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Category Book Review

Book Review: Arbitrary Lines – How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

Arbitrary Lines is the newest must read book on zoning by land use scholar and Market Urbanism contributor, Nolan Gray. The book is split into three sections, starting with what zoning is and where it comes from followed by chapters on its varied negative effects, and ending with recommendations for reform. For even deep in the weeds YIMBYs, it’s well worth picking up. There’s nothing dramatically controversial here, but give it a thorough read and you’re guaranteed to learn something new. In particular, the book’s third section on reforms is outstanding. It starts with a slate of policy proposals typical to this kind of text, but quickly goes much farther afield. After suggested policy changes, we’re invited to consider a world without zoning via an in-depth look at Houston’s land use regime. Here we’re treated to both an explanation of how it works and the unique political history that left the city unsaddled with zoning. Nolan goes on to close his recommendations with a call to reimagine what a city planner could be in a post-zoning American city; a call that, as a former New York City planner, he is uniquely fit to make. Aside from the content, this book deserves points for prose. Arbitrary Lines is blessedly readable. The writing flows and the varied anecdotes interspersed throughout the book make it feel less like a policy tract and more like a conversation with your favorite professor during office hours. For those already initiated, buy the book and enjoy nodding your head and learning a couple new things. And for those trying to share the good news of land use reform, consider making Arbitrary Lines that one thing you get friends or family to read. It’s among the most accessible books on land use I’ve ever read, and it’s a […]

Unpacking Emergent Tokyo with author Jorge Almazán

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.

Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan

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.

Review: Homelessness is a Housing Problem

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 housing is scarce and rents are high, lots of people are homeless. Where rents are lower, fewer people are homeless, even in very poor places. (In fact, high city incomes correlate positively with homelessness, because more and better jobs lead to higher demand for housing). By contrast, many other factors that one might think are related to homelessness in fact are not correlated on a citywide basis. For example, since homeless people are generally poor, one might think that places with high poverty rates or high unemployment rates have lots of homelessness. The authors show that this is not the case. Where most people are poor, there is less demand for housing, which translates into lower rents and less homelessness. One might also think that places with warm weather have lots of homelessness, because homeless people might be attracted to them. But high-rent cold cities like Boston have above-average levels of homelessness, while cheaper warm-weather cities like Orlando and Charlotte do not. However, homeless people are more likely to have temporary shelter in cold cities than in expensive warm-weather cities like San Diego- either because city governments are less motivated to build homeless shelters when no one is at risk of freezing to death, or because the homeless themselves are less eager to use shelters. I suspect that if the authors focused only on highly visible unsheltered homelessness, they might have found a stronger correlation with weather). It might be argued that shelters themselves (or other social services) attract the destitute. […]

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 more complicated. Simplification is valuable and gives us more general insights. But is greenfield development complicated in ways that are interesting and might change the results of urban economic models? Or that might change the ways we think or talk about development policy? Witold Rybczynski’s 2007 book Last Harvest helps answer these questions. It tracks a specific cornfield in Londonderry, Pennsylvania, from the retirement of the last farmer to the moving boxes of the first resident. With its zoomed-in lens, Last Harvest answers (or at least raises) lots of questions that are interesting but not especially important in the grand scheme: Why do expensive homes mix some top-line finishes with cheap, plasticky ones? Why do anti-development communities permit any subdivisions at all? What is ‘community sewerage,’ and how does it work? Exactly who thinks it’s attractive to have brick and vinyl cladding on the same house? What’s it like to buy a house from a national homebuilder? Does Chester County really produce forty percent of America’s mushrooms? The Stack Rybczynski does not use this term, but what he describes is part of what I call the “stack” of housing supply. One of the central facts of development is that it relies on a very long chain of industries and professions, each of which relies on every other part of the stack doing its job. If one part is left undone, nobody gets paid: ‘Without a water contract, we can’t get a permit for the water mains, […]

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 to various places to interview people who are engaged in the (legal) drama of what we now call “the housing crisis.” Boudreaux had the misfortune of being ahead of his time. The housing market was so soft in 2011 that his book landed with nary a sound. A quick web search turned up no book reviews besides the publisher’s blurbs. The book (and you’ll be forgiven if you stop reading right here) will set you back. That’s unfortunate. Just a few years later, the book would have connected with passions shared by the rapidly growing YIMBY movement and a publisher would have marketed it to the masses. Boudreaux’s thesis is that “the laws that govern our use of land are biased in favor of one specific group of Americans—affluent, home-owning families—who least need the government’s help.” He keeps his ideological cards close to the vest. But that’s the point: one need not lean left or right to want to stop using the power of the state to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. The first chapter is the most important, because it lays out the foundation for all that local governments do, good and bad, in land use: the police power. He’s writing from Manassas, Virginia, where “restaurants with Aztec pyramids on them” telegraph the large Hispanic immigrant community. A vocal minority opposed this local immigration, and pressured local governments to stop it. Of course, the city doesn’t issue passports, but the police power allows local […]

Get the tuck out of here

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 petty, it’s not irrelevant, because Parolek recommends that cities regulate to match his design goals, and such regulations could stifle some of the most successful contemporary infill growth. Parolek’s book suffers from his demands that missing middle housing match his own tastes. For instance, he has a (Western?) bias against three-story buildings. Having grown up in the Northeast, I think of three stories as the normal and appropriate height for a house. To each his own – but Parolek’s constant insistence on this point offers aid to neighborhood defenders who will be happy to quote him to make sure three-story middle housing remains missing. The house in the doghouse No form is in Parolek’s doghouse as much as the “tuck-under” townhouse, an attached house with a garage on the first floor. This is clearly a building that builders and buyers love: “If your regulations do not explicitly prohibit it, it will be what most builders will build” (p. 140). In fact, tuck-under townhouses are probably the most successful middle housing type around. In lightly-regulated Houston, builders small and large have been building townhouses, sometimes on courtyards perpendicular to the road. Parking is tucked. Townhouses are usually three stories tall (bad!), sometimes four. A few are even five stories. Their courtyards are driveways (also bad!). In a very different context – Palisades Park, NJ – tuck-under duplexes are everywhere. Their garages are excessive thanks to high parking minimums, but the form has been very successful nonetheless. These examples are not to be dismissed lightly: these are some of the only cases where widespread middle housing is […]

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? Aren’t those cost disadvantages just the result of unfair regulations and financing? Indeed, structures of three or more units are subject to a stricter fire code. It’s costly to set up a condo or homeowners’ association. Small-scale infill builders don’t have economies of scale. Those, and the other barriers to middle housing that Parolek lays out in Chapter 4, seem inherent or reasonable rather than unfair. In particular, most middle housing types cannot, if all units are owner-occupied, use a brilliant legal tradition known as “fee simple” ownership. Fee simple is the most common form of ownership in the Anglosphere and it facilitates clarity in transactions, chain of title, and maintenance. Urbanists should especially favor fee simple ownership of most city parcels because it facilitates redevelopment. Consider a six-plex condominium nearing the end of its useful life: to demolish and redevelop the site requires bringing six owners to agreement on the terms and timing of redevelopment. A single-owner building can be bought in a single arms-length transaction. It’s no coincidence that the type of middle housing with the greatest success in recent years – townhomes – can be occupied by fee-simple owners, combining the advantages of owner-occupancy with the advantages of the fee simple legal tradition. Many middle housing forms enjoy their own structural advantage: one unit is frequently the home of the (fee simple) owner. By occupying one unit, a purchaser can also access much lower interest rates than a non-resident landlord. (This is thanks to FHA insurance, as Parolek […]

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 book Missing Middle Housing expounds the concept (which he coined), collecting in one place the arguments for missing middle housing, many examples, and several emblematic case studies. The entire book is beautifully illustrated and enjoyable to read, despite its ample technical details. Missing Middle Housing is targeted to people who know how to read a pro forma and a zoning code. But there’s interest beyond the home-building industry. Several states and cities have rewritten codes to encourage middle housing. Portland’s RIP draws heavily on Parolek’s ideas. In Maryland, I testified warmly about the benefits of middle housing. I came to Missing Middle Housing with very favorable views of missing middle housing. Now I’m not so sure. Parolek’s case for middle housing relies so much on aesthetics and regulation that it makes me wonder whether middle housing deserves all the love it’s currently getting from the YIMBY movement. Can middle housing compete? Throughout the book, Parolek makes the case that missing middle construction cannot compete, financially, with either single-family or multifamily construction. That’s quite contrary to what I’ve read elsewhere. In a chapter called “The Missing Middle Housing Affordability Solution”, Daniel Parolek and chapter co-author Karen Parolek write: The economic benefits of Missing Middle Housing are only possible in areas where land is not already zoned for large, multiunit buildings, which will drive land prices up to the point that Missing Middle Housing will not be economically viable. (p. 56) On page 81, we learn, It’s a fact that building larger buildings, say a 125-150 unit apartment […]

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 are other urbanist and market books on the market. What makes this one unique? First, it focuses on Southern California, rather than taking a nationwide or worldwide perspective (though Stephens does have a few essays about other cities). Second, the book’s short-essay format means that one does not have to read a huge amount of text to understand his arguments. Because the book is a group of short essays, it doesn’t have one long argument. However, a few of the more interesting essays address: The negative side effects of liquor license regulation. Stephens writes that the Los Angeles zoning process gives homeowners effective veto power over new bars. As a result, the neighborhood near UCLA has no bars, which in turn causes UCLA students go to other neighborhoods to drink, elevating the risk to the public from drunk driving. The Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles; Los Angeles facilitated the transfer by giving land to the Dodgers- but only after a referendum passed with support from African-American and Latino neighborhoods. On the other hand, the construction of Dodger Stadium displaced a Latino community. To me, this story illustrates that arguments about “equity” can be simplistic. Los Angeles Latinos were both more likely than suburban whites to support Dodger Stadium, yet were more likely to be displaced by that stadium. So was having a stadium more equitable or less equitable than having no stadium? (On the other hand, a stadium that displaced no one might have been more equitable than either outcome). […]

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