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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
If the 2010s were the decade that urbanists “discovered” zoning as a major force in American cities, the 2020s are the decade of discovering all the non-zoning restrictions and regulations that restrict housing construction…
Every so often I read tweets complaining that the wrong kind of housing is being built. Some complain that there aren’t enough houses being built, because houses are supposedly more family-friendly. Others complain that…
One argument for height limits and similar regulations is that high-rise apartment buildings generate more greenhouse gas emissions than low-rise apartment buildings, because the former category of buildings have more “embodied carbon”- that is,…
Every so often I read a claim that the housing crisis is caused not by supply or demand, but by inequality. It occurred to me today that I should dig up information on inequality…
Sag Harbor, New York, has more yachts than apartments. To its credit, the local government took steps to allow one local landowner to replace a parking lot with affordable apartments intended for local service…
Housing policy expert Madeleine Marr dug into previously-written legislative histories of federal housing bills. She was kind enough to share her bibliography, including in parenthesis which housing laws are covered:
One anti-YIMBY argument is that “slowing growth or declines in rent are often signals to stop building new housing. Rather than encouraging housing suppliers to continue producing new units, decreases in rental prices put…
A new NBER paper by Yu-Hsin Ho (an incoming Harvard grad student) and three co-authors including Chiang-Tai Hsieh, contrasts zoning-segregated U.S. metro areas to Taipei, Taiwan, which allows mixed uses almost everywhere. The most…
Supporters of new housing tend to believe that high housing costs increase homelessness, because expensive cities tend to have the largest number of homeless people. Recently, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute has argued…
Samuel Hughes asks an excellent question in Works in Progress: Why aren’t there any YIMBYs, or NIMBYs for that matter, in continental Europe? It’s not for lack of high home prices. Instead, Hughes hypothesizes…
