Berkeley Planning Journal

Affordable housing often, these days, appears to occupy a low rank on the planning agenda. Emergent issues such as climate change and the obesity crisis, along with the various solutions that planning proposes for them, seem to take up much of the available planning communication bandwidth. Indeed, with a widespread foreclosure crisis in the United States and drastically depressed housing prices in much of the world, many have come to see housing affordability as a less urgent concern than it once was. But Nico Calavita and Alan Mallach, editors of Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture, shine a spotlight on a quiet revolution that has sought to integrate affordable housing provision directly into the planning system. Although inclusionary housing arose four decades ago in a few high-cost pockets of the United States—principally in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland—the practice has, as Calavita and Mallach show, spread worldwide since then.