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Michael Lewyn

Michael Lewyn

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 131

For once I agree with the NIMBYs: please don’t turn my neighborhood into Dubai- because Dubai isn’t dense enough!

One common argument against new housing is that it will turn “[neighborhood at issue] into Dubai.” Evidently, some people think Dubai is a hellscape of super-dense skyscapers. In fact, Many Dubai neighborhoods aren’t very dense at all. There is one Dubai neighborhood that is more dense than most urban neighborhoods in North America: Ayal Nasir (which has about 200,000 people per square mile). But it looks far more like Paris than the popular stereotype of Dubai: streets are narrow, and most buildings are five or so stories high. The neighborhood next door, Al Murar, has 130,000 people per square mile and has a similarly human-scale urban fabric.

More evidence that sunlight is no crisis

In my email box today, I received a message from an anti-housing group, touting a study from the localize.city website* on sunlight on New York neighborhoods. The purpose of the study is to show which neighborhoods have the least sunlight. The study found that 27 of the city’s allegedly darkest neighborhoods are in Manhattan. More interestingly, the list of most sunlight-deprived Manhattan neighborhoods includes some of the city’s richest areas: Midtown, the Financial District, Tribeca, Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side. By contrast, the list of Manhattan’s ten sunniest areas include not only a few well off areas (like Hudson Yards and Battery Park City) but less pricey areas like Marble Hill and Inwood. Why does this matter? My interpretation of these facts is that people who can afford to live anywhere don’t really care very much about an extra hour or two of sunlight, which in turn suggests that sunlight is basically just an excuse to block new housing rather than something people actually care about in other contexts. To put the matter another way, New Yorkers may actually value shade over sunlight, if they care about the issue at all. *I note that if you really do care about sunlight more than I am suggesting that most people do, you can search an individual address at the Localize website.

The Paper of Record Gets Yorkville Wrong

Even the most supposedly reputable mainstream media is often less than careful in its coverage of housing issues. For example, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran an article on the Upper East Side’s Yorkville neighborhood, implying that high-rises are “erasing their community’s character.” The article implies that Yorkville is a quaint little brownstone neighborhood. But in fact, even the most casual perusal of real estate websites would show that Yorkville has been a high-rise area for many years. I ran a search on Streeteasy.com showing 259 for sale apartments with doormen (a feature generally found only in high- and mid-rise buildings). Only 27 of these housing units were built after 2010, which means that hundreds of high-rise units were built long ago.* So the entire story is based on falsehood. Moreover, even if Yorkville’s towers were new, I am not sure that its pre-high-rise character is particularly unique. To me Yorkville’s tenements look just like similar tenements elsewhere in Manhattan. If you can’t trust what the Times says about the Upper East Side, how can you trust what it says about climate change or Washington politics? *I did not search for-rent apartments because Streeteasy’s software does not allow users to separate for-rent units by age.

Why “Move to Boise” Is No Answer

One common argument raised by NIMBYs is that zoning is not harmful to humans, because people priced out of expensive cities can always move to a cheaper one. But a recent story illustrates why this argument is misguided: the story discusses increased housing prices in small cities like Boise and Grand Rapids. When people are priced out of expensive, they move to cheaper ones, thus increasing demand for housing in the cheaper cities. In turn, this causes housing prices to increase in the cheaper cities. In a nation with lots of restrictive zoning, you can’t escape high rents because the high rents will follow you wherever you go. To take the argument further: some people justify local control over zoning by saying that what city X does is its own business. But when city X does things that harm city Y, its policies become the business of the state and federal governments. If city X has restrictive zoning, its policies raise housing costs in whatever city takes in X’s rent refugees- so at that point, a higher level of government should step in.

Learning from Astor Street

One common argument against mixing housing types and densities is that if housing type A (for example, townhouses or single-family homes) is mixed with housing type B (for example, condos), the neighborhood will somehow be “ruined” for residents of the less dense housing types. Last week, my new wife and I visited Chicago for our honeymoon. The most interesting street we visited, on Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast, was Astor Street, just a block from high-rise dominated Lake Shore Drive. What is unusual about Astor Street is its mix of housing types. Although this street is dominated by large attached houses, it also has a few tall-ish buildings next to the townhouses, such as the 25-floor condo building at 1300 North Astor, the 20-story Astor Villas at 1430 North Astor, and the 27-story Park Astor condos at 1515 North Astor. Despite the tall buildings, this street felt like a quiet, beautiful, tree-shaded urban street. And the real estate market seems to agree: recent Zillow ads show a single-family house on Astor Street selling for over $2 million, and another one selling for over $3 million. By contrast, the average house in Astor Street’s zip code (60610) is valued at less than half a million dollars, and only 14.6 percent are worth over $1 million. Clearly, multifamily housing has not “ruined” Astor Street.

The Truth About “Red Vienna”: Its a YIMBY Paradise!

One common leftist argument against new housing is the “Red Vienna” argument: the claim that housing can only be affordable in places where the government dominates the housing market. Supporters of this claim like to mention Vienna, where (according to progressive lore) Big Brother builds lots and lots of super-affordable public housing, while the Big Bad Market is not involved. But a recent article about Vienna states that “one-third of the 13,000 new apartments built in Vienna each year are funded by the government and commissioned by the housing associations.” This means that about 8700 apartments are built every year by the private sector. In a city with 1.8 million people, that’s a lot. By contrast, in Manhattan (which has a comparable population) about 3000 housing units were built between 2014 and 2017- far less than Vienna. Even in Houston (which has a slightly bigger population) only 14,653 housing units of all types, or about 3700 per year, were built between 2014 and 2017. In other words, even if not a single unit of public housing had not been built, Vienna would still have built more than twice as many units as high-growth Houston, and about ten times as many as Manhattan. Vienna’s affordability is thus an argument in favor of lots more housing, not an argument in favor of NIMBYism.

The Storper paper: not exactly a bombshell

Some commentators are slightly agog over an academic paper by Andres Rodrieguz-Pose and Michael Storper; Richard Florida writes that they shows that ” the effect of [housing] supply has been blown far out of proportion. ” Most of this paper isn’t really about the effect of housing supply on prices at all. Instead, the first 80 percent of the paper seems to argue that it makes no sense for low-skilled domestic workers to live in cities, because “Several decades ago mid-skilled work was clustered in big cities, while low-skilled work was most prevalent in the countryside. No longer; the mid-skilled jobs that remain are more likely to be found in rural areas than in urban ones.” (p. 20). The authors’ attack on upzoning is in the last few pages, and is based on broad, sweeping generalizations rather than actual data. First, they say that upzoning “would very likely involve replacing older and lower-quality housing stock in areas highly favoured by the market, effectively decreasing housing supply for lower income households in desirable areas.” (p. 30). They cite no source or data for this assertion- just pure conjecture. What’s wrong with their claim? First, such gentrification happens without upzoning; for example, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, gentrification occurred through renovation of existing structures, rather than new, taller buildings- and of course places where new construction is politically difficult (such as San Francisco and Manhattan) are notorious for gentrification. Second, it assumes that new housing inevitably replaces older housing, rather than, say, vacant lots- an obvious overgeneralization.. Second, they rely on the “but we’re already building new housing!” argument. They cite a paywalled newpaper article to support this statement: “rents are now declining for the highest earners while continuing to increase for the poorest in San Francisco, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Pittsburgh, […]

High-Rises and Street Life

One common argument against tall buildings is that they reduce street life, because the most expensive high-rises have gyms and other amenities that cause people to stay inside the buildings rather than using the street.  Because Manhattan has plenty of high-rises and plenty of street life, I have always thought this was a dumb argument. But until recently I’ve never thought of any way to prove or disprove the argument empirically- until now.  It seems to me that if high-rises were bad for street life, places with expensive high-rises would have lower Walkscores than other neighborhoods; I reason that if high-rise residents stayed inside rather than going outside, they would be surrounded by fewer businesses than low-rise neighborhoods. So do high-rises generally have lower Walkscores? Not in dense areas; for example, 432 Park Avenue, one of Manhattan’s most expensive buildings, has a Walkscore of 98.  Similarly, Boston’s Millenium Tower, a 60-story residential skyscraper, has a Walkscore of 96.  

A great new paper on how government fights walking

Many readers of this blog know that government subsidizes driving- not just through road spending, but also through land use regulations that make walking and transit use inconvenient and dangerous.  Gregory Shill, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, has written an excellent new paper that goes even further. Of course, Shill discusses anti-pedestrian regulations such as density limits and minimum parking requirements.  But he also discusses government practices that make automobile use far more dangerous and polluting than it has to be.  For example, environmental regulations focus on tailpipe emissions, but ignore environmental harm caused by roadbuilding and the automobile manufacturing process.  Vehicle safety regulations make cars safer, but American crashworthiness regulations do not consider the safety of pedestrians in automobile/pedestrian crashes.   Speeding laws allow very high speeds and are rarely enforced. If you don’t want to read the 100-page article, a more detailed discussion is at Streetsblog.

Big Media Gets Big Buildings Wrong

While reading someone else’s work, I recently ran across an article by David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, claiming that overseas oligarchs  turning apartments all over the world into unused “ghost apartments”.  In this article, Johnston writes:  “In Paris, for instance, one apartment in four sits empty most of the time.” This claim struck me as so astonishing that as to be implausible, for the simple reason that in other “global” cities vacancy rates are much lower.  For example, in New York only 9 percent of housing units are vacant, and most of those units are currently for sale or rent.*  Even this vacancy level should not be particularly astonishing, since cheaper American cities often have higher vacancy rates.  For example, Houston has an 11 percent vacancy rate, and Atlanta has an 18 percent vacancy rate. After googling “one in four paris apartments vacant” I found an article claiming that 26 percent of apartments in four Paris arrondisements (neighborhoods) is vacant- a much narrower claim, comparable to an assertion that one in four midtown Manhattan apartments is vacant.   One would think that a journalist as distinguished as Johnston would know the difference between “Paris” and “some parts of Paris.” A more recent article claims that only 7.5 percent of Paris apartments are vacant- a lower vacancy rate than that of New York.   Moreover, we don’t know what the local media means by “vacant.”  Does this category limited to apartments that are unused 365 days a year?  What about units that are rented out now and then through Airbnb?  Or units that are currently being advertised for rent or sale?  I suspect that the true number of “ghost apartments” is far lower than 7.5 percent, since in London (another “global city”) less than 1 percent of housing units are […]

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