I recently saw a law review article quote an article with the headline: "Are Hedge Funds And Equity Funds Driving Up The Cost of Housing?" The article wrote that there is a "more plausible hypothesis behind the housing affordability crisis—namely, that hedge funds and private equity firms have been … [Read more...]
Morton’s Fork and urbanism
I recently read about an interesting logical fallacy: the Morton's fork fallacy, in which a conclusion "is drawn in several different ways that contradict each other." The original "Morton" was a medieval tax collector who, according to legend, believed that someone who spent lavishly you were … [Read more...]
How much housing does Massachusetts build?
In a recent post, I revealed the 91 large cities and counties that consistently fail to report complete data to the federal Building Permit Survey (BPS). But what about smaller jurisdictions, which often have weak record-keeping and slim staffs - and what about states made up of many such small … [Read more...]
Review: Key to the City, by Sara Bronin
In Key to the City, Sara Bronin both critiques and defends zoning. Like numerous other commentators (including myself) Bronin points out that anti-density regulations such as minimum lot size and minimum parking requirements artificially increase housing costs. Her critique of the latter … [Read more...]
Does your city do its part to measure housing production?
One of the core data sources for understanding homebuilding in the U.S. is the Census Bureau's Building Permit Survey. But a disturbing number of large cities and counties are lax in providing the monthly data that make the survey useful. The resulting lower-quality data impacts federal products, … [Read more...]
Homelessness exits: Systems or individual factors?
In a new essay for Works In Progress magazine, I explain how the familiar correlation between housing cost and homelessness works. The most intuitive explanation would be that in high cost cities, more people lack the income for very cheap shelter. But that's not true. Income varies more … [Read more...]
Housing filters (dorm / shelter edition)
From the Washington Post via Greater Greater Washington: New non-congregate shelter in for people experiencing homelessness opens in West EndThe shelter, in a former George Washington University dormitory, is meant for families without children under 18, individuals who were matched to permanent … [Read more...]
Where sale prices are going up
The conventional wisdom (based on Census estimates) seems to me that urban cores have lost population since COVID began, but are beginning to recover. But mid-decade Census estimates are often quite flawed. These estimates are basically just guesses based on complicated mathetmatical formulas, and … [Read more...]
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