Debates over land use policy often devolve into opponents arguing over how to interpret the same set of facts. For example, "market suburbanists" argue that because apartments in walkable neighborhoods tend to cost more per square foot than suburban single family homes, high densities make coastal … [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...]
Why the Left and the Right Should Join Forces against Eminent Domain
The destruction of inner cities at the hands of bureaucrats wielding eminent domain has been well documented by urban theorists from Jane Jacobs to Richard Epstein. As Ilya Somin points out, eminent domain has played an important role in destroying property in Detroit, contributing to its population … [Read more...]
Homeownership and Financial Well-being
Adam, Stephen, and I have previously written on some of the downsides of homeownership from an urbanist perspective; owner-occupied units are biased toward being single family homes, and when owner-occupied units are condos, they carry many detrimental characteristics for redevelopment. Despite the … [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...]
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Centrally Planned City
On my last post about Ayn Rand's views on cities, I received feedback in the comments that obviously she loved cities and on Twitter that obviously she did not. I think I come down on the side that she likely saw cities, and particularly skyscrapers, as embodiment of human achievement. However Frank … [Read more...]
Why do condos even exist?
It sounds like a dumb question – they exist because people like the security of owning a home combined with the services and lower costs that apartments offer, duh! But upon further reflection, condominium-style tenure can be a bit problematic.The main problem, as I see it, is that a building … [Read more...]
Look beyond Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn for solutions to a lack of retail
Robbie Whelan's got a column in today's Wall Street Journal on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue, which is something I've been thinking a lot about since I moved to Brooklyn earlier this year. If you don't recall, last year the City Council passed a zoning amendment to require new residential developments on … [Read more...]