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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
In my last post I critiqued the introduction to Lynn Ellsworth’s new anti-YIMBY book, Wonder City. Having just finished Chapter 1, I thought I would add my thoughts. Ellsworth seems to be primarily motivated…
Colleges are the perfect place for walkable neighborhoods, yet many colleges don’t focus on Transit Oriented Development. The Purple line going through the University of Maryland is a key expansion point for the D.C…
Every so often I read a ringing defense of anti-housing, anti-development politics. Someone on my new urbanist listserv recommended an article by Lynn Ellsworth, a homeowner in one of New York’s rich neighborhoods who…
Two Substacks this week suggest that YIMBYism will or should merge with broader urbanist concerns to become something more like a political party. Two professors aligned with YIMBYism – Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher…
The Great Depression featured vast Hoovervilles, which expanded the hobo “jungles” of earlier times. When wartime production drew millions into industrial cities that had no beds for them, why didn’t the Hoovervilles expand into…
I recently saw a tweet complaining that left-wing YIMBYs favored urban containment- a strategy of limiting suburban sprawl by prohibiting new housing at the outer edge of a metropolitan area. (Portland’s urban growth boundaries,…
Check out Dan Bertolet’s review of the productive legislative year in Washington, where lawmakers preempted local parking, design, and unfunded inclusionary zoning requirements, among other things.
Via Kevin Erdmann, several Democratic and Independent U.S. senators have introduced a viciously NIMBY bill: The “Humans over Private Equity for Homeownership Act” is [would require] firms that own more than 50 single-family rental…
If investors and hedge funds are a major cause of high housing costs, why do they seem to be most common in cheap cities?
Connor Tabarrok has an excellent new primer on Texas Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs), covering history, function, governance, and critiques.
