Matt Yglesias is one of the best mainstream bloggers on land use/transportation that I know of. As one blogger (who I don’t recall right now) once said, his urban planning and transportation posts could be blogs in their own right. However, it’s puzzling that in an article for Cato Unbound, he comes up [...]
Reason Magazine, the Reason Foundation, and Cato are generally pretty okay libertarian standard-bearers, but they lose serious libertarian cred when it comes to land use. In those areas, they’ve been completely co-opted by hacks like Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, and Robert Poole, who take every opportunity to bash the budding New Urbanist movement over [...]
J. Brian Phillips wrote a great post at Houston Property Rights about liberal property rights in Houston, but what Brian had to say applies to every place. Here’s a snippet, but the entire post deserves a reading:
when developers and builders see a need for greater density, they respond accordingly. And they can respond relatively [...]
NIMBYism is the biggest obstacle to the evolution of vibrant urban communities, but the incentives for some to use public forums to impose restrictions on neighboring properties are great. Local politicians often bow to the most vocal residents, often with minority opinions, to avoid making waves, but their impositions are at the expense of [...]
Matthew Yglesias - Straight Talk on Gasoline on drilling and how conservative deviation from free-market principles has hurt the environment:
Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where [...]
That is, he argues that private property should be subject to government planning restrictions if a developer building densely on its property creates a traffic burden on government roads.
Wooten points out that any solution to Atlanta’s traffic congestion has to focus on roads, not transit or land use. In a more interesting twist, he takes [...]
Harvard Economist Ed Glaeser wrote an opinion piece in the New York Sun about the differences in housing affordability and other costs of living between Houston and New York.
New York is naturally more expensive than Houston because the geographical constraints force higher density development, which is more expensive to build. New York’s highly regulated [...]
G.L.C. at Amateur Economist wrote an informative article on zoning, an issue which always gets attention at Market Urbanism - Why Zoning Laws Are No Longer a Benefit to U.S. Home Buyers
Virtually every town in the United States has zoning laws which affect land use, lot size, building heights, density, setbacks, and other aspects of [...]
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