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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
On June 23, Congress passed its first big, standalone housing policy bill in a generation. The bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, is a salad of small reforms and previously-introduced bills. One of those is the Build Now…
Every so often I read tweets complaining that the wrong kind of housing is being built. Some complain that there aren’t enough houses being built, because houses are supposedly more family-friendly. Others complain that there aren’t enough apartments being built,…
One argument for height limits and similar regulations is that high-rise apartment buildings generate more greenhouse gas emissions than low-rise apartment buildings, because the former category of buildings have more “embodied carbon”- that is, they use more energy-intensive building materials.…
Every so often I read a claim that the housing crisis is caused not by supply or demand, but by inequality. It occurred to me today that I should dig up information on inequality by metro area. I discovered pretty…
Housing policy expert Madeleine Marr dug into previously-written legislative histories of federal housing bills. She was kind enough to share her bibliography, including in parenthesis which housing laws are covered:
One anti-YIMBY argument is that “slowing growth or declines in rent are often signals to stop building new housing. Rather than encouraging housing suppliers to continue producing new units, decreases in rental prices put a halt to new supply.” In…
Supporters of new housing tend to believe that high housing costs increase homelessness, because expensive cities tend to have the largest number of homeless people. Recently, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute has argued that homeless people are attracted to…
Samuel Hughes asks an excellent question in Works in Progress: Why aren’t there any YIMBYs, or NIMBYs for that matter, in continental Europe? It’s not for lack of high home prices. Instead, Hughes hypothesizes that underlying NIMBYism is in fact…
Often, opponents of the pro-housing YIMBY* movement either do not care about the negative results of high housing costs, or are simply careless with the facts. Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia is more interesting: he seems as…
Recently I saw an argument on X that went something like this: Person A- infill is cheaper than sprawl because no one has to build new sewer lines! Person B- Sprawl is cheaper because its more expensive to build in…
