In a new essay for Works In Progress magazine, I explain how the familiar correlation between housing cost and homelessness works. The most intuitive explanation would be that in high cost cities, more people lack the income for very cheap shelter. But that's not true. Income varies more … [Read more...]
Stone: Diversity didn’t cause the baby bust
There's a vigorous debate about whether various urban factors, like density, lower birth rates. In a new paper, Umit Gurun and David Solomon propose a new one that they claim accounts for 90% of the recent decline in birthrates: E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth … [Read more...]
The 15-Minute City Is a Distracting Utopia
As proposed, Moreno's 15-minute city has no chance of implementation, because economic and financial realities constrain the location of jobs, commerce, and community facilities. No planner can redesign a city by locating shops and jobs according to their own whims. This article appeared … [Read more...]
Are New Cities Necessary?
Promotors of recently developed cities ranging from Nusantara, the freshly built capital of Indonesia, to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futurist urban paradise, advertise them as breakthroughs in urban living. But does the world need new cities? This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is … [Read more...]
Can YIMBY policies cause large price declines?
Kevin Erdmann offers a helpful corrective to the "YIMBY triumphalism" of claiming that large relative rent declines in Austin and Minneapolis are results of YIMBY policies. He's mostly correct, especially about the rhetoric: arguing about housing supply from short term fluctuations is like arguing … [Read more...]
Pedestrianized streets usually fail – and that’s OK
Urbanists love to celebrate, and replicate great urban spaces - and sometimes can't understand why governments don't: But what's important to recall - especially for those of us under, uh, 41 - is that pedestrianized streets aren't a new concept coming into style, they're an old one that's been … [Read more...]
Gentrification: An LVT Would Do That
In many cities, poor people occupy valuable urban land close to downtown jobs, amenities, and transit. They can afford to live there because the housing stock in inner areas is usually older. If it hasn't been completely renovated, the result can be quite cheap, even if the land is pretty … [Read more...]
Xiaodi Li, Misunderstood
Max Holleran's book, Richard Schragger's law review article, and randos on Twitter all find pessimistic views on housing supply from a paper by Xiaodi Li. But the paper is asking a narrow question and yielding an optimistic answer. This post tries to provide some context. EDITED 3/3: I've edited … [Read more...]
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