Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill has received a lot of love from those who favor of land use liberalization. Like Cory Booker’s housing bill, the Warren bill would seek to encourage state and local land use reform using federal grants as an incentive. Warren’s bill would significantly increase … [Read more...]
Three Policies for Making Driverless Cars Work for Cities
Some urbanists have become skeptical about the future of autonomous vehicles even as unstaffed, autonomous taxis are now serving customers in Phoenix and Japan. Others worry that AVs, if they are ever deployed widely, will make cities worse. Angie Schmitt posits that allowing AVs in cities without … [Read more...]
Three Lessons from Nashville’s Building Boom
Nashville has enjoyed some of the country's fastest job growth for several years as healthcare and tech startups have made the city home. Unsurprisingly, this economic boom has coincided with a large increase in population, greater demand for real estate, and rising house prices. But Nashville's … [Read more...]
United against dynamism
The battle lines being drawn for the SB 827 debate is perhaps the clearest example ever of the strange bedfellows that align on land use politics. Tenant rights activists stand in opposition to preemption of local land-use regulations with landlords and owners of suburban single family … [Read more...]
The Role for State Preemption of Local Zoning
Urbanists have increasingly turned to state-level preemption as a tool for reducing the barriers to new housing supply, recognizing the improved incentives for land-use policy relative to the local level. In a piece for the Atlantic Cities, Nolan sums up the potential for preemption to address … [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 called Tax Increment Local Transfers (TILTs). … [Read more...]
Is Inclusionary Zoning Legal?
Market Urbanism may soon have a hearing in the Supreme Court. Two of my colleagues at the Mercatus Center, Sandy Ikeda, half a dozen other professors, and I argue that the Court should take up the case 616 Croft Ave., LLC, v. City of West Hollywood. The case is an opportunity for the Court … [Read more...]
What makes Philadelphia so affordable?
In 2005, Joseph Gyourko published an economic history of Philadelphia. He explored the economic and policy factors that contributed to its population and job loss during the twentieth century. Gyourko's outlook for Philadelphia was pessimistic. He argued that the city lacked the supply of skilled … [Read more...]