Cato recently kicked off an essay series they’re calling “What Can’t Private Governance Do?”. The series questions how far we can take private governance in replacing public institutions. The most recent essay by Mark Lutter questions where to draw the line between private and public in territorial … [Read more...]
Jeff Fong
Jeff graduated from San Jose State University in 2011 where he studied Politics and Economics. He spent two years working in financial services before joining a startup focused on urban transportation. Since then he has become increasingly interested in urban economics as well as transportation policy and spends much of his free time reading, writing, and researching.
San Francisco Turned Sisyphus: Why the City Can’t Fix the Housing Crisis On its Own
Housing prices in San Francisco are obscene. And, in large part, that’s because the city hasn’t permitted enough new construction. But that’s not the entire story. For as hard as San Francisco has resisted development, the Peninsula cities have resisted it even more. And in so doing they’ve pushed … [Read more...]
Urban Density, Mass Transit, and Uber
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and Rueben Fischer-Baum claim mass transit is Uber’s best friend. They use data from New York to show that Uber is most frequently used in areas with effective mass transit. They explain that residents in areas with poor access to mass transit are more likely … [Read more...]
Trickle-Down Housing Economics? Laying Reagan’s Ghost to Rest
In a recent 48 Hills post, housing activist Peter Cohen aimed a couple rounds of return fire at SPUR's Gabriel Metcalf. The post comes in response to Mr. Metcalf's own article critiquing progressive housing policy. Mr. Cohen bounces around a bit, but he does repeat some frequently used talking … [Read more...]
Market Fundamentalism in the Mission?
There’s a proposal to place a moratorium on all market rate construction in the Mission District, one of San Francisco’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Needless to say the proposal has sparked a debate. And Dan Ancona’s Putting Market Fundamentalism On Hold is another rock hurled into that … [Read more...]
Seamless Transit: Thoughts on the new report from SPUR
Seamless Transit is the new transportation policy report from SPUR. Main author Ratna Amin proposes integrating the Bay Area’s balkanized transit systems to improve lackluster ridership. Given that the region has 23 separate transit providers--more than any other metropolitan area in the … [Read more...]
Why Money for Schools Means No Permits For Housing
Housing has a lot going against it in the California. But amidst all the legal, political, and regulatory roadblocks, there’s one law that sneaks by largely unnoticed: Prop 98.Prop 98 guarantees a minimum level of state spending on education each year. Sacramento pools most city, county, and … [Read more...]
The Right to the City
This post draws heavily from Tom W. Bell’s “Want to Own a City?” and would not have been possible without his prior writing and research The "Right to the City" is an old marxist slogan that’s as catchy as it is ill-defined. Neither the phrase's originator Henri Lefebvre, nor David Harvey, a more … [Read more...]