Updated 1/11/24 to add 3 new papers, Wegmann, Baqai, and Conrad (2023), Dobbels & Tavakalov (2023), and Hamilton (2024). The original post was published 3/14/23.A concerted research effort has brought minimum lot sizes into focus as a key element in city zoning reform. Boise is looking at … [Read more...]
Hopefully, AI will create a perpetual housing crisis
I don't know how successful artificial intelligence will be. But let's agree, for the moment, to consider a reasonably optimistic case where AI delivers significant productivity gains across a broad range of tasks - but not in a way that radically alters our Newtonian constraints. What would happen … [Read more...]
The weird D.C. housing grift that’s sending a former FBI agent to jail
WASHINGTON – David Paitsel, 42, a former FBI agent, and Brian Bailey, 53, a D.C. real estate developer were sentenced today on bribery and conspiracy charges for their role in schemes involving confidential information held by the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development United States … [Read more...]
An Autopsy of Hsieh & Moretti (2019)?
Update 11/20: Chang-Tai Hsieh counters that Greaney's critique ignores general equilibrium effects which make labor scale invariant. That doesn't address the alleged coding errors. We'll see - and perhaps I wrote an autopsy too early. Thanks to Bryan Caplan for getting Hsieh's response out to the … [Read more...]
Tyler Cowen: “Is Tokyo really a YIMBY success story?”
Tyler is stirring the pot over at Marginal Revolution, asking whether Tokyo's low rents are a YIMBY success or just a productivity failure: low productivity and low immigration keep demand down. He calls the latter "NIMBYism". That framing doesn't hold up very well, but we can discard it and think … [Read more...]
Pedestrianized streets usually fail – and that’s OK
Urbanists love to celebrate, and replicate great urban spaces - and sometimes can't understand why governments don't:https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1697265425241752004But what's important to recall - especially for those of us under, uh, 41 - is that pedestrianized streets aren't a … [Read more...]
Solano County Dreamin’: Is there a market urbanist way to build a new city?
Conor Dougherty and Erin Griffith revealed the identities behind a Silicon Valley investor group, Flannery Associates, that had gradually purchased 55,000 acres of ranchland near Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, California. Scale check: that's a lot of land. San Francisco is 30,000 acres; San … [Read more...]
Gentrification: An LVT Would Do That
In many cities, poor people occupy valuable urban land close to downtown jobs, amenities, and transit. They can afford to live there because the housing stock in inner areas is usually older. If it hasn't been completely renovated, the result can be quite cheap, even if the land is pretty … [Read more...]