In Homelessness is a Housing Problem, Prof. Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Page Aldern seek to answer the question: why is homelessness much more common in some cities than in others?They find that only two factors are significant: 1) overall rents and 2) rental vacancy rates. Where … [Read more...]
Book review: Last Harvest
In the standard urban growth model, a circular city lies in a featureless agricultural plain. When the price of land at the edge of the city rises above the value of agricultural land, “land conversion” occurs. In the real world, we’re more likely to call it “development” and it is, of course, a lot … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Housing Bias
The best book on zoning and NIMBYism you’ve never read might well be The Housing Bias by Paul Boudreaux. The author is a law professor, but you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s a journalist. His writing is engaging - and occasionally funny – and he does what is unthinkable for many scholars: drives … [Read more...]
Get the tuck out of here
Tuck-under duplexes in Palisades Park, NJ (Google Streetview)In two previous posts, I’ve raised questions about the competitiveness of missing middle housing. This post is more petty: I want to challenge the design rigidities that Daniel Parolek promotes in Missing Middle Housing. Although … [Read more...]
In praise of fee simple ownership
In yesterday's post, I showed that missing middle housing, as celebrated in Daniel Parolek’s new book, may be stuck in the middle, too balanced to compete with single family housing on the one hand and multifamily on the other.But what about all the disadvantages that middle housing faces? … [Read more...]
Stuck in the (Missing) Middle
Everybody loves missing middle housing! What’s not to like? It consists of neighborly, often attractive homes that fit in equally well in Rumford, Maine, and Queens, New York. Missing middle housing types have character and personality. They’re often affordable and vintage.Daniel Parolek’s new … [Read more...]
Review: The Urban Mystique, by Josh Stephens
This book, available from solimarbooks.com, is a set of very short essays (averaging about three to five pages) on topics related to urban planning. Like me, Stephens generally values walkable cities and favors more new housing in cities. So naturally I am predisposed to like this book.But there … [Read more...]
What Should I Read to Understand Zoning?
We are blessed and cursed to live in times in which most smart people are expected to have an opinion on zoning. Blessed, in that zoning is arguably the single most important institution shaping where we live, how we move around, and who we meet. Cursed, in that zoning is notoriously obtuse, with … [Read more...]