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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Rent control has devalued property so badly that you could make a million dollars by tearing down a nice 12-unit building in my neighborhood.
Two new estimates of the national housing shortfall offer a seeming contradiction. But we can synthesize the demand and supply models to get close to the truth: High-priced places should build much more housing than Up For Growth estimates and moderate-priced places will build much less housing than the JEC predicts.
As foreigners, we are mesmerized by zakkyo buildings or yokocho, but within Japan, scholars, and authorities often ignore and neglect them as urban subproducts. In spite of their conspicuous presence and popularity, the official discourse still considers most of Emergent Tokyo as unsightly, dangerous, or underdeveloped. The book offers the Japanese readership a fresh view of their own everyday life environment as a valuable social, spatial, and even aesthetic legacy from which they could envision alternative futures.
American YIMBYs point to Tokyo as proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability. But a great deal of that knowledge can be traced back to a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog post. As the YIMBY movement matures, it's time to go books deep into the fascinating details of Japan's land use institutions.
Are there diverse places in the U.S. where racial differences among residents are small enough to be undetectable to a typical resident? Places where Roger Starr's ideal of "integration without tears" might be a reality, where people of different races socialize as equals, share culture and priorities, and work in the same range of occupations?
Urbanist and YIMBY Twitter had a field day dunking on Nathan J. Robinson, whose essay in his publication Current Affairs called for building new cities in California. But California really could use some new cities - and we need to think about them in primarily economic terms.
A trip to Houston reveals how a city can design without shame, urbanize around cars, and achieve privacy in a context of radical integration.
The narrow choice of city versus suburb is a balance of cost and amenities. But the bigger question – in which region should I make my home? – requires one to look on a higher plane.
A quick data exercise shows that LA really is unique among big American metros, matched only by its East Coast twin, Miami.
Case studies from several authors help explain the gritty politics of "Yes." The list includes three classics and will be expanded with reader submissions.
