill still in play in the Washington Legislature would make elevators easier and less expensive to install in "middle housing" developments.

"During the 15 years I was a renter, I never found a single accessible apartment in a building with fewer than six stories. This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a design failure dictated by Washington state’s outdated codes." www.seattletimes.com/opinion/miss...

High-End Construction Really Does Help Everyone A new rung at the top of the housing ladder permits people lower down to climb up.

new from me: a story about VACANCY CHAINS, the idea that underlies the argument that more housing is good even if you can't afford it www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The bill cuts the stretcher requirement in small bldgs at risk of having no elevator at all (up to 6 stories, 24 units), as well as ordering the building code council to reconsider the issues of elevator hoistway opening protection and two-way visual comms. Tens of thousands in savings per building.

The hidden double standards driving our housing crisis Apartments are safer and more affordable than single-family homes. Why do we treat them like a hazard?

"But in the US, a morass of construction codes, fire safety requirements, utility rules, and even tax policies, treat even small multifamily buildings fundamentally differently from the way they treat single-family homes." Nice to see the great work of @alexhrwtz.bsky.social and Pew in @vox.com.

Apartments are banned on 95% of residential land in Virginia, and they’re banned on large swaths of commercial land too.

Episode 106: Mortgage Lending Standards with Kevin Erdmann (Incentives Series pt. 8) - UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies We built too much housing in the mid-2000s, right? Kevin Erdmann says no, explaining how this misunderstanding is at the root of unaffordability today.

Today on UCLA Housing Voice, I talk with @kevinerdmann.bsky.social about about the mid-2000s housing market pre-crash, resulting changes in federal mortgage lending standards, and their catastrophic effects on homeownership, rental affordability, and production. www.lewis.ucla.edu/2026/01/21/1...

My takeaway here is that new housing is just way safer than older housing for so many reasons. If your number one concern in housing policy is fire safety, you should be way more concerned about getting people out of old housing than about making marginal fire safety improvements to future housing.

gr8 research by @pewtrusts.org (@alexhrwtz.bsky.social + Seva Rodnyansky), Bethel Cole-Smith + Daniel Muhammad, @evan-mast.bsky.social, Limin Fang + Emi Kim + @justintyndall.bsky.social

Building housing ⬇️housing costs 4 people across the income spectrum
(ty @tinysnekcomics.bsky.social 4 the comic)

Update: This bill directing HUD to develop a model single-stair code was amended in House Financial Services committee yesterday to allow six stories instead of five, and it passed committee as part of the Housing for the 21st Century Act!

Condos are an affordable homeownership option, but they're rarely built in CA. A major reason is the construction defect liability, which creates excessive legal threats disincentivizing construction.

@muhammadspeaks.bsky.social from @cayimby.bsky.social explains

www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/12/17/1...

Consultants contracted by Minnesota found that an eight-story single-stair building with 6,000 sq. ft. per floor (building 4) has dramatically lower fire risk than a same-height code-compliant two-stair building with a larger floor plate (building 1) www.dli.mn.gov/sites/defaul...

Thanks, Shane! It was great to talk about fire safety in multifamily housing, and I think the whole incentives series has offered really valuable framing for how to think about housing in the context of tradeoffs and well-being.

good listen w/ @alexhrwtz.bsky.social

also - need to revisit the data with the thousands of single stair buildings @stephenjacobsmith.com and i learned about in brooklyn a few weeks ago

Great piece. Very compelling and so sad.

And this GAO report offers a quantitative estimate of the relationship between rents and homelessness: www.gao.gov/products/gao...

How Housing Costs Drive Levels of Homelessness A new analysis of rent prices and homelessness in American cities demonstrates the strong connection between the two: homelessness is high in urban areas where rents are high, and homelessness rises w...

We didn’t attempt to quantify but the directional relationship between supply and demand-> rent -> homelessness is clear: www.pew.org/en/research-...

Mayor Alyia Gaskins speaks at a podium before a packed audience in a large hall during VOICE’s Homes for All Assembly.

Close-up of a glass award reading “Commonwealth Housing Coalition — Pro-Homes Caucus Member. Committed to leading on tackling Virginia’s housing shortage, reining in costs, and ensuring homes for all.”

Today I spoke at VOICE’s Homes for All Assembly about the urgency of our housing shortage. We must build homes for all incomes, ensure every level of government plays its part, and use our power to unlock housing and protect stability for everyone in Alexandria.

I can't stop thinking about this. We're pursuing zero fire risk in multifam, while tolerating much more in single-fam. People respond by building and living in single-fam, where they're exposed to not only one of the highest fire death risks in the developed world, but also TONS more car crash risk

Love this new report on buildings' relative fire safety from @alexhrwtz.bsky.social and Pew colleagues.

www.pew.org/en/research-...

Thanks! The fire-fatality disparities were wild. Fire-death rate 18x higher in pre-1970 single family than post-2010 apartment. But only new apartments (and occasionally townhouses) are getting stopped by fire-safety concerns.

Pew finds something that everybody in codes and standards knows but few will say out loud: we apply far stricter fire safety standards to apartments than to houses. www.pew.org/en/research-...

Episode 98: Elevators with Stephen Smith (Incentives Series pt. 2) Elevators in the U.S. and Canada cost 3–5x as much as in other high-income countries. Stephen Smith explains how our well-intentioned standards make cities less safe and accessible.

In part 2 of our series on misaligned incentives in housing policy, the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast speaks with @stephenjacobsmith.com about the high cost of elevators in North America, and the negative consequences for affordability and accessibility. www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/09/24/9...

Well said. And this research shows why reforms like Colorado's are crucial. Regional housing supply drives local rents 4x more than supply within a municipality, so statewide reforms are necessary--there's just no way to get to widespread affordability solely through local action.

And one more... regional housing supply drives local rents 4x more powerfully than supply within localities on average, so state laws to allow more homes are absolutely necessary to improve housing affordability, even when some localities act.

And the converse is also true. Rents have been falling fastest for older, naturally affordable (Class C) apartments in metro areas that have added the most housing.

New Housing Slows Rent Growth Most for Older, More Affordable Units The nationwide housing shortage has driven rents up more in low-income neighborhoods than in the U.S. overall, but in areas that have recently added large amounts of housing, rents have fallen the mos...

Turns out there's no tradeoff between housing abundance and affordability for low-income renters- the opposite in fact. Rents have risen 10 pts more during the shortage in low-income neighborhoods than high-incomes ones. www.pew.org/en/research-...

The bills are:
Apartments in all commercial areas in cities
Small-lot starter homes in cities
Office to residential conversions in cities
Strong limits on protest petitions
Single-stair
Expanding where factory-built housing can be used
Curbing college-town limits on roommates

Pew Applauds Texas Lawmakers for Passage of Much-Needed Housing Legislation WASHINGTON—The Pew Charitable Trusts today commended the Texas Legislature and Governor Greg Abbott (R) for enacting a suite of seven bills passed with bipartisan support and designed to improve housi...

Texas has raised the bar, putting up probably the single most impactful legislative session for housing this year with 7 bipartisan bills. Pew's statement outlining them here: www.pew.org/en/about/new...