Although housing costs in greater Boston and elsewhere around the region have leveled off, affordable housing is still high on the public policy agenda in every New England state. A growing chorus of employers and policymakers are warning that the region's high cost of housing is now undermining its ability to attract and retain workers and businesses. This paper presents a thorough, region-wide analysis of the housing affordability problem in New England. We construct three affordability indicators to examine differences in the cost of housing across socioeconomic, demographic, and occupational groups, for every New England state and for the region's principal metropolitan areas.We find that owner-occupied housing is often not affordable, particularly in southern New England, and the problem is getting worse over time. In contrast, New England's rental housing is expensive relative to the rest of the nation, but incomes are high enough that rentals are still affordable to most New Englanders. However, the lack of affordable owner-occupied housing is a problem for both middle-income and very lowincome households. Households headed by young professionals can afford to purchase median homes in New England, but not as easily as they used to, and not as easily as in most rival metropolitan areas. At the same time, the very low-income are being squeezed by falling household incomes coupled with rapidly appreciating prices for houses at the lower end of the price distribution. Finally, fewer rental and owner-occupied units are actually available to the very low-income than in the past because households with higher incomes are moving down the housing distribution in order to secure shelter. Finally, we summarize the strategies New England governments have adopted to address the problem. These policies attempt either to increase the ability of households to rent or purchase a home or to increase the supply of affordable units. Supply-side strategies are likely to be particularly critical in improving housing affordability given the sluggish growth in the region's housing stock over the past decade.

New England's villages and seacoast, its character and characters, attract producers of movies, television shows, commercials, and other film and video projects. But such work is not just about lovely scenery-it is also about business. Because production costs help determine where such projects are made, five of the six New England states now provide tax credits or other financial incentives to attract producers to film on location. This policy brief discusses whether these incentives attract more production, and whether they are costeffective in creating jobs. It focuses on the use of one major incentive: film tax credits. The little evidence available suggests that film tax credits do attract film production and create jobs in states that have little or no film industry. However, they also cost states considerable foregone tax revenue. The film production stimulates little additional economic activity in other industries. Consequently, film tax credits do not "pay for themselves" by indirectly generating additional corporate income, sales, and property tax revenues. Evidence on the benefits of film tax credits to states with a large film industry already in place, such as New York, is too scant to enable analysts to draw firm conclusion. As more evidence becomes available, policy analysts and policymakers should evaluate the cost-effectiveness of film tax credits relative to alternative policies designed to promote job creation and economic growth. They should also take into account the economic effects of measures needed to offset the revenue losses incurred by film tax credits in order to maintain balanced budgets.