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Emily Hamilton

Emily Hamilton

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 154

Chief Resiliency Officers Versus Antifragility

This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog about state and local policy and economic freedom. At The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about a new program from the Rockefeller Foundation called 100 Resilient Cities, focused on equipping cities with a new employee called a Chief Resiliency Officer. The program states its goals as follows: Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses. [. . .] There are some core characteristics that all resilient systems share and demonstrate, both in good times and in times of stress: Spare capacity, which ensures that there is a back-up or alternative available when a vital component of a system fails. Flexibility, the ability to change, evolve, and adapt in the face of disaster. Limited or “safe” failure, which prevents failures from rippling across systems. Rapid rebound, the capacity to re-establish function and avoid long-term disruptions. Constant learning, with robust feedback loops that sense and allow new solutions as conditions change. In his book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb defines antifragile as something that not only recovers from shocks, but becomes stronger after recovery, in line with the stated objectives of 100 Resilient Cities. Following its Great Fire of 1871, Chicago demonstrated antifragility. It rebounded rapidly from a disaster that killed 300 people and left one-third of city residents homeless, many without insurance after the fire bankrupted local insurers or the blaze destroyed their paperwork. Despite this great loss, residents of Chicago quickly rebuilt their city using private funding and private charity that was small relative to the amount of damage, but without any government funding. In rebuilding, Chicago developed safer building techniques both through entrepreneurship and with new insurance requirements and  new municipal […]

Newest Offering from Fundrise Goes Live on Monday

On Monday, Fundrise will make their newest offering at 906 H Street NE in DC available to investors. Many real estate journalists have covered this innovative investment company’s crowdsourcing strategy, with Urban Turf naming Fundrise a top real estate trend of 2012. This development is the company’s second crowd-sourced project and their third property on H Street. Without special approval, publicly advertised offerings can only seek funding from accredited investors, but Fundrise has has gone through a cumbersome process through DC, Virginia, and federal securities regulators to permit any individual to invest in their newest offering with a $100 minimum investments. Because of the high regulatory hurdles standing in the way of marketing public offerings to a broad audience, Fundrise is currently the only group in the country doing so. Daniel Miller, Co-Founder of Fundrise, explained that he thinks crowdfunding has significant potential to improve incentives for focusing on the long run in development. From an urban development perspective, one benefit of crowdsourcing is that small companies do not face the same pressure to post quarterly profits that larger, publicly-traded firms do. Because real estate is a long-term investment that doesn’t always demonstrate profits on a timetable that’s attractive to Wall Street investors, crowdsourcing provides an opportunity for development financing that will not have a short-term bias. The difficulty in getting legal approval for small investors, however, demonstrates the regulatory bias in favor of large firms. Daniel said: When you’re invested in a broader portfolio like a REIT that owns 400 or 500 malls, it’s very difficult to measure success because there are only financial indicators. But if you’re invested in a single property — the tenant is open, he’s paying rent, he has good sales — it’s much easier to measure success. There’s transparency in reporting. A lot of these big companies […]

Thoughts on The Power Broker and Government Roads

I recently finished The Power Broker by Robert Caro after many months of Metro reading. I loved the book, and can’t recommend it enough. Caro provides an overview of Robert Moses’ policies here. If you don’t want to invest in reading the full 1162 pages, I would particularly recommend the chapters that explain the impacts of Robert Moses’ policies on what were cohesive neighborhoods: “Changing,” “One Mile,” and “Rumors and the Report of Rumors.” While reading The Power Broker, I was repeatedly reminded of the massive coercion involved in road building despite the commonly held belief among many advocates of limited government that road provision is one of the least offensive government practices. Oftentimes the small government tolerance of road building seems to stem from the relatively small subsidies that roads require. Randal O’Toole has often demonstrated that automobile travel is cheaper per passenger mile than mass transit and that the bulk of these costs are born by drivers. While he advocates moving to a vehicle mile tax that would more closely tie road costs to their users and allow for the devolution of transit funding, he does not challenge that road building is a legitimate state and local government function. However, as Stephen, Adam and others have previously pointed out, these accounting costs of road building don’t take into consideration the opportunity cost of the land dedicated to roads, which in areas with high real estate prices is considerable. Moses notoriously bulldozed valuable developments for highways and while he made operating profits on tolls, he put land to lower value use in the process. For example, Moses used eminent domain and government funds to transform what was once a privately operated elevated rail system into an elevated highway on Brooklyn’s Third Avenue, destroying property values and a neighborhood in the process. We have no way of […]

Ranking State Land Use Regulations

Yesterday, the Mercatus Center released the third edition of Freedom in the 50 States by Will Ruger and Jason Sorens. The authors break down state freedom among regulatory, fiscal, and personal categories. At the study’s website, readers can re-rank the states based on the aspects of freedom that they think are most important, including some variables related to land use and housing. The available variables include local rent control, regulatory takings restrictions, the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index, and an eminent domain index. Using only these “Property Rights Protection” variables, Kansas ranks as the freest state, followed by Louisiana, Indiana, Missouri, and South Dakota. Texas, sometimes cited as the state without zoning, comes in at 18th. The least free state is New Jersey, with Maryland at 49th, followed by California, New York, and Hawaii. This result — states with some of the most expensive cities being the most regulated — is unsurprising. In the places with the freest land use regulations, where a developer would be able to build walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods without going through a burdensome entitlement process, there isn’t demand for dense development. This may be one reason why the Piscataquis Village project, an effort to build a traditional city, is happening in a sparsely populated Maine county because new development of this sort is simply not permitted near any population centers. As Stephen recently pointed out, public opinion in New York tends to see city policies as wildly pro-development: In spite of the popular impression of New York as a builder-friendly city that’s constantly exceeding the bounds of rational development, the city’s growth over the past half-century has been anemic, and has not kept pace with the natural growth in population. This ranking of New York near the bottom of the index demonstrates what urban economists already know — new development […]

Shortfalls in non-profit disaster rebuilding

After receiving years of praise for its work in post-Katrina recovery, Brad Pitt’s home building organization, Make It Right, is receiving some media criticism. At the New Republic, Lydia Depillis points out that the Make It Right homes built in the Lower Ninth Ward have resulted in scarce city dollars going to this neighborhood with questionable results. While some residents have been able to return to the Lower Ninth Ward through non-profit and private investment, the population hasn’t reached the level necessary to bring the commercial services to the neighborhood that it needs to be a comfortable place to live. After Hurricane Katrina, the Mercatus Center conducted extensive field research in the Gulf Coast, interviewing people who decided to return and rebuild in the city and those who decided to permanently relocate. They discussed the events that unfolded immediately after the storm as well as the rebuilding process. They interviewed many people in the New Orleans neighborhood surrounding the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. This neighborhood rebounded exceptionally well after Hurricane Katrina, despite experiencing some of the city’s worst flooding 5-12-feet-deep and being a low-income neighborhood. As Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Storr found [pdf]: Within a year of the storm, more than 3,000 residents had returned [of the neighborhood’s 4,000 residents when the storm hit]. By the summer of 2007, approximately 90% of the MQVN residents were back while the rate of return in New Orleans overall remained at only 45%. Further, within a year of the storm, 70 of the 75 Vietnamese-owned businesses in the MQVN neighborhood were up and running. Virgil and Emily attribute some of MQVN’s rebuilding success to the club goods that neighborhood residents shared. Club goods share some characteristics with public goods in that they are non-rivalrous — one person using the pool at a swim club doesn’t impede others from doing so — but club […]

Many Market Urbanist Elements in DC’s Zoning Rewrite

Yesterday at Slate Matt Yglesias pointed out the poor logic behind AAA’s opposition to the elimination of some parking minimums in the DC zoning reqrite. AAA is not alone, joined by many DC residents who oppose the rewrite that will introduce some deregulation in parking requirements and zoning. The rewrite includes a few basic changes, and Greater Greater Washington provides excellent coverage of each: Eliminate parking requirements for some transit-rich neighborhoods Permit homeowners in some neighborhoods to rent out accessory dwellings such as basements or carriage houses Remove the 30-foot width requirement for developing alleyway homes Allow more cornerstor commercial development in residential neighborhoods Simplify the Planned Unit Development approval process Initially, the plan included a proposal to switch from parking minimums to parking maximums, but fortunately this proposal was rejected in favor of allowing developers to build parking based on what they think will be profitable, allowing for a freer market in parking. Now, those who assert that eliminating subsidies to driving amounts to a “war on drivers” are left without basis for their argument. I am not too enthusiastic about the zoning rewrite because it doesn’t go nearly far enough in permitting a greater supply of housing. It makes no significant changes to allowable floor area ratios, only permitting greater density by tinkering around the edges. However, as the zoning update is focused on simplifying the zoning map and allowing some increased freedom for developers to build what they think consumers want, it is in many ways a step toward market urbanism. It will benefit some homeowners and their renters by permitting accessory dwelling rentals. Additionally the attempt to simplify the Planned Unit Development process could improve rule of law in DC development and take steps toward leveling the playing field for developers. Perhaps the most significant element […]

Developer size and development patterns

Earlier this week I attended an Urban Land Institute event about DC’s new development, The Yards on the Anacostia waterfront. This is a 42-acre area which was formerly a manufacturing center for the Navy. In 2003, Forest City Washington purchased the site from the General Services Administration for residential, retail, and office redevelopment. Generally I don’t have strong architectural preferences, but some of the former factories that now have glass curtain walls are looking very cool. During the presentation, I was reminded of Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm.” This paper is about knowledge problems, within and outside of the firm. He explains that firms exist, rather than each worker serving as his own contractor, because firms reduce the transaction costs of contracting for individual projects. However, firms face knowledge problems similar to those that government bureaucracies face: In economic theory we find that the allocation of factors of production between different uses is determined by the price mechanism. The price of factor A becomes higher in X than in Y. As a result, A moves from Y to X until the difference between the prices in X and Y, except if so far as it compensates for other differential advantages, disappears. Yet in the real world, we find that there are many areas where this does not apply. If a workman moves from department Y to department X, he does not go because of a change in relative prices, but because he is ordered to do so. Those who object to economic planning on the grounds that the problem is solved by price movements can be answered by pointing out that there is planning within our economic system which is quite different from the individual planning mentioned above and which is akin to what is normally called economic planning. In the case of The Yard, this […]

A Conversation about the Commonwealth of Belle Isle

Yesterday I learned about a proposed free city in the United States through Arnold Kling. The project, called the Commonwealth of Belle Isle would be located on an island on the Detroit River that is currently a city park. The proposal comes from Detroit real estate developer Rod Lockwood who recently wrote a novel that takes place 29 years in the future when the city-state is developed and prosperous. When Rod wrote the book, he wasn’t aware of the support for international charter cities from economists like Paul Romer and investors like Michael Strong. He said that he got the idea for the city when he was running a marathon that crossed into Belle Isle. “Necessity is the mother of invention. The current state of Detroit led me to think about possible solutions, and I realized that Belle Isle could be the next Singapore or Hong Kong.” As Arnold Kling points out, Rod’s background in real estate development gives him advantages over some other charter city boosters without this background. “I do understand the costs involved in greenfield development such as utilities and I have site planning experience,” Rod said. To move to the city, residents would have to pay $300,000 under the proposal to cover initial infrastructure costs. Rod sees the 982-acre island as home to 35,000 people. The city would be a walking city, with cars stored off of the island, and the initial infrastructure would include a monorail system. Rod said that being a car-free city outside of emergency vehicles and service vehicles is an important quality of life issue. “When I started researching city-states, I looked into Monaco, which does have cars and roads,” he explained. “It would be nice to have more green space than Monaco, and being a walking city will allow for that.” Rod identifies […]

Car and Driver(less) Link List

1) A reader pointed out this post at Volokh Conspiracy arguing that personal cars give us freedom, citing the example of automobiles helping African Americans boycott segregated buses in the 1950s. Sasha Volokh writes: Let’s think back to 1955, when African Americans stayed off segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala. During the year-long boycott, 325 private cars, some owned by African Americans, some by whites, some by churches, picked up people at 42 sites around the town. I don’t think that it works to think of technologies as something that can increase our freedom, per se. While cars give some people greater freedom of mobility, for those who can’t drive or refuse to drive for whatever reason have worse freedom of mobility in cities that are built for automobiles. Rather government spending and regulations that favor one type of transportation over another impede the freedom of those who don’t prefer the favored mode. And in this case of cars presenting an alternative to segregated buses, Volokh explains that drivers picked up passengers at defined stops. They were using their cars to implement a voluntary community transit system, using cars beyond their purpose as personal automobiles. 2) Many people have written about the potential of driverless cars to enhance freedom of mobility and to improve automobile safety, but Meagan McArdle points out that car manufacturers will likely face greatly increased liability when driverless cars reach the roads. Do you think driverless cars are in our near future? I’m sold on their potential to cut back on parking in city centers. 3) My colleague Eileen Norcross writes at US News on Governor Bob McDonnell’s proposal to move to funding transportation with a sales tax rather than a gas tax in Virginia: The governor is right to note that the gas tax suffers from […]

A Trial of Zoning

A recent Wall Street Journal op ed combines two of my favorite topics: Franz Kafka’s The Trial  and the inefficiencies of zoning. Roger Kimball explains the roadblocks he has faced in trying to repair his home after it was damaged in Hurricane Sandy. He writes: It wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?” Of course. Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits. Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that? Disaster rebuilding efforts highlight the impediments that bureaucracies create for economic development, but they are far from the only time that land use regulations create kafkaesque obstacles for property owners. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup explains that parking requirements can create a similar effect. When a business owner goes out of business and wants to sell his property, it’s likely that the next owner will want to operate a different type of business in the location or that parking requirements will have […]

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