Our tax code favors suburbia. Homeownership, greenfield development, and sprawl receive preferential tax treatment, and the market responds to incentives built into the code. As a result, a disproportionate amount of capital flows to those investments. In many cases, it has been an unintentional side effect of pursuing other goals. The combined effect is that our tax system plays a huge role in shaping our communities. Its influence is an important factor to understanding how residential design in the US became what it is today.
Financing Suburbia: How government mortgage policy determined where you live
The government exercises tremendous power over residential design in the US. Its influence is nearly invisible, because it works through complex financing programs, … [Read More...]
A Great Book for Market Urbanists
One long-forgotten housing option is residential hotels; a century ago, most renters lived in hotels and shared space with short-term tenants. I just read a book, Living Downtown, about the rise and fall of residential hotels. Rather than discuss them in … [Read More...]
Subsidizing Suburbia: A forgotten history of how the government created suburbia
This is the first article of a five-part series on suburbia in the United States.In primary school, one of my friends lived in a duplex. This fact blew my mind. To my inexperienced 7-year-old mind, a duplex barely registered as a house. Her family shared a … [Read More...]
TILTs for Income Mobility
Land-use scholars have offered a variety of policy proposals that attempt to identify institutional reforms to reduce the incentive for homeowner NIMBYs to protest development. For example, in a 2013 paper law professor David Schleicher proposed a policy … [Read More...]
NIMBY Contradictions
Ever since zoning was invented in the 1920s, homeowners have argued that limits on density and on multifamily housing are necessary to protect property values. But today, urban NIMBYs seek to prevent new housing on the ground that new housing will lead to … [Read More...]
How Suburban Parking Requirements Hold Back Downtown
You wake up thirty minutes before your alarm, jerking up after having a nightmare about a car crash. Reluctantly, you clean up, eat breakfast, and hop into your car. Work is only three mile away—easy biking distance—and there are 15 or so people in your … [Read More...]
Congressional Housing Subsidies Won’t Lower DC Housing Prices, But Liberalizing Zoning Will
During his last days in office, former Representative Jason Chaffetz must have forgotten he is supposed to be a fiscal conservative. His recent comments that members of Congress need $2,500 stipends to afford housing in DC reflect a complete ignorance of both … [Read More...]
(Not So) Infinite Demand
In a recent blog post, Julia Galef has generated a fairly comprehensive list of pro-housing arguments and counterarguments to those arguments.She gives the most detailed consideration to the "infinite demand" argument- in her words,“So even if SF adds … [Read More...]
More on “Empty Houses”
I recently saw a Facebook post asserting that San Francisco has 30,000 vacant units, so therefore no market-rate housing should be built. So I looked up Census data on these allegedly empty units.It is true, according to the Census Factfinder website, … [Read More...]