Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems
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Overview
Practical ideas to provide affordable housing to more Americans
Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about political divides and inequality in the United States. But these discussions too often miss one of the most important factors in the divisions among Americans: the fundamentally unequal nature of the nation’s housing systems. Financially well-off Americans can afford comfortable, stable homes in desirable communities. Millions of other Americans cannot.
And this divide deepens other inequalities. Increasingly, important life outcomes—performance in school, employment, even life expectancy—are determined by where people live and the quality of homes they live in.
Unequal housing systems didn’t just emerge from natural economic and social forces. Public policies enacted by federal, state, and local governments helped create and reinforce the bad housing outcomes endured by too many people. Taxes, zoning, institutional discrimination, and the location and quality of schools, roads, public transit, and other public services are among the policies that created inequalities in the nation’s housing patterns.
Fixer-Upper is the first book assessing how the broad set of local, state, and national housing policies affect people and communities. It does more than describe how yesterday’s policies led to today’s problems. It proposes practical policy changes than can make stable, decent-quality housing more available and affordable for all Americans in all communities.
Fixing systemic problems that arose over decades won’t be easy, in large part because millions of middle-class Americans benefit from the current system and feel threatened by potential changes. But Fixer-Upper suggests ideas for building political coalitions among diverse groups that share common interests in putting better housing within reach for more Americans, building a more equitable and healthy country.
1 Housing Sits at the Intersection of Several Complex Systems
2 Build More Homes Where People Want to Live
3 Stop Building Homes in the Wrong Places
4 Give Poor People Money
5 Homeownership Should Be Only One Component of Household Wealth
6 High-Quality Community Infrastructure Is Expensive, But It Benefits Everyone
7 Overcoming the Limits of Localism
8 Build Political Coalitions around Better Policies
[Fixer Upper]…is one of the clearest overviews of America’s housing policy failures and just its housing policies that you’ll find. But reading it, a much deeper argument struck me throughout. This is very much a book about when democracy works and when it fails… what [Schuetz] is saying is that this system, what we often imagine to be the essence of democracy, it is failing and it is failing worst in the places where it often looks to be operating best. It’s a pretty profound set of questions, not just for liberals, but for anybody who thinks about political systems, to grapple with.
This book offers a well-written, well-researched, and insightful analysis of what is not working in housing and land use policies in the United States and how to fix them.
Housing affordability is one of the most important problems facing American families. Using an economic lens, Fixer-Upper presents a clear and compelling diagnosis of today’s housing ills and illuminates the path forward to reach the nation’s goal of decent and affordable homes and strong communities for all.
If you think housing policy is dry and technocratic, Fixer-Upper will convince you otherwise. Jenny Schuetz clearly and succinctly explains how current policies—from local zoning to federal tax policy—contribute to some of the country’s most urgent economic and social problems. Her proposed solutions are both practical and provocative—worthy of serious debate.
This pithy treatise examines the structural inequities in housing, makes a compelling ethical and economic argument that systemic change benefits everyone, and—though she is under no illusion that it will be easy—points the way forward.
While the scope of the book is both broad and incisive, the overall ambition is charged with moral imperative. The term fixer-upper is usually deployed as a marketing tool for a single unit of housing. In Schuetz’s hands, Fixer-Upper is a playbook for a sustainable, just, and humane system
Fixer-Upper offers a good introduction to the economic forces that underlie that problem, and the graduate course is all there in the footnotes. Jenny Schuetz writes in an accessible, common-language style even when she is covering abstruse economic theories.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the [2020] recession…have (yet again) shown that the U.S. housing system is broken and needs to be fixed, as evidenced by the millions of applications to state and local rent relief programs, tens of thousands of evictions and ensuing homelessness, and miles-long lines in front of food banks. Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems presents solutions that should be implemented at the federal, state, and local levels.
Fixer-Upper will be a useful tool for mobilizing the change it advocates. Schuetz’s accessible writing style echoes the book’s content. She wrangles a seemingly intractable issue into a cogent brief, written in plain, disciplined language… a phenomenal introduction for government officials at all levels, civic leaders, students, and the broader public.
Fixer-Upper, the excellent new book from Dr. Jenny Schuetz at Brookings Metro, might be the closest thing there is to a restatement of the current progressively infused “Yes in My Back Yard” (YIMBY) housing movement.... Fixer-Upper is the book I would hand a to a friend who does not study housing but wants to learn. If it becomes a guidebook to the next housing movement, it will not be because Fixer-Upper has all the answers, but because it simultaneously gives the novice a chance to see what is at stake, and the scholar a center around which a whole host of ideas can turn.
- Title: Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems
- Author: Jenny Schuetz
- Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Pages: 210
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780815739296, 9780815739289, 0815739281, 081573929X
- Resource ID: LLS:9780815739296
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T04:18:00Z
Jenny Schuetz is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro. Her research focuses on urban economics and housing policy, particularly how government policies impact housing affordability and economic opportunity.