Inclusionary housing (IH) ties the creation of affordable, below market-rate units with new development, and it is known to help address the affordable housing crisis and build inclusive communities. Yet, the absence of a national IH database limits our understanding of the prevalence, practice, and production of inclusionary housing in the U.S., and it creates barriers for further investigation and development of this affordable housing strategy. This study draws a national census of IH programs in the U.S. Through a comprehensive data collection between 2018 and 2019, a total of 1,019 local IH programs are documented in 734 local jurisdictions of 31 states and the District of Columbia. This study summarizes program design nationwide and features distinct patterns in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, where state laws largely impact program adoption and production. A subset of 258 programs reported producing about 110,000 inclusionary units, and 123 programs have collected close to $1.8 billion in fees for affordable housing development.

Opportunity assessments have served as crucial tools for advocacy and policy-based action to address variability in spatially distributed urban opportunity. However, despite the vast body of theoretical and normative frameworks for discerning the effects of space, the current practices of opportunity mapping do not provide grounded assessments of differences that disproportionately affect the poor and racial minorities. We analyze seventeen opportunity assessments from the last twenty years and find issues of construct validity, implicit racial bias, and limited interpretability of outputs. More importantly, symptomatic outcomes of historical marginalization are conflated with problems of material access in poor and minority neighborhoods.

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