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Liberalizing Cities From The Ground Up
Montana passed a transformative land use reform package in 2023 – the “Montana Miracle”. This year, Montana’s legislature is again considering a lot of housing bills. The western United States overall has been the most dynamic region for pro-housing legislation,…
As a sense of urgency builds around North America’s housing affordability crisis, researchers have begun to look beyond zoning and permitting for ways to build more housing for less money. In the wake of a movement to bring more mass timber buildings to the US and Canada, some have turned their attention to the role of building codes. The first building code issue to receive sustained grassroots attention is the requirement, listed in the International Building Code (despite the name, a code mostly in use in the US), for buildings over three stories to have two exit staircases connected by a corridor. This requirement has long been in effect in most of the United States, with the exception of New York City, Seattle, and recently Honolulu and Knoxville (and a few other areas with modified versions of the requirement, as detailed in this Niskanen Center report.) Architect Sean Jursnick and developer Peter LiFari’s policy brief for Mercatus is a good general survey of the issue; for a discussion of local reforms that also interviews many of the key players, also read Patrick Sisson’s article in The Architect’s Newspaper. State legislators in Tennessee, Washington, Oregon, California, Connecticut, Virginia, and Minnesota have passed legislation directing their states’ building councils to consider – or simply approve – single-stair buildings up to six stories. Bills to similar effect were also introduced but not passed last year in New York and Pennsylvania; this year, bills are being considered in Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, and Texas. Los Angeles city councilmember Nithya Raman has also introduced a motion to update the building code there, and Austin is debating such a motion as well. Mechanisms of reform A policy brief for HUD’s Cityscape journal by Stephen Smith of the Center for Building in North […]
With state legislative seasons in full swing, a picture of the landscape of land use reform is emerging. One dynamic I’ve been tracking: Yes In God’s Back Yard (YIGBY) bills, designed to allow religious organizations (and sometimes other nonprofits) to easily use their land to build housing, are still in vogue with lawmakers. Salim Furth and I predicted last year that this year would be a key test for this policy area. While it would be a mistake to expect YIGBY to solve the housing crisis on its own, these bills can broaden the housing abundance coalition and let reluctant state lawmakers take a first step into preemption of local zoning ordinances. So far, YIGBY bills have been proposed in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Washington state. In fact, this year’s bills seem to be converging on (at least part of) the framework for YIGBY legislation that Furth and I proposed. Our framework would let organizations build to a specified development intensity everywhere, as well as to the development intensity of the surrounding neighborhood if it’s denser than that base density. Arizona’s HB 2191, for instance, specifies: B. The height requirements for an allowed use development on an eligible site must meet one of the following: 1. Be not more than thirty-eight feet and three full floors. 2. Be the maximum height allowable by the current municipal zoning regulations for retail, office, residential or mixed use. 3. be not more than the height of a previously existing structure on the eligible site. 4. be not more than the height of any existing building within one-fourth mile of the eligible site, except for buildings developed pursuant to this section. Clauses C and D set similar limits for setbacks and maximum lot coverage, followed by (emphasis mine): E. […]
A review of a book that endorses more flexible zoning, but doesn't reject zoning entirely.
In New York City, one common argument against congestion pricing (or in fact, against any policy designed to further the interests of anyone outside an automobile) is that because outer borough residents are all car-dependent suburbanites, only Manhattanites would benefit. For example, film critic John Podhoretz tweeted: “Yeah, nothing easier that taking the subway from Soundview or Gravesend or Valley Stream.” Evidently, Podhoretz thinks these three areas are indistinguishable from the outer edges of suburbia: places where everyone drives everywhere. But let’s examine the facts. Soundview is a neighborhood in the Southeast Bronx, a little over 8 miles from my apartment in Midtown Manhattan near the northern edge of the congestion pricing zone. There are three 6 train subway stops in Soundview: Elder Avenue, Morrison Avenue, and St. Lawrence Avenue. Soundview zip codes include 10472 and 10473. In zip code 10472* only 25.7 percent of workers drove or carpooled to work according to 2023 census data; 59.6 percent use a bus or subway, and the rest use other modes (including walking, cycling, taxis and telecommuting). 10473, the southern half of Soundview, is a bit more car-oriented- but even there only 45 percent of workers drive alone or carpool. 41 percent of 10473 workers use public transit- still a pretty large minority by American standards, and more than any American city outside New York. In the two zip codes combined there are just 45,131 occupied housing units, and 24,094 (or 53 percent) don’t have a vehicle. In other words, not only do most Soundview residents not drive to work, most don’t even own a car. Gravesend, at the outer edge of Brooklyn over 12 miles from my apartment, is served by three subway stops on the F train alone: Avenue P, Avenue U and Avenue X. It is also served by […]
Builders seeking approval for proposed real estate developments must in almost all American localities navigate a complex series of required procedural steps, but for those who persevere and succeed in obtaining a permit, one eleventh-hour device can bring all those efforts to naught: the objector lawsuit. Easy to file but difficult to resolve, lawsuits by development opponents even when unsuccessful can delay projects by a year or more, playing havoc with cost and time estimates. Why are these suits so simple to start? The American common law system sets a low bar for a plaintiff to establish a right to maintain a lawsuit — known as “standing” — in which the mere claim that an injury has occurred, or even may occur in the future, is sufficient to keep a case moving along. Recognizing plaintiffs’ interest in having their day in court and the prudential consideration of having claims decided on their merits, judges will rarely find an injury to be so minor, indirect or speculative that it’s not worth judicial attention. While these considerations are important, they were not formulated with the expectation that they would be used to thwart individual exercise of property rights and the ordinary activities of civilized life. Some may recall the 1972 Supreme Court case of Sierra Club v. Morton, where the Court narrowly (4-3) decided that an environmental organization couldn’t rely upon alleged injuries to nature, rather than to the organization itself, to establish its right to sue to stop a planned ski resort, and which resulted in a dissent by Justice Douglas arguing for “conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” The holding was quickly a moot point, as environmental organizations and other entities opposed to development recognized that they could recruit individual members who could allege […]
A new paper in the Journal of Development Economics by Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, and Andrii Parkhomenko estimates the welfare gains of Transit Oriented Development in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru metro or the Namma metro is around 170Km long including the planned sections. Bengaluru has low building heights and the paper’s counterfactual depends on relaxing FSI/FAR from their current level to 2 (only 2!) around 500 meters of the metro line. The paper finds “The complementarity between TOD and the metro unlocks additional gains equivalent to about $64 million per year or one-half of annual operating costs of the metro system.” Paper reference:Chen, L., Hasan, R., Jiang, Y., & Parkhomenko, A. (2024). Faster, taller, better: Transit improvements and land use policies. Journal of Development Economics, 103322.
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 often diverge a bit from end-of-decade Census counts. Is there another way to judge the popularity of various places? Perhaps so. I just uncovered a database of real estate price trends from Redfin. Because housing supply is often slow to respond to demand trends, housing prices probably reflect changes in demand. What do they show? First let’s look at the most expensive cities: San Francisco and New York City where I live now. If conventional wisdom is accurate, I would expect to see stagnant or declining housing prices in the city and some increase in suburbia. In Manhattan, the median sale price for condos and co-ops was actually lower in 2024 than it was in mid-2019, declining from $1.25 million in August 2019 to $1.05 million in August 2024.* Similarly, in the Bronx multifamily sale prices decreased slightly (though prices for single-family homes increased). By contrast, in suburban Westchester County, prices increased by about 30 percent (from just under 250k to 325k). Similarly, in Nassau County prices increased from 379k to 517k, an increase of well over one-third. So these prices suggest something like a classic suburban sprawl scenario: stagnant city prices, growing suburban prices. In San Francisco, by contrast, property values declined everywhere. City prices declined from $1.2 million in August 2019 to just under $1 million today; in suburban Marin County, the median price declined from $633k to $583k. So sale price data certainly supports the narrative of flight from expensive cities. What about places that are dense but not quite as expensive? But […]
Everyone agrees that delays and uncertainty are costly for housing development. But it’s very hard to put a number on it. The obvious costs (lawyer hours, interest over many months) are surely an underestimate. Professors Stuart Gabriel and Edward Kung have a useful answer, at least for Los Angeles: As a lower bound, simply by pulling forward in time the completion of already started projects, we estimate that reductions of 25% in approval time duration and uncertainty would increase the rate of housing production by 11.9%. If we also account for the role of approval times in incentivizing new development, we estimate that the 25% reduction in approval time would increase the rate of housing production by a full 33.0%. Delay and uncertainty go together for two reasons. One is that many delays are caused by uncertain processes, like public hearings and discretionary negotiations. The other is that market conditions change, so a developer chasing a hot market in Los Angeles is probably too late – by the time she’s leasing up, the market will have changed.
Jane Jacobs wasn’t optimistic about the future of civilisation. ‘We show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age,’ she declares in Dark Age Ahead, her final book published in 2004. She evidences a breakdown in family and civic life, universities which focus more on credentialling than on actually imbuing knowledge in its participants, broken feedback mechanisms in government and business, and the abandonment of science in favour of ‘pseudo-scientific’ methods. Jacobs’ prose is, as always, rich, convincing and successful in making the reader see the importance of her claims. Yet the argument that we are spiralling into a new Dark Age, similar to that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, is not quite complete and I remain unconvinced that the areas she identified point towards collapse as opposed to merely things we could, and should, work to improve. Let us start with the idea that families are ‘rigged to fail,’ as she puts it in chapter two. Jacobs, urbanist at heart, cites ‘inhumanely long car commutes’ stemming from the disbanding of urban transit systems, rising housing costs, and a breakdown in ‘community resources’ – the result of increasingly low-dense forms of urban development – as a significant reason why families are now set up for failure. She suggests our days are filled with increasingly vacuous activities, leading to the rise of ‘sitcom families’ which ‘can and do fill isolated hours’ at the expense of ‘live friends.’ That phenomenon has now been replaced by the ‘smartphone family’ where time spent on TikTok, and consuming other forms of digital media have supplanted the ‘sitcom’ family of the past. There has been significant literature on the detrimental effects of digital technologies to our physical and mental health, not least in Jonathan Haidt’s most recent book, The Anxious Generation. A similar picture is painted by Timothy Carney in […]
