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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
With a hugely productive legislative season in 2025, pro-homes legislators are rapidly taking good ideas around the country. To keep track of it all, my team created a new set of interactive maps. You…
Over the past decade, state policymakers across the country have established a new, accelerating trend of state laws that set limits on local zoning authority. These laws include new requirements that localities allow more,…
In Chapters 2 and 3, Ellsworth tries to argue for supply skepticism- that is, the idea that new housing (or at least the high-end towers that she opposes)* will not reduce rents or housing…
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.
