Michael Lewyn

Joined: May 21, 2025
Articles: 127

housing, Policy, Zoning

Collective Action Problems Are Similar For Land Use And Schools

I just read a law review article complaining that some white areas in integrated southern counties were trying to secede from integrated school systems (thus ensuring that the countywide systems become almost all-black while the seceding areas get to have white schools), and it occurred to me that there are some similarities between American school systems and American land use regulation. In both situations, localism creates gaps between what is rational for an individual suburb or neighborhood and what is rational for a region as a whole. In particular, it is rational for each suburb to have high home prices (because that means a bigger tax base)- but I don’t think San Francisco-size rents and home prices are rational for a region as a whole. Similarly, it is rational for each individual neighborhood within a city to have restrictive regulations, because if one neighborhood is less restrictive it suffers from whatever burdens might result from new housing, without the broader benefit of lower citywide housing costs. How are school districts similar? Since the prestige of a neighborhood is related to its school district, and the prestige of school districts depends on their socio-economic makeup, it is rational for each suburb (or city neighborhood) to be part of a school district dominated by white children from affluent families, rather than to be part of a socially and racially diverse district. But if every middle-class or affluent area draws school district lines in a way that excludes lower-income children, the poor people are all concentrated in a few poor school districts (such as urban school districts in Detroit and Cleveland). Is this rational for the region as a whole? I suspect not.

Michael Lewyn
October 30, 2016

Book Review, Culture & Books, sprawl

Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America

Also read my other post about Kotkin’s book: NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism Traditionally, defenders of suburban sprawl have been skittish about proclaiming that government should promote sprawl and halt infill development. Instead, they have taken a libertarian tack, arguing that government should allow any kind of development while asserting that a level playing field would favor automobile-dependent suburbia. But in his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin, who, among many other titles, is the executive director of a pro-sprawl organization called the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, appears to take a different view. Like more libertarian defenders of the status quo, he generally opposes attempts to limit new suburban development. But he also writes that both city residents and suburbanites aggressively resist “densification”- that is, when nearby landowners want to build new housing or offices. For example, he writes that Los Angeles neighborhood activists “have rallied against attempts to build denser buildings, which generate more congestion and erode both the area’s livability and its distinct urban identity.” Similarly, he writes that some New Yorkers opposed “Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to further densify already congested Midtown.” But Kotkin never suggests that turning a cornfield into a subdivision creates congestion, or that doing so would erode an area’s “distinct rural identity.” He also doesn’t seem to think that new housing belongs in existing suburbs: in describing zoning that prohibits such housing, he writes that “suburbs generally can be expected to, for the most part, resist high degrees of densification”, including “attempts by planners to impose strict regulations on construction and impose higher densities”. This language implies (erroneously) that “densification” is something imposed by a distant government, rather than by landowners who want to build places for people to live. So if I interpret his book correctly, it seems that there is nothing libertarian […]

Michael Lewyn
September 29, 2016
10 Comments

Free-market impostors, housing, NIMBYism, Policy, Zoning

NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism

In his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin tries to use NIMBYism as an argument against urbanism. He cites numerous examples of NIMBYism in wealthy city neighborhoods, and suggests that these examples rebut “the largely unsupported notion that ever more people want to move ‘back to the city’.” This argument is nonsense for two reasons. First, the NIMBYs themselves clearly want city life and a certain level of density–otherwise they would have moved to suburbia. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, a wide range of housing choices exist for those who can afford them. Second, the fact that some people want to prohibit new housing does not show that there is no demand for new housing. To draw an analogy: the War on Drugs prohibits many drugs. Does that mean that there is no demand for drugs? Of course not. If anything, it proves that there is lots of demand for drugs; otherwise government would not bother to prohibit it. For my more in-depth review of The Human City, read: Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America

Michael Lewyn
September 26, 2016
3 Comments

housing, Zoning

Home-Sharing and Housing Supply

One common argument against Airbnb and other home-sharing companies is that they reduce housing supply by taking housing units off the long-term market.* As I have written elsewhere, I don’t think home-sharing affects housing supply enough to matter. But even leaving aside the empirical question of whether this will always be true, there’s a theoretical problem with the argument that if someone fails to use their land for long-term rental housing, government must step in. It seems to me that this argument, if applied with even a minimal degree of consistency, leads to absurd results. For example, suppose that Grandma has a spare room in her house, and instead of renting it on Airbnb she allows the room to be unused. Should Grandma be forced to rent out the room? Of course not. A home-sharing critic might argue that an unused room is different from a room that is likely to be rented out to a long-term tenant. Indeed it is- but in fact, Grandma’s failure to rent the room to anyone is more socially harmful than her renting the room on Airbnb. In the latter situation, a traveler benefits (from a cheaper rate than a hotel, or at least for a different kind of experience) and Grandma benefits by getting money from the traveler. By contrast, in the former situation, no one benefits. It could be argued that Grandma’s rights should be unimpeded, but that regulation should be targeted towards the amateur hotelier who seeks to rent out an entire building all-year round, rather than using the building for more traditional tenants. Even here, the argument based on housing scarcity leads to absurd results. Suppose the evil landlord Snidely Whiplash decides, instead of renting out his building on Airbnb, to use the building for a vacation house one day a year […]

Michael Lewyn
September 12, 2016
2 Comments

housing

The “Global Buyers” Argument

One common argument against building new market-rate housing is that there is an infinite supply of rich foreigners willing to soak up new supply. One obvious flaw in this argument is that housing prices do occasionally go down even in expensive places. But even leaving aside this reality, the “foreign buyers” argument is not logically provable, since there is no way of knowing whether there are more rich foreign buyers in San Francisco than in, say, Raleigh or Houston. Thus, the argument rests on the following chain of logic: 1) we know that there are rich foreigners taking over Expensive City X (but not Cheap City Y) because housing prices are high; (2) therefore, the rich foreigners are what keep housing prices high in City X. The argument makes sense only when you add the following premise: housing prices can only be high in the presence of huge numbers of rich foreigners. I really don’t see any reason to take this premise seriously.

Michael Lewyn
September 12, 2016

housing, Travel, Uncategorized

Does Home-sharing Create Negative Externalities?

A decade or two ago, a traveler who wished to stay in a city temporarily had no alternative to a hotel. Even if the owner of a house or condominium wished to rent out a room for a short period of time, the costs of advertising in a newspaper would have at least partially canceled out the financial benefits from renting. But the Internet has made home-sharing much more economical, through websites like Airbnb.com. At first glance, the home-sharing industry seems highly beneficial: guests get a cheaper and/or more exotic vacation, home-sharing hosts get extra money to pay off mortgages, and their neighborhoods benefit from tourist revenue. Nevertheless, NIMBYs have attacked home-sharing. One major argument is that home-sharing creates negative externalities. For example, a recent law review article(1) notes that some neighborhood activists in Silver Lake (a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood) sought to exclude home-sharing from their neighborhood on the ground that shared homes are “hotel-like room rentals” and such a “commercial use [causes] the noise and traffic levels of the area [to] increase as a result of people coming and going, and the transient nature of the establishment can increase the crime rate.” As a result of these problems, home-sharing “brings nuisances to residential areas, thereby lowering the value of all homes in the neighborhood.” In other words, the “externalities” argument rests on the following chain of logic: Assumption 1: Home-sharing, as a commercial use, is no different from hotels. Assumption 2: Commercial uses bring down property values. Conclusion: Home-sharing brings down property values. But none of these claims has significant factual support. First, home-sharing is somewhat different from a large hotel. An individual hotel might have hundreds or thousands of guests on one block. By contrast, home-shares tend to be spread out over a much larger space, […]

Michael Lewyn
August 3, 2016
2 Comments

NIMBYism

Middle Aged NIMBYs, Young YIMBYs

Today, CNU Nextgen, a group of younger members of the Congress for New Urbanism, retweeted a New York Times story about the evils of NIMBYism in Boulder. Why did I find this noteworthy? Because on the Pro-Urb listserv, dominated by middle-aged CNUers, a very different conventional wisdom prevails. Most of the Pro-Urb posters on housing costs assume that high rents are the result of insatiable demand driven by wealthy foreigners, that government lets developers do as they please, and that housing supply is pretty much irrelevant.

housing

Do The Rich Cause High Rents?

One common argument against building new housing is that new construction will never reduce housing costs, because the influx of ultra-rich people into high-cost cities creates an insatiable level of demand. I recently found a source of information that may be relevant to this argument: the Wealth Report, which lists the number of high-wealth individuals in a set of world cities, including five American cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Miami). In particular, the report lists the number and percentage growth of “ultra high net worth individuals” (UHNWIs), which it defines as those with over $30 million in wealth. It seems to me that if UHNWI growth was related to high housing costs, then the most expensive cities in this group (New York and Los Angeles) would have the highest UNHWI growth. In fact, the number of UHNWIs grew most rapidly in Houston (63 percent) between 2005 and 2015. By contrast, UNHWI growth in the other four cities ranged between 31 and 34 percent. In Canada, UNHWI growth was higher, but roughly equal (ranging between 65 and 70 percent) in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal- despite the fact that these cities have radically varying housing costs. The median housing unit price in Vancouver tops $1 million, about three times the median price in Montreal. What about UNHWIs as a percentage of city population? New York has 5600 of them in a city of 8.1 million*- just under 700 per 1 million. Low-cost Chicago has 2030 in a city of 2.7 million- about 750 per 1 million. Houston has 1318 in a city of 2.1 million, or around 625 per million. These differences don’t strike me as significant. *I am assuming these people all live in the central city; I am not actually sure this is the case, […]

Michael Lewyn
June 27, 2016
1 Comment

housing

Are High-Rises More Expensive?

One common argument against allowing the construction of taller apartment buildings is that tall buildings cost more to build, and thus are “overwhelmingly occupied by the wealthy.” For example, tall buildings, unlike houses and walk-up buildings, require elevators. But in fact, fairly tall buildings can be pretty cheap where demand is low and/or housing supply is high. For example, in East Cleveland, a low-income suburb of Cleveland, one 24-story building rents one bedroom apartments for as little as $552 per month, despite the fact that the building contains extras such as a pool and a fitness center. This means that (assuming rent should be no more than a quarter of income) someone earning less than $30,000 could afford this building. Even in nicer neighborhoods, older high-rises are not hugely expensive: for example, in midtown Atlanta, the Darlington’s apartments start at just over $700. It could be argued that because these buildings were built decades ago, their costs are not relevant to those of newer buildings. Certainly, newer high-rises are more expensive than older ones- but the same is true for newer walk-ups. To test this proposition, I focused on the outer boroughs of New York, using Zillow.com to focus on buildings built between 2010 and 2016. The cheapest newer apartment in Brooklyn started at $1150 (about $350 more than the cheapest older listing); the cheapest new elevator building started at $1600 (and included a doorman, thus inflating the rent beyond the basic amount caused by elevators). Similarly, in Queens the cheapest newer building rented for $1450 (over $600 more than the cheapest older listing), while the cheapest newer elevator building rented for $1550. In sum, it seems to me that the difference in cost between the cheapest high-rises and the cheapest low-rises, although not nonexistent, are not huge either.

Jane Jacobs, planning

Jane Jacobs And High-Rises

Since new urbanists (in my experience) tend to be very skittish of high-rise development, one might think that their ideological ancestor Jane Jacobs was one of these people who thought no building should be over five floors. But in her 1958 essay “Downtown Is For People,” she hinted at a very different view, describing New York City’s Lever House and Seagram Building as among the city’s “extraordinary crown jewels.” Similarly, she described San Francisco’s Union Square (which bordered buildings of wildly varying heights) as “the city at its best.” Jacobs was not against height–but she was against monotony. She wrote, for example, that Park Avenue should “have the most commercially astute and urbanite collection possible of one- and two-story shops, terraced restaurants, bars, fountains and nooks.” So I’m not sure she would have favored the common modern idea that high-rise and low-rise buildings should be segregated from each other, or that buildings of different density are “out of scale.”

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