https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-zESacteu4Yesterday, Reason TV released a video comparing Houston with more heavily regulated East Coast cities, explaining that Houston's relatively lax land use regulations contribute to its housing costs that are much lower than in other large cities. While the … [Read more...]
How Affordable Housing Policies Backfire
Affordable housing policies have a long history of hurting the very people they are said to help. Past decades' practices of building Corbusian public housing that concentrates low-income people in environments that support crime or pursuing "slum clearance" to eliminate housing deemed to be … [Read more...]
Culs de sac for safety?
At Cato At Liberty, Randall O'Toole provides a list of recommendations for reversing Rust Belt urban decline in response to a study on the topic from the Lincoln Land Institute. He focuses on policies to improve public service provision and deregulation, but he also makes a surprising recommendation … [Read more...]
Ranking State Land Use Regulations
Yesterday, the Mercatus Center released the third edition of Freedom in the 50 States by Will Ruger and Jason Sorens. The authors break down state freedom among regulatory, fiscal, and personal categories. At the study's website, readers can re-rank the states based on the aspects of freedom that … [Read more...]
Irrelevant real estate trends
Earlier this week Wendell Cox wrote a piece at New Geography arguing that projections for increasing demand for multifamily housing relative to single family homes are incorrect. He was criticizing a study by Arthur Nelson that predicts increased demand for multifamily housing relative to … [Read more...]
The Renewed Debate on Inclusionary Zoning
Stephen Smith and I co-wrote this post. In case you haven't been following Stephen elsewhere, he's also been writing at The Atlantic Cities and Bloomberg View. This year, some of the first apartments and condos subject to inclusionary zoning laws in DC are hitting the market, stoking … [Read more...]
Selling the Rights to Greater Density
At Next American City, Mark Bergen has an interesting long-form piece on municipal infrastructure financing. He argues that the property owners who benefit from public policies, such as infrastructure investment, should be required to fund these policies. He suggests infrastructure improvements … [Read more...]
Tokyo’s surprising lack of density
Wendell Cox has received his fair share of criticism from this blog, but his post last week about Tokyo's surprising lack of density is very interesting. Sure, Tokyo's suburbs are dense enough to be connected by job centers by rail, but the core is almost completely low- and lower-mid-rise, and thus … [Read more...]