Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has pledged to work towards the construction of 3 million new housing units during her term. Setting aside the methods, what does that mean? And, as she said in a speech last week, would it "end America's housing shortage"? First, it's pretty obvious that Harris … [Read more...]
How much does delay cost?
Everyone agrees that delays and uncertainty are costly for housing development. But it's very hard to put a number on it. The obvious costs (lawyer hours, interest over many months) are surely an underestimate. Professors Stuart Gabriel and Edward Kung have a useful answer, at least for Los … [Read more...]
Living on the edge
It's hard to imagine a better example than this: A natural zoning experiment in Denver: These two homes straddle a 2010 zoning boundary change. The result: The house in duplex zoning converted into two homes, and the other converted into a McMansion that cost 80% more.Arthur Gailes, AEI This … [Read more...]
Dataviz links: Over time, across space
Great links for quick data dives: The Historical Housing Prices Project gives rents and home prices from 1890 - 2006 for US cities. It's based on newspaper listings and was led by Ronan C. Lyons, Allison Shertzer, and Rowena Gray. I've added Ronan's blog, Time & Space, to the links below.City … [Read more...]
Can YIMBY policies cause large price declines?
Kevin Erdmann offers a helpful corrective to the "YIMBY triumphalism" of claiming that large relative rent declines in Austin and Minneapolis are results of YIMBY policies. He's mostly correct, especially about the rhetoric: arguing about housing supply from short term fluctuations is like arguing … [Read more...]
The benefit-cost ratio of U.S. social housing
Via The Excellent Kevin Lewis, here's a paper that tries - at least - to estimate the benefit-cost ratio of the most common types of social housing in the U.S. Edgar Olsen and Dirk Early estimate that Housing Choice Vouchers - aka Section 8 - have a respectable benefit to taxpayer cost of 77%. … [Read more...]
“The traditional model”
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...]
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