Alex Schwartz

Alex Schwartz is Professor of Public and Urban Policy at the New School. He holds a doctorate in Urban Planning and Policy Development from Rutgers University. Professor Schwartz’s research centers on housing and community development, including public housing and other affordable housing programs, mixed-income housing, and fair housing. While most of his research has focused on housing issues in the United States, he has also studied housing policy in the United Kingdom, and has consulted for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).

Professor Schwartz is the author of Housing Policy in the United States: 4th Edition (Routledge, 2021). He is co-author with Rachel Meltzer of Policy Analysis as Problem Solving: A Flexible and Evidence-Based Framework (Routledge second edition 2025). His research has appeared in such journals as Cityscape, Economic Development Quarterly, Housing Policy Debate, Housing Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, the Journal of Urban Affairs, and the Journal of the American Planning Association. In addition, he served as the Managing Editor for North America for the international journal Housing Studies from 2010 to 2020.

Professor Schwartz is Director of the New School's Urban Policy Lab, in which teams of graduate students advise government agencies and nonprofit organizations on a wide array of policy and management issues. He also teaches Policy Analysis, and Housing Policy. In the spring of 2019 New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Professor Schwartz to the city's Rent Guidelines Board, which determines maximum rent increases for nearly 1 million units of rent stabilized housing.

Housing affordability has finally come to the fore of public discourse. For decades, millions of renters have struggled to afford their homes, and millions more have lacked the income and assets to purchase a home. Yet the lack of affordable housing has only recently become a front-burner issue. More often than not, the nation’s housing affordability challenges are framed as a consequence of a housing shortage. I will show that housing is intrinsically unaffordable to low-income households, and that increasing the supply would at best make for marginal improvements in the affordability situation. Any far-reaching solution to the nation’s housing affordability crisis will require a big increase in subsidy—both for renting and buying homes.