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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Every so often I read tweets complaining that the wrong kind of housing is being built. Some complain that there aren’t enough houses being built, because houses are supposedly more family-friendly. Others complain that there aren’t enough apartments being built,…
One argument for height limits and similar regulations is that high-rise apartment buildings generate more greenhouse gas emissions than low-rise apartment buildings, because the former category of buildings have more “embodied carbon”- that is, they use more energy-intensive building materials.…
Every so often I read a claim that the housing crisis is caused not by supply or demand, but by inequality. It occurred to me today that I should dig up information on inequality by metro area. I discovered pretty…
One anti-YIMBY argument is that “slowing growth or declines in rent are often signals to stop building new housing. Rather than encouraging housing suppliers to continue producing new units, decreases in rental prices put a halt to new supply.” In…
Supporters of new housing tend to believe that high housing costs increase homelessness, because expensive cities tend to have the largest number of homeless people. Recently, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute has argued that homeless people are attracted to…
Often, opponents of the pro-housing YIMBY* movement either do not care about the negative results of high housing costs, or are simply careless with the facts. Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia is more interesting: he seems as…
Recently I saw an argument on X that went something like this: Person A- infill is cheaper than sprawl because no one has to build new sewer lines! Person B- Sprawl is cheaper because its more expensive to build in…
A recent “supply skeptic” paper by various academics has gotten a lot of attention in housing-related social media. The somewhat sensationalistic title is: “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis.” But unlike most random rants from “not in my…
I recently read a report from one of Georgetown Law School’s many centers, discussing the shortage of low-income housing in six metro areas with high housing growth. * The report points out that owner-occupied units built since 2010 are far…
Every so often I read a tweet or listserv post saying something like this: “If modern buildings were prettier there’d be less NIMBYism.” I always thought this claim was silly for the simple reason that in real-life rezoning disputes, people…
