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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
After a 15 year experiment, England is phasing out the New Homes Bonus that has been part of the formula for distributing funds to local governments since 2011. In revamping the broader funding scheme, the current government explained its decision:…
My favorite conference of the year is always the Urban Economics Association annual meeting, which is small, collegial, and technical. In 2024 and 2025, I published my notes on interesting papers. I think I went a little overboard this year…
What’s permanent about the “housing crisis” (or should we call it the “housing Cold War”?) and what’s new in the past decade? I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation with Aziz Sunderji – see the whole thing on his Substack.
Thanks to Infrastructure Lab at the National University of Singapore, there’s now a global atlas of every (??) data center built or proposed, as well as a catalog of active legislation, including across US states. Check it out.
Andrew Miller at Changing Lanes recently re-posted his 2025 article, “The 50% problem.” He’s positively inclined toward self-driving cars, but recognizes that there will be real growing pains. In this article, he predicts that tensions between human and machine drivers…
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…
