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Salim Furth

Salim Furth

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 72
  • Comments: 1

Cities for families?

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 […]

Deep Research: Supermajority laws around the states

Here are the results of my first use of OpenAI’s Deep Research tool. I asked for information that I know well – and in which inaccurate research has been published. It did a great job and relied substantially on my own research. But it also went beyond my list – identifying protest petition statutes in two states I had missed: New Mexico and South Dakota. That’s embarrassing. Deep Research also turned up an important, related law I hadn’t known: Downzonings in Wisconsin require a 2/3 majority vote. Getting the prompt right First, I asked ChatGPT 4o how to write the prompt. I’m a land use, housing, and zoning researcher. A key question in my area is how easy or difficult it is to change zoning. In most states, to change the zoning of a particular parcel or the text of a particular zoning district requires a simple majority vote of the city council, town meeting, or other legislative body. I’d like to ask Deep Research to find out which states, if any and under which conditions, require a supermajority vote to change zoning. Can you help me write a prompt to pose this question to Deep Research? GPT replied: Here’s a clear and precise prompt for Deep Research:_______________________________________________________________________Research Request: Supermajority Requirements for Zoning Changes by State I’m conducting research on the legal and procedural requirements for zoning changes in different U.S. states. In most states, changing the zoning of a specific parcel or amending the text of a zoning district requires a simple majority vote by the relevant legislative body (e.g., city council, town meeting). However, I am interested in identifying states where a supermajority vote is required under certain conditions. Please provide: 1. A list of states that require a supermajority vote for zoning changes.2. The specific conditions under […]

How much housing does Massachusetts build?

In a recent post, I revealed the 91 large cities and counties that consistently fail to report complete data to the federal Building Permit Survey (BPS). But what about smaller jurisdictions, which often have weak record-keeping and slim staffs – and what about states made up of many such small jurisdictions? The gold standard for counting housing units is the Decennial Census. That shows that the number of homes in Massachusetts grew from 2,622,000 in 2000 to 2,808,000 in 2010 to 2,998,000 in 2020. Even though building permits do not always result in completed homes, local reports and Census Bureau interpolations fall well short: It’s possible that some building permits pulled in 2007-2009 were delayed by the Great Recession but completed after the 2010 census. Taking the twenty-year period together, the BPS (2000-2019) is only picking up 84 percent of completed homes – not to mention those that are permitted but abandoned. Looking ahead, Gov. Healey’s administration has estimated (poorly) that the commonwealth needs 222,000 new homes by 2035. How does that compare to recent production? We don’t have a 2024 Census. But if we assume that reported 2015-2024 building permits turn into housing at the same rate that 2000-2019 building permits did, we can get a working estimate. The BPS reports 167,000 Bay State building permits from 2015 through 2024 (with extrapolation for December, 2024). That means that something closer to 199,000 new homes were likely completed in that period. If that’s true, then the administration’s “housing need” estimate is just 12% higher than recent construction – which has been inadequate to prevent a huge upswing in rents and prices.

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