Kevin Erdmann argues that mortgage credit standards are too tight. Others say the federal government is subsidizing homeownership. Can they both be right?
Congestion Pricing: Traffic Solver or Sin Tax?
The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips. This article appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s […]
Stone: Diversity didn’t cause the baby bust
A new paper proposes that increasing diversity explains 90% of the recent decline in birthrates. Lyman Stone says it’s nonsense.
Harris’ housing target: Compared to what?
Kamala Harris has pledged to build 3 million new housing units. Setting aside the methods, what does that mean? And, would it “end America’s housing shortage”?
How much does delay cost?
Everyone agrees that delays and uncertainty are costly for housing development. But it’s very hard to put a number on it. The obvious costs (lawyer hours, interest over many months) are surely an underestimate. Professors Stuart Gabriel and Edward Kung have a useful answer, at least for Los Angeles: As a lower bound, simply by […]
Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces
Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.
The 15-Minute City Is a Distracting Utopia
As proposed, Moreno’s 15-minute city has no chance of implementation, because economic and financial realities constrain the location of jobs, commerce, and community facilities. No planner can redesign a city by locating shops and jobs according to their own whims.
Do People Travel Less In Dense Places?
Every so often I read something like the following exchange: “City defender: if cities were more compact and walkable, people wouldn’t have to spend hours commuting in their cars and would have more free time. Suburb defender: but isn’t it true that in New York City, the city with the most public transit in the […]
The Master Plan: An Obsolete Urban Management Tool
Most master plans are a costly effort by a team of temporary consultants, spread over two to three years, to prepare a blueprint that is usually obsolete as soon as it is completed.
Are we spiralling into a new dark age? | Analysis and review of Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead
Jane Jacobs wasn’t optimistic about the future of civilisation. ‘We show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age,’ she declares in Dark Age Ahead, her final book published in 2004. She evidences a breakdown in family and civic life, universities which focus more on credentialling than on actually imbuing knowledge in its participants, broken feedback mechanisms in government […]
Are New Cities Necessary?
Promotors of recently developed cities ranging from Nusantara, the freshly built capital of Indonesia, to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futurist urban paradise, advertise them as breakthroughs in urban living. But does the world need new cities?
Lessons from Cities and the Wealth of Nations: a manual for urban policymakers
Continuing this series of book reviews on Jane Jacobs’ works, I now turn to Cities and the Wealth of Nations. But there is already a fantastic piece on the Market Urbanism website, by Matthew Robare, who reviews this book and outlines what Jacobs overlooks in her analysis. So, this piece takes a slightly different angle: […]
Living on the edge
“These two homes straddle a 2010 zoning boundary change. The result: The house in duplex zoning converted into two homes, and the other converted into a McMansion that cost 80% more.” – Arthur Gailes