Yonah Freemark is Principal Research Associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. He leads Urban's practice area on Fair Housing, Land Use, and Transportation. He has written extensively in the media, including for CNN, The New York Times, Planning, CityLab, Next City, and Vital City; he also founded the national website The Transport Politic. Yonah is a member of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) Social Science Advisory Board. He is a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute.
Freemark is an urban planning scholar whose work centers on a single animating question: how do local governments, operating within fragmented, multi-level systems of authority, shape the outcomes of transportation, housing, and land-use policy—and who benefits or loses as a result? Across two decades of peer-reviewed scholarship, Urban Institute reports, and journalism, Freemark returns repeatedly to the tension between local political control and broader societal goals like affordability, equity, and environmental sustainability. His research is comparative by instinct (frequently setting the United States against France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), empirical in method (relying on original datasets, geospatial analysis, and quantitative causal-inference techniques), and consistently attentive to the mechanisms—zoning codes, municipal veto power, subsidy design, metropolitan governance structures—through which local political conflict translates into concrete, unequal outcomes on the ground. Whether the topic is zoning reform in Chicago, the location of subsidized housing in Paris, the politics of transit investment, or the regulation of autonomous vehicles, Freemark's work asks how institutional structure and local political preference interact to produce winners and losers in metropolitan life, and it does so with an eye toward actionable policy reform.
Freemark graduated from Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture. He received masters’ degrees in city planning (MCP) and transportation (MST) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in 2013. He received a PhD in urban studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020. Between 2008 and 2010, Freemark researched community engagement processes in Paris, where he studied the planning and construction of the Rive Gauche project, a model for neighborhood involvement in development decision-making. He worked at Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) as an associate and project manager between 2013 and 2016.
Yonah also maintains a directory of historical plans for the redevelopment of Durham, North Carolina.
Detailed Research Summary: Yonah Freemark
1. Zoning, Land Use Regulation, and Housing Supply
A central thread of Freemark's scholarship examines how zoning and land-use regulation shape housing production, prices, and demographic patterns, and how difficult it is to answer these questions rigorously. His review article "Zoning Change: Upzonings, Downzonings, and Their Impacts on Residential Construction, Housing Costs, and Neighborhood Demographics" (Journal of Planning Literature, 2023) synthesizes the empirical literature on zoning changes, concluding that upzonings tend to modestly increase construction and downzonings tend to suppress it, but that effects are highly context-dependent. He has pursued this question empirically in his own quasi-experimental work, most notably "Upzoning Chicago: Impacts of a Zoning Reform on Property Values and Housing Construction" (Urban Affairs Review, 2020), and its companion study, "Downzoning Chicago: How Local Land Use Policy Has Reduced Housing Construction and Reinforced Segregation" (with George Kisiel, Findings, 2025)—together showing the construction and demographic impacts of Chicago's zoning system. His recent journal article, "The Paradox of Housing Supply Growth: Conservative Sprawl and Liberal Infill in the 21st-Century United States" (Housing Policy Debate, 2026), extends this line of inquiry nationally, examining how housing production patterns diverge along political lines between sprawling growth in conservative-leaning regions and infill development in liberal ones.
Freemark has also worked to sharpen the conceptual and methodological tools available to housing researchers. "What Is a Housing Shortage?" (Housing Policy Debate, 2025) interrogates how the term is defined and measured, arguing for more precise, multidimensional approaches rather than a single national vacancy-rate metric. With Christina Stacy and coauthors, "Land-use reforms and housing costs: Does allowing for increased density lead to greater affordability?" (Urban Studies, 2023) offers a systematic review of density-reform evaluations. This research agenda continues through numerous Urban Institute reports, including "Bringing Zoning into Focus" (a parcel-level analysis of zoning's relationship to affordability and segregation in Connecticut, with Lydia Lo and Sara Bronin), "Homing In: What Types of Municipalities Are Adding Residential Units," and the interactive feature "Cracking the Zoning Code," as well as place-specific studies of the Puget Sound, Washington State, and the Central San Joaquin Valley, California.
Freemark frequently connects this empirical work to advocacy for federal and state-level reform. In "How Federal Policymakers Can Promote Affordable Housing Production in Exclusionary Communities" and related Urban Wire pieces, he argues that federal and state governments have underused tools—funding conditionality, technical assistance, mandates—to counteract municipal exclusion. His co-authored book chapter "Rethinking local regulations governing housing production" (with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Jenny Schuetz, in A Research Agenda for US Land Use and Planning Law, 2023) situates this applied work within a broader academic research agenda for the field.
2. Affordable Housing Policy, Politics, and Comparative Housing Systems
Freemark's dissertation research and subsequent scholarship probe why affordable and subsidized housing ends up located where it does, and how local political control shapes that geography. "Politics in affordable housing provision: How partisan control of local councils influences planning choices" (Urban Studies, 2025) uses French municipal data to show that the partisan composition of local government directly affects affordable housing siting decisions. This builds on his earlier comparative article with Justin Steil, "Local power and the location of subsidized renters in comparative perspective" (Housing Studies, 2022), which contrasts the U.S., France, and the U.K. to show how differing degrees of local versus central authority shape where low-income households end up living. His Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper, "Mandating Access to Affordable Housing, City by City: Is France's Fair-Share SRU Law a Model for U.S. Metropolitan Areas?" (2021), examines whether France's mandatory affordable-housing quota system offers lessons for American fair-share housing policy, a theme he revisited in an Urban Wire post "Lessons from France for Creating Inclusionary Housing by Mandating Citywide Affordability."
A second strand of this work addresses the practical challenges of building and financing affordable, mixed-income, and mixed-use housing. "Challenges in the Creation of Mixed-Use Affordable Housing: Measuring and Explaining Its Limited Prevalence" (Housing Policy Debate, 2018) quantifies just how rare mixed-use affordable projects are and why. With Tarsi Dunlop, "Learning From German Publicly Led Development Strategies to Create Mixed-Income, Mixed-Use Development Projects" (Cityscape, 2024)—paired with the German Marshall Fund report "Breaking Barriers to Affordable and Abundant Housing"—examines how German cities use publicly led land assembly and development to achieve affordability at scale, offering a model for U.S. jurisdictions. His long-standing historical interest in public housing dates to his master's and early career work, including "From Public Housing to Public-Private Housing: 75 Years of American Social Experimentation" (with Lawrence Vale, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2012) and the book chapter "Myth #5: Public Housing Ended in Failure during the 1970s" in Public Housing Myths (Cornell University Press, 2015).
More recently, Freemark and colleagues have examined specific financing and delivery mechanisms, including a pair of Urban Wire essays on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit with Corianne Scally ("How to Better Leverage the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program" and "LIHTC Provides Much-Needed Affordable Housing, but Not Enough") and detailed reports on homeownership and racial wealth gaps in the Twin Cities, such as "Understanding the Black-White Homeownership Gap in the Twin Cities" and "Who Owns the Twin Cities?" (both with Owen Noble and Yipeng Su, 2021).
3. Transit-Oriented Development and the Housing-Transportation Nexus
Freemark's work increasingly bridges his housing and transportation research through a sustained focus on transit-oriented development (TOD), asking whether housing growth is actually occurring near transit and what stands in the way. A trio of 2025 Urban Institute reports with Lydia Lo and Yipeng Su forms the empirical backbone of this agenda: "The Financial Feasibility of Transit-Oriented Development," "Tracking Transit-Oriented Development: Key Performance Indicators," and "Mandating Density Near Transit: Practices by States and Provinces in the United States and Canada." These are complemented by place-based studies such as "Moving Toward Transit-Oriented Development in Nashville" and "Generating Affordable and Abundant Transit-Oriented Development in Washington State."
This work builds on years of Puget Sound–focused research, including "Making Room for Housing Near Transit: Zoning's Promise and Barriers" and the interactive feature "America Has a Housing Shortage. Zoning Changes Near Transit Could Help." (both with Lo, Olivia Fiol, Gabe Samuels, and Andrew Trueblood), as well as his Terner Center report "Achieving Housing Abundance Near Transit" (2023). Freemark has also examined novel land-supply mechanisms for TOD, including "Leveraging Underused Transit Properties Could Produce More Affordable Housing" (with Jorge González-Hermoso) and "Spurring Housing Development Near Transit through Federally Funded Land Acquisition." Throughout, his argument is consistent: aligning transportation and housing investment is a policy imperative that current zoning and financing structures routinely undermine.
4. Public Transportation Investment, Finance, and Ridership
Transportation systems—their history, funding, and politics—form another major pillar of Freemark's scholarship, rooted in his MIT dissertation, Mobility Politics: Local Ideologies in the Multi-Jurisdictional Metropolis (2020) and his work creating and continuing to maintain the website The Transport Politic. Historically oriented articles extend this dissertation work: "Promoting 'orderly and sound growth:' 1960s debates over administering public transportation in service of mobility or regional planning" (Journal of Urban History, 2023) traces the origins of the tension between transit-as-mobility and transit-as-regional-planning-tool, while "Making the City: The Contested Shaping of Urban Life through Transit Investments" (Journal of Urban History, 2024) examines how transit projects become sites of political contestation over urban form and who a city is for.
On the applied policy side, Freemark has produced an extensive body of work on transit finance and ridership trends at the Urban Institute, including "Surmounting the Fiscal Cliff: Identifying Stable Funding Solutions for Public Transportation Systems" (with Lindiwe Rennert, 2023) and "In Search of Equitable Transit Operations: Examining Public Transportation Funding and Service across the United States" (2021). He has closely tracked federal infrastructure spending following the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, co-authoring a series of reports, including "Federal Infrastructure Spending on Transportation, Four Years after the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," "The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Promised a Shift in Infrastructure Funding Priorities. Did It Deliver?," and "Is Federal Infrastructure Investment Advancing Equity Goals?," along with the public-facing interactive tool, "Are Federal Infrastructure Dollars Meeting Your Community's Needs?"
Earlier in his career, this same interest in transit performance and best practice animated his Streetsblog series "Getting Transit Right," a project that examined transit systems, land use, and recent investment across cities including Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles.
5. Metropolitan Governance and the Political Economy of Planning
A distinct but related body of work examines the institutional architecture of metropolitan governance itself: The fragmented, multi-jurisdictional systems within which housing and transportation decisions are made. "How Municipalities Exploit Their De Facto Power to Manage Metropolitan Planning Through Mutual Deference" (Urban Affairs Review, 2025) develops a theoretical account of how municipalities informally coordinate to preserve local control even within regional planning frameworks that nominally supersede them. This complements "Varieties of Urbanism: A Comparative View of Metropolitan Fragmentation and Inequality" (with Justin Steil and Kathleen Thelen, Politics & Society, 2020), which develops a comparative typology of how different national political-economic systems structure metropolitan fragmentation and its consequences for inequality.
Freemark has translated this theoretical interest into empirical studies of who actually populates the boards and commissions that make planning decisions. "Who Makes Planning Choices? How Women, People of Color, and Renters Are Systematically Underrepresented on Land-Use Decisionmaking Bodies" (with Lydia Lo and Owen Noble, 2023) and the related Urban Wire posts on metropolitan planning organizations and metropolitan planning boards (2025) document systematic overrepresentation of homeowners and drivers relative to renters and transit users. Related work, "Influencers, Bias, and Equity in Rezoning Cases" (with Lo, 2022), examines who successfully petitions for rezonings in Louisville, Kentucky, and "Planning for Housing in a Regional Context" (with Lo, 2025) surveys metropolitan governance and planning organizations nationally.
6. Comparative and International Urbanism (France, Germany, the UK)
Freemark's scholarship is distinguished by sustained comparative and historical engagement with European cities, particularly Paris. "Housing Haussmann's Paris: The Politics and Legacy of Second Empire Redevelopment" (with A. Bliss and Lawrence Vale, Planning Perspectives, 2022) examines the housing consequences of Haussmann's famous 19th-century redevelopment of Paris, while "Metropolis on the Water: Varieties of Development Logics along the Seine" (Projections, 2019) compares waterfront development approaches. His article "Doubling Housing Production in the Paris Region: A Multi-Policy, Multi-Jurisdictional Paradigm" (International Journal of Housing Policy, 2021) analyzes how the Paris region achieved a dramatic increase in housing construction through coordinated policy across jurisdictional scales, a case study he draws on to compare with outcomes in the U.S. (see his San Francisco Chronicle op-ed "How the French are fixing a housing crisis comparable to California's").
This comparative lens extends to street safety and transit ridership as well: his 2025 Urban Wire piece "Transit Ridership Hasn't Recovered Since the Pandemic. What Can the US Learn from French Transit Systems?" and "How Cities Can Use Paris as a Model for Implementing Safer Street Infrastructure" both mine French practice for U.S.-applicable lessons, echoing the comparative housing-and-subsidized-renter work with Justin Steil discussed above. Collectively, this strand of work treats France (and, in the Cityscape/German Marshall Fund pieces, Germany) not as an idealized foil but as a source of tested policy mechanisms—fair-share mandates, publicly led development, coordinated regional planning—that Freemark evaluates for their applicability to fragmented American governance.
7. Transportation Technology and Autonomous Vehicles
For roughly a decade, Freemark has also studied how local governments are, or are not, preparing for automated and autonomous vehicles (AVs) and related transportation technologies. "Are Cities Prepared for Autonomous Vehicles? Planning for Technological Change by U.S. Local Governments" (with Anne Hudson and Jinhua Zhao, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2019) and its follow-up, "Policies for Autonomy: How American Cities Envision Regulating Automated Vehicles" (Urban Science, 2020), survey municipal planning documents to assess how (in)adequately cities are anticipating AV disruption. The book chapter "Multimodal Relationships: Shared and Autonomous Vehicles and High-Capacity Public Transit" (with Neema Nassir and Jinhua Zhao, in Shared Mobility and Automated Vehicles, 2022) extends this to the question of AV/transit complementarity or competition.
Freemark's applied Urban Institute reports in this area include "Regulations to Respond to the Potential Benefits and Perils of Self-Driving Cars" (2022), "Steering Autonomous Vehicles Toward Equity" (with Manuel Kovalski, Christina Stacy, and Alena Stern, 2023), and the 2026 "Toolbox for Navigating the Land-Use Impacts of the Automated Vehicle Ecosystem," produced with the National Academies of Science. Across this body of work, Freemark's consistent concern is whether AV deployment will reinforce or counteract existing inequities in access to transportation and whether land-use and regulatory frameworks are keeping pace with the technology—a skepticism voiced pointedly in his Next City op-ed "Without New Regulations, Self-Driving Cars Could Make Our Transportation System Even Worse."
8. Equity, Environmental Justice, and Transportation Safety
Some of Freemark's recent work has turned toward the health, safety, and environmental-justice consequences of transportation infrastructure, particularly for communities of color. "Mobility risk: using ambulance operations data to analyze the spatial and social dimensions of health disadvantage" (with Mark Brennan, Sophia Dyer, and coauthors, Cities and Health, 2025) uses novel ambulance-dispatch data to map spatial health disadvantage, while "Pedestrians and Cyclists Who Live in Communities of Color Face Disproportionate Exposure to Traffic Injury" (with Brennan and Justin Steil, 2025) documents unequal exposure to traffic danger. Earlier work with Gabe Samuels, "The Polluted Life Near the Highway: A Review of National Scholarship and a Louisville Case Study" (2022), and with Will Curran-Groome, "Highway Pollution Near Multifamily Homes Hurts Residents" (2024), extend this environmental-health focus to housing sited near highways.
Freemark has also studied the constraints local governments face in acting on climate and safety goals. "The Pernicious Effects of Uncertainty on Municipal Climate Action" (with Daniel Engelberg, Anne Hudson, Joanna Moody, and Jinhua Zhao, Urban Affairs Review, 2025) examines how uncertainty about federal and state support inhibits municipal climate policymaking, complementing a series of Urban Wire posts co-authored with Wesley Jenkins on vehicle weight, carbon taxation, and rising U.S. traffic fatalities (e.g., "With US Traffic Fatalities Rising, What Would It Take to Save Lives?"). Taken together, this work positions transportation infrastructure not merely as a mobility question but as a determinant of public health and racial equity.
9. Public-Facing Journalism and Commentary
Alongside his academic and institutional research, Freemark has maintained an extensive career translating technical findings for general audiences in outlets including The New York Times, CityLab (now part of Bloomberg), Slate, Vital City, Shelterforce, and The Hill. His New York Times op-eds span more than a decade, from "How to Build a Streetcar that Works" (2016) to "How Safer Streets Can Thwart Terrorists" (2017) and, with Lawrence Vale, "Illogical Housing Aid" (2012), a critique of the mortgage interest deduction. His long-running CityLab contributions include the widely cited "Why can't the United States build a high-speed rail system?" and, more recently for Bloomberg, comparative pieces on zoning reform (with Lydia Lo, "Effective Zoning Reform Isn't as Simple as It Seems") and campaign transportation platforms.
Freemark's early-career journalism was especially prolific: as the author of Next City's Grassroutes series (2010), he traveled to smaller American cities to document grassroots transportation innovation, and he continues to independently author The Transport Politic as a widely read analytical website on transit and infrastructure policy. His recent essays for Vital City—including "A Bolder Development Strategy for a Crowded New York" (2026), "New York City Needs a Two-Track Mind" (2025), and "Room for Improvement: What New York's Subway System Can Learn from Cities Around the World" (2024)—along with his Slate op-ed with Daniel Denvir, "Just Build the Homes: Public housing is ready to make a comeback" (2023), demonstrate the continuity between his scholarly research agenda and his public commentary: the same questions about zoning, subsidized housing, and transit investment that occupy his peer-reviewed work reappear, translated for a broader public, in his journalism.