People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example. My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of … [Read more...]
Can Housing Quotas Affect Demand For Housing?
Economist Nick Rowe at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative has a provocative piece asking whether housing demand curves might actually slope up. He puts his argument in abstract mathematical terms (again, he’s an economist), but the germ of the idea is that “everybody wants to live near everyone else, … [Read more...]
The Answer to Expensive Housing: Build More
If you restrict the supply of housing, other things equal, what will happen to the price? That’s not a trick question. Any competent Econ 101 student would answer correctly that the price will rise. One reporter for the Washington Post gets it. In a hopeful sign of spreading economic literacy, … [Read more...]
Palo Alto: The Land of Too Many Jobs
Co-authored by Tony Albert and Jeff Fong SF Curbed recently sat down with Patrick Burt, Mayor of Palo Alto, to get his response to the high profile resignation of Kate Vershov Downing. Downing, of course, was the Palo Alto Planning Commissioner who publicly announced that she will move her family … [Read more...]
How The Housing Market Works
[Editors note: Sandy Ikeda was an original Market Urbanism writer and is now a regular columnist for the Foundation for Economic Education, or FEE.org. FEE has offered republishing rights, so Sandy's past work will be appearing here every Tuesday at 10am eastern time] People sometimes argue that … [Read more...]
Parking Requirements Increase Traffic And Rents. Let’s Abolish Them.
Everybody in LA can agree on one thing - traffic blows hard. Harder, even, than these guys: Hate traffic? Blame parking. But here’s a secret: people don’t cause traffic. Cars do. And you know what makes people use cars? … [Read more...]
Does Home-sharing Create Negative Externalities?
A decade or two ago, a traveler who wished to stay in a city temporarily had no alternative to a hotel. Even if the owner of a house or condominium wished to rent out a room for a short period of time, the costs of advertising in a newspaper would have at least partially canceled out the … [Read more...]
NIMBYs Outdo YIMBYs In Organizing Ability
A problem that pro-housing YIMBYs face in communities nationwide is that the NIMBYs opposing them are much better organized. The reason boils down to the classic problem of concentrated costs and dispersed benefits: the beneficiaries of new housing are scattered, while those who benefit … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- …
- 32
- Next Page »