I recently ran across an interesting discussion on Twitter about housing costs. Someone praised Chicago's low housing costs, and someone else responded that because Chicago's most troubled neighborhoods are so unusually dangerous and disinvested (compared to the most troubled parts of a safer city … [Read more...]
Milton’s Zoning Referendum
"Wow!" the reporter said, "I knew you from Milton, but I didn't know you were from East Milton. Tell me what it feels like?" Well, until last week it was not that dramatic. East Milton is an old railroad-commuter neighborhood favored by affluent Boston Irish. It's separated from the City of … [Read more...]
Houston as an Affordability Model
In December, I was asked to testify at a House Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance hearing on government barriers to housing construction and affordability. I provided examples of reforms to land regulations that have facilitated increased housing supply, particularly relatively low-cost types of … [Read more...]
Hopefully, AI will create a perpetual housing crisis
I don't know how successful artificial intelligence will be. But let's agree, for the moment, to consider a reasonably optimistic case where AI delivers significant productivity gains across a broad range of tasks - but not in a way that radically alters our Newtonian constraints. What would happen … [Read more...]
The weird D.C. housing grift that’s sending a former FBI agent to jail
WASHINGTON – David Paitsel, 42, a former FBI agent, and Brian Bailey, 53, a D.C. real estate developer were sentenced today on bribery and conspiracy charges for their role in schemes involving confidential information held by the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development United States … [Read more...]
Unexpected correlation in Census housing data
Since 1973, the US Census Bureau has administered the American Housing Survey (AHS) in odd-numbered years. Surveyors ask questions about the quality and value of respondents’ housing, and have a battery of questions for the subset of respondents who moved recently, asking about their search process. … [Read more...]
An Autopsy of Hsieh & Moretti (2019)?
Update 11/20: Chang-Tai Hsieh counters that Greaney's critique ignores general equilibrium effects which make labor scale invariant. That doesn't address the alleged coding errors. We'll see - and perhaps I wrote an autopsy too early. Thanks to Bryan Caplan for getting Hsieh's response out to the … [Read more...]
Tyler Cowen: “Is Tokyo really a YIMBY success story?”
Tyler is stirring the pot over at Marginal Revolution, asking whether Tokyo's low rents are a YIMBY success or just a productivity failure: low productivity and low immigration keep demand down. He calls the latter "NIMBYism". That framing doesn't hold up very well, but we can discard it and think … [Read more...]
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