New York City's crisis of housing affordability has reached unprecedented levels. The ratio of median rent to median household income in New York City is the second highest among the 25 largest cities in the country. Additionally, the number of single adults experiencing homelessness in New York City has more than doubled in the past ten years. These conditions arose despite concentrated policy efforts at the state and local levels to control the growth of rents and increase the supply of means-tested affordable housing units. Fundamentally, existing state and local policies--particularly those limiting rent increases--largely do not address the root problem behind the city's affordability crisis: Housing production has not kept pace with the growing demand to live in New York City. In this report, the authors address the issue of housing affordability in New York City by focusing on the role that broadly expanding the supply of housing can play in increasing affordability. They propose six policy reforms for increasing production and estimate that if fully enacted, these policies could lead to approximately 300,000 additional units of housing relative to the status quo level of housing production.

"The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) is a citizenship and leadership educational program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in more than 3,000 secondary schools across the United States and around the world. Cadets who join JROTC take classes taught by former service members in addition to their regular studies and participate in out-of-school-time activities similar to a club or sport. The U.S. Army operates about one-half of all JROTC units and has units in all 50 states, several U.S. territories, and around the world. Like the other services, the Army's JROTC units are disproportionately located in the South, in urban areas, and in larger schools; this has been noted in congressional legislation and in a recent Army memo focused on modernizing the JROTC program. Changing this distribution is challenging, however, because of historical geographic patterns, funding constraints, and the need for schools and districts to apply to host a JROTC unit. The Assistant Secretary of the Army, Manpower & Reserve Affairs asked RAND Arroyo Center to inform the Army about where it might locate new, sustainable sites and how to grow the program's instructor cadre. The research team used a mixed-methods approach: a review of literature on JROTC, post-service careers, and teacher pathways; analysis of public data on school and community characteristics in conjunction with service data on JROTC site locations; analysis of instructors' prior Army careers compared with non-instructor careers; and use of counterfactual simulations to understand potential implications of recent proposed or passed legislation."--