As foreigners, we are mesmerized by zakkyo buildings or yokocho, but within Japan, scholars, and authorities often ignore and neglect them as urban subproducts. In spite of their conspicuous presence and popularity, the official discourse still considers most of Emergent Tokyo as unsightly, dangerous, or underdeveloped. The book offers the Japanese readership a fresh view of their own everyday life environment as a valuable social, spatial, and even aesthetic legacy from which they could envision alternative futures.
Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan
If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab … [Read More...]
Land Value Taxation and Intertemporal Tradeoffs
Georgists assert that a Land Value Tax (LVT) ensures land is always put to its most efficient use. They claim that increased carrying costs deter speculation. And if valuable land is never held out of use, society is better off.I think the story about … [Read More...]
Entrepreneurs and the Changing Political Economy of Housing
Discussions about land use reform focus on policy – as they should. Overcoming NIMBYism will require deep legal, political, and regulatory reform. That said, entrepreneurs may be helping to short circuit the perverse incentives that give rise to NIMBYism in … [Read More...]
Protecting Housing Affordability by Protecting the Right to Build Housing
Legislators in Colorado and Tennessee have introduced bills modeled on Arizona’s Private Property Rights Protection Act, a law that requires municipal governments to compensate landowners when new land use regulations make land less valuable. Both states … [Read More...]
Reasons to be a Census skeptic
Over the past week, the press was chock full of 2020-style headlines like "Census Bureau Confirms Pandemic Exodus from SF." That's because according to the Census Bureau, virtually every urban county in the U.S. (even urban counties in growing metros like … [Read More...]
Are there places in America with diversity *and* equality?
The relationship between blacks and whites in the residential subdivisions out beyond the suburban ring suggests that middle-class people of both races recognize each other as equals. Among middleclass Americans, at least in the special circumstances of these … [Read More...]
Do HOAs justify zoning?
At a recent webinar, Prof. Christopher Serkin of Vanderbilt Law School made an interesting argument. He pointed out that a) Sun Belt cities tend to have less restrictive zoning than northern cities; b) Sun Belt cities also have more homeowners' associations … [Read More...]
California should indeed build new cities – but don’t let Nathan J. Robinson anywhere near them
Urbanist and YIMBY Twitter had a field day dunking on Nathan J. Robinson, whose essay in his publication Current Affairs (yesterday's tagline: "the one thing left that isn't disappointing") called for building new cities in California.The essay was a … [Read More...]
Houston Impressions
Given that I've written a few papers about Harris County, Texas, and even helped republish a book about the city of Houston, it's a little embarrassing to admit I had never been there. So when a Canadian buddy suggested meeting up in the Bayou City for … [Read More...]