One common leftist argument against new housing is the "Red Vienna" argument: the claim that housing can only be affordable in places where the government dominates the housing market. Supporters of this claim like to mention Vienna, where (according to progressive lore) Big Brother builds lots and … [Read more...]
Big Media Gets Big Buildings Wrong
While reading someone else's work, I recently ran across an article by David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, claiming that overseas oligarchs turning apartments all over the world into unused "ghost apartments". In this article, Johnston writes: "In Paris, for instance, one apartment in four … [Read more...]
What Should YIMBYs Learn From 2018?
Believe it or not, the YIMBY movement won a lot in 2018. It kicked off with January’s high of California State Senator Scott Wiener’s introduction of SB 827, which would have permitted multifamily development near transit across the state, but fell to a low after its eventual defeat in committee, … [Read more...]
New and Noteworthy: Randy Shaw’s Generation Priced Out
In Generation Priced Out, housing activist Randy Shaw writes a book about the rent crisis for non-experts. Shaw's point of view is that of a left-wing YIMBY: that is, he favors allowing lots of new market-rate housing, but also favors a variety of less market-oriented policies to prevent … [Read more...]
Response to “Steelmanning the NIMBYs”
Scott Alexander, a West Coast blogger, has written a post that has received a lot of buzz, called "Steelmanning the NIMBYs"; apparently, "steelmanning" is the opposite of "straw manning"; that is, it involves making the best possible case for an argument you don't really support. There have been … [Read more...]
Housing Still Suffers the Same Ills That Caused the Great Recession—Just Not the Ones You Think
If you type “housing crisis” into Google search, “2008” is no longer the first result. The subprime mortgage crisis that toppled the global economy just a decade ago has been supplanted on Google trends by “housing crisis 2018.” This time, the crisis isn’t an overabundance of housing; it’s a chronic … [Read more...]
Light and Air, Sound and Fury; or, Was the Equitable Life Building Panic Only About Shadows?
When I first became interested in urban planning, I believed a piece of professional mythology that went like this: “For all its faults, Euclidean zoning was a well-meaning effort to expand nuisance regulation in the face of the urban industrialization. It was later practitioners who used zoning for … [Read more...]
Mini review: Suburb, by Royce Hanson
Suburb: Planning Politics and the Public Interest is a scholarly book about planning politics in Montgomery County, a (mostly) affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. The book contains chapters on redevelopment of inner ring, transit-friendly areas such as Friendship Heights and Silver Spring, but also … [Read more...]