According to the Plan: Testing the Influence of Housing Plan Quality on Low-Income Housing Production

Darrel Ramsey-Musolf

doi:10.3390/urbansci2010001

Abstract

For more than 20 years, scholars have assessed a plan’s content to determine the plan’s quality, with quality serving as a proxy for planning efficacy. However, scholars rarely examine the relationship between a plan’s quality and the plan’s intended outcome. Thus, it is unclear whether quality influences planning outcomes or even advances equity. To close this gap, this study assessed a non-random sample of housing plans from 43 cities in California’s Los Angeles and Sacramento regions to observe how cities accommodated low-income housing needs and to observe whether each plan’s quality influenced low-income housing production. The analysis indicates that the plans identified 42 different planning tools to accommodate low-income housing needs, and nearly 60% of the implementing objectives proposed construction programs. Quality is influential after the city’s location, land-use, population, and the plan’s compliance with state housing law are taken into account. In summary, quality illuminated how these cities accommodated low-income housing needs and, in conjunction with other city conditions, quality influences low-income housing production. Due to this non-random sample, this study calls on planning scholars to subject quality to more empirical tests on planning outcomes in other areas to increase quality’s importance in scholarship.

Highlights

After more than 20 years of studies, is there any evidence indicating that a plan’s quality has any influence on the plan’s intended outcome? Quality is a descriptive method that scholars use to assess a plan’s content
This review focuses on housing mandates and their influence on low-income housing production
The dominance of the special needs households (SPN HH) suggests that the planners adhered to fair-share proportions because the sample’s overall audience proportions synchronized with the sample’s overall housing allocation

Summary

Introduction

After more than 20 years of studies, is there any evidence indicating that a plan’s quality has any influence on the plan’s intended outcome? Quality is a descriptive method that scholars use to assess a plan’s content. Communicative, incremental, and/or mediation approaches, as well as the breadth of studies extolling scholars to improve plan quality discourse [1,2], there is no evidence to date that planning practitioners consider quality an important planning approach. Perhaps this lack of evidence is because scholars rarely test the influence of quality on outcomes, because to do so would require a more stringent analysis [3]. Quality is a method with which scholars assess a plan’s content against an organized and subjective criteria that epitomizes planning theory or implements best practices [2] The scholar might interview planners in order to triangulate the quality assessment

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion