On Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen linked to a new paper in Real Estate Economics by Anthony W. Orlando and Christian L. Redfearn. It's a simple, empirical paper using data from 8 metro areas in California and Texas. It finds that net new housing creating appears to become more expensive and more … [Read more...]
Interrogating the Strong Towns “Ponzi Scheme”
NYU professor Arpit Gupta has channeled the annoyance of economists into a blog post directly calling out the Strong Towns "growth Ponzi scheme" line of argument. Like Arpit, I've never found a clear accounting for the Strong Towns argument. The basic evidence, as Arpit shows, is in the opposite … [Read more...]
Mumbai upzoning
Geetika Nagpal's job market paper, written with Sahil Gandhi, shows that a 2017 increase in allowed floor area ratio in Mumbai had a tremendous impact on affordability by accidentally improving the economics of smaller apartments. (Note that the authors are updating the paper, so some of the … [Read more...]
Responsive Cities in the arena: Brazil floods
Update: Support the recovery work of Responsive Cities Institute by donating via PayPal. Last year, Alain Bertaud and I traveled to Porto Alegre and spent time learning from the excellent architects and urbanists at the Responsive Cities Institute - you can think of it as a practitioner-led, … [Read more...]
Market Affordable
Check out my new post at Metropolitan Abundance Project: How “inclusionary” are market-rate rentals? In metropolitan Baltimore, a family of four making $73,000 in 2024 qualifies for 60% AMI affordable housing, where it would pay $1,825 per month for rent, utilities included. A third of new … [Read more...]
No Solutions, Just Tradeoffs
File under "sad", not under "surprising": We provide evidence of intensified discriminatory behavior by landlords in the rental housing market during the eviction moratoria instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected from an experiment that involved more than 25,000 inquiries of … [Read more...]
The sudden death of the American condo
Condos are disappearing. They persist now mainly in pre-2010 buildings. Among multifamily homes built in the 2020s, just 1 in 25 is owner-occupied. What happened? I pulled American Community Survey data via IPUMS to get a better grasp of the numbers and the geography. Nationally, the rate of … [Read more...]
The urban economics of sprawl
Should YIMBYs support or oppose greenfield growth? Two basic values animate most YIMBYs: housing affordability and urbanism. Sprawl puts those values into tension. Let's take as a given that sprawl is "bad" urbanism, mediocre at best. Realistically, it's rarely going to be transit-oriented, … [Read more...]
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