Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
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 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…
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…
A recent “supply skeptic” paper by various academics has gotten a lot of attention in housing-related social media. The somewhat sensationalistic title is: “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis.” But unlike most random rants from “not in my…
I recently read a report from one of Georgetown Law School’s many centers, discussing the shortage of low-income housing in six metro areas with high housing growth. * The report points out that owner-occupied units built since 2010 are far…
In the WSJ, Jeff Yass & Steve Moore play the world’s smallest violin for the poor homeowners who are sitting on more than half a million dollars of nominal capital gains and therefore cannot sell. If only that tiny number…
One argument against Manhattan’s congestion pricing plan is that it merely redistributes congestion and pollution to nearby neighborhoods and suburbs, as drivers choose alternative routes that avoid midtown and downtown Manhattan. If this was true, air quality would decrease citywide…
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has received some publicity for stating: “If you can’t afford to live here [in New York City] maybe you should not live here.” From the standpoint of advice to individuals, this statement of course makes perfect…
Sometimes, opponents of new housing claim that they aren’t really against all housing- they just want housing to be “gentle density” (which I think usually means “not tall”), or “affordable” (which I think usually means “lower-income housing”). Even if these…
