The Section 8 voucher program enables low-income residents to rent homes in the private market while receiving financial assistance to keep their housing affordable. Unfortunately, voucher holders are more likely to live in high poverty areas, and the traditional formula used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) may be partly responsible. HUD sets Section 8 limits, known as Fair Market Rents (FMRs), based on the 40th percentile rent of each region. As a result, vouchers cannot be used in the more expensive parts of metropolitan areas where most of the rental units available are more expensive than that regional limit. HUD is now experimenting with recalculating the FMRs at the ZIP code level in select cities to correct this imbalance. These new geographic areas would be known as “Small Area Fair Market Rents” (SAFMRs).

This brief summarizes findings from the project, which evaluated this HUD policy by calculating if a set of for-rent listings across California are accessible to a voucher holder under the current FMRs limits and again under the proposed SAFMRs limits. The rental listings, from a proprietary source, include data from 2012 and 2013. This brief focuses on results for the Sacramento Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Sacramento, Placer, and El Dorado Counties.

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This report examines the ability of existing and proposed affordable housing policies to align with sustainable transportation goals in California. First, the authors compare the ability of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), Redevelopment and inclusionary funded projects to locate in neighborhoods with transit access to employment versus market rate production in the same period. The authors find tax credit funded units outperform market rate production with respect to job accessibility via transit, and the authors attribute this to the scoring criteria of California’s tax credit allocating body, the Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC). However, the authors find this may have come at the cost of concentrating new affordable housing in areas with higher poverty rates. At the federal level, the authors measure how a change in the determination of maximum payouts for Section 8 housing vouchers, known as Fair Market Rents (FMRs), alters the ability of voucher holders to access transit and jobs rich neighborhoods. The results show that changing to “Small Area” FMRs, which are determined at the ZIP code scale, dramatically improves voucher holders’ access to jobs rich neighborhoods. This benefit comes at the cost of nearly eliminating voucher accessibility in neighborhoods that are currently accessible. And finally, at the state level, an analysis is conducted to determine if California’s emphasis on promoting affordable housing in transit and jobs rich neighborhoods is increasing the cost of affordable housing development. The modeling results indicate that affordable housing near transit stops is not significantly more expensive, but that costs increase slightly for projects in jobs rich neighborhoods. Participation in the state’s Transit Oriented Development (TOD) housing program does not significantly impact costs. The results of this research are intended to inform policy makers at every level of government on how best to continue to integrate transportation and housing policies without sacrificing the primary purpose of affordable housing policies: to house people.

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California taxpayers have supported more than a billion dollars of bonds to support affordable infill housing in neighborhoods with access to rail transit. The cost of constructing subsidized affordable housing in California has significantly increased over the past several years, leading the Legislative Analyst’s Office to conclude that the state’s affordable housing construction programs alone cannot solve the state’s housing crisis.

There has been limited analysis of the interactions between policies that prioritize affordable housing development in transit- and jobs-rich neighborhoods and the cost of affordable housing in general. To better understand this interaction, this project studied the key drivers of affordable housing production costs across four regional metropolitan areas in California: Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), and Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). This brief summarizes the findings of that study.

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The realization of on-demand organ and tissue availability could yield a benefit to global health comparable to the curing of cancer, unleashing the full potential of modern transplantation science without its current geographic, socioeconomic, and technical limitations. However, a seemingly simple scientific problem has thus far restricted this reality: our inability to preserve organs outside the body for extended periods of time.

Generally, in order to arrest the metabolism of an ex vivo biologic and prevent it from expiring, one must reduce its temperature to well below the freezing point of water (its principal material component). However, the formation of ice within complex vascularized systems proves catastrophic, and thus a wonderfully fundamental puzzle emerges: How can we prevent water from freezing, when equilibrium thermodynamics demand that it should freeze? Over the past 70 years, efforts to address this question have taken an overwhelmingly chemical approach. However, techniques driven by the use of cytotoxic non-physiological cryoprotectants to modulate freezing point has not yielded clinically-relevant advancements at the whole-organ scale to date, and thus a fundamentally different approach is needed.

This thesis presents theoretical and experimental explorations of an alternative, non-chemical approach to cryopreservation based on the rich and unexplored thermodynamic and kinetic behaviors of water and ice confined under isochoric (constant-volume) conditions. We herein develop fundamental analytical tools with which to probe isochoric phase equilibria and nucleation kinetics across volumes; reveal critical consequences of water confinement at the micro- and macroscales; experimentally demonstrate previously unrealized phase behaviors in isochoric systems in stable equilibrium, metastable equilibrium, and non-equilibrium scenarios; provide initial biological validation of isochoric cryopreservation with whole mammalian organs and tissues; and evince the additional value of isochoric freezing processes in the food industry. We develop several distinct isochoric techniques for varied preservation applications and generate baseline thermodynamic data for each, which, alongside the biological results reported herein, we hope will serve as a foundation from which the community may further advance the unique domain of isochoric freezing.