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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
I walked down the 400 block of K St with an international guest last night. It was hard to describe the transformation of the street. Google Streetview, however, has been there almost since the beginning. 2007 2011 2014 2017 2018…
In my day job, I suggested the name “Urbanity” for the research project that Emily Hamilton and I co-lead. I wasn’t sure about it myself, but it stuck. The noun urbanity, of course, refers both to the quality of being…
On April 17, 1980, the Washington Post ran a curious paragraph, reporting a five-year-old quote for the first time – one withheld originally out of deference to the source: [Douglas Schneider’s] views of urban transportation were spelled out clearly in…
With a hugely productive legislative season in 2025, pro-homes legislators are rapidly taking good ideas around the country. To keep track of it all, my team created a new set of interactive maps. You can see snapshots here: Our goal…
Two Substacks this week suggest that YIMBYism will or should merge with broader urbanist concerns to become something more like a political party. Two professors aligned with YIMBYism – Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher – argue that YIMBY needs a…
The Great Depression featured vast Hoovervilles, which expanded the hobo “jungles” of earlier times. When wartime production drew millions into industrial cities that had no beds for them, why didn’t the Hoovervilles expand into Rosie-the-Rivetervilles? The corollary is that the…
Check out Dan Bertolet’s review of the productive legislative year in Washington, where lawmakers preempted local parking, design, and unfunded inclusionary zoning requirements, among other things.
Via Kevin Erdmann, several Democratic and Independent U.S. senators have introduced a viciously NIMBY bill: The “Humans over Private Equity for Homeownership Act” is [would require] firms that own more than 50 single-family rental properties to divest their properties [over…
Connor Tabarrok has an excellent new primer on Texas Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs), covering history, function, governance, and critiques.
In response to David Albouy & Jason Faberman’s new NBER paper, Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle, Lyman Stone asks if this means that cities will always have lower fertility? I think the answer is probably yes, but that’s extrapolating beyond the paper at hand. What this paper shows is that there will always be some regions that are a better (worse) deal for parents relative to non-parents. The paper First, here’s Albouy & Faberman’s abstract, with emphasis added. TL;DR: there’s no point paying to live in Honolulu if you’re going to stay at home and watch Bluey every night. We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties. Consequently, individuals’ time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle. This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape. We present evidence that the move towards lower-amenity (and lower-cost) metropolitan areas is driven by changes in the number of household children over the life cycle: individuals, particularly the college educated, tend to move towards lower-amenity areas after having their first child. We develop an equilibrium model of location choice, labor supply, and amenity consumption and introduce life-cycle changes in household compo! sition that affect leisure preferences, consumption choices, and required home production time. Key to the model is a complementarity between leisure time spent going out and local amenities, which we estimate to be large and significant. Ignoring this complementarity and the distinction between types of leisure misses the dampening effect child rearing has on urban agglomeration. Since the […]
