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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
On June 23, Congress passed its first big, standalone housing policy bill in a generation. The bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, is a salad of small reforms and previously-introduced bills. One of those is the Build Now…
If the 2010s were the decade that urbanists “discovered” zoning as a major force in American cities, the 2020s are the decade of discovering all the non-zoning restrictions and regulations that restrict housing construction and urban change, especially building codes…
Sag Harbor, New York, has more yachts than apartments. To its credit, the local government took steps to allow one local landowner to replace a parking lot with affordable apartments intended for local service workers. But state law is so…
Housing policy expert Madeleine Marr dug into previously-written legislative histories of federal housing bills. She was kind enough to share her bibliography, including in parenthesis which housing laws are covered:
A new NBER paper by Yu-Hsin Ho (an incoming Harvard grad student) and three co-authors including Chiang-Tai Hsieh, contrasts zoning-segregated U.S. metro areas to Taipei, Taiwan, which allows mixed uses almost everywhere. The most interesting finding is a ranking of…
Samuel Hughes asks an excellent question in Works in Progress: Why aren’t there any YIMBYs, or NIMBYs for that matter, in continental Europe? It’s not for lack of high home prices. Instead, Hughes hypothesizes that underlying NIMBYism is in fact…
Two useful resources came across my desk this week. From Sargun Kaur and Bhuvana Anand, an analysis of recent building reforms in eight Indian states – not all of which succeeded in expanding the practically buildable space. They use a…
Kudos to the Pew housing research team for successfully tracing a real-life moving chain in Washington, D.C. They started at the bottom, with a woman named Titi who was living in a homeless shelter, and traced six rounds of vacancies.…
Via Kevin Lewis, a new paper in an influential econ journal demonstrates that mayoral elections have a large influence on housing supply outcomes. It also shows that developer’s political contributions pay off in ways that sound like corruption. Returns to…
On Twitter, Patrick Collison chided YIMBYs for using Paris as an example of density – because Paris happens to not only be a helpful example of high population density midrise urban form, but is also widely considered the most beautiful…
