On Wednesday, June 21, 2023, CHPC hosted its first in-person book club. We were thrilled to welcome Brookings Metro Senior Fellow, Jenny Schuetz, author of Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems. The book lays out a diagnosis of our housing system and prescriptions for local, state, and federal strategies to remedy dysfunction and inequities.
About Jenny Schuetz
Jenny Schuetz is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, and is an expert in urban economics and housing policy. Dr. Schuetz has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on land use regulation, housing prices, urban amenities, and neighborhood change. Dr. Schuetz has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the PBS NewsHour, The Indicator podcast, Vox, and Slate.
About the book
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 that 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.