After my post on charter cities, I received some interesting feedback from Michael Strong, CEO of MGK Group, the company investing in Honduras' charter cities and Brandon Fuller, a Research Scholar at NYU's Urbanization Project. The Urbanization Project is headed by Paul Romer who is no longer … [Read more...]
The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 16 – 18
This post follows on the earlier discussion of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 16 -- Turning Small Change in Big ChangesHere Donald Shoup gets to the idea of using Business Improvement Districts to manage street parking as Brandon Smith mentioned in the last post's … [Read more...]
Why do condos even exist?
It sounds like a dumb question – they exist because people like the security of owning a home combined with the services and lower costs that apartments offer, duh! But upon further reflection, condominium-style tenure can be a bit problematic.The main problem, as I see it, is that a building … [Read more...]
Rent control by any other name
Earlier this week, David Alpert wrote a piece at Greater Greater Washington on the benefits of inclusionary zoning and why economists should support it. I would counter that IZ as designed in DC is not an efficient program for providing affordable housing, and to the extent that it does provide … [Read more...]
Market Urbanism vs. Market Suburbanism smackdown at Cato: “The Death and Life of Affordable Housing”
The debate you've been waiting for! Randal O'Toole, Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent, and Adam Gordon participated yesterday in a discussion at the Cato Institute moderated by Diana Lind from Next American City/Forefront. (How had this never happened before??)Randal O'Toole did not disappoint, arriving … [Read more...]
Walk Score Regression Results
Thanks for the comments on my Walk Score model! Per a few reader requests, here are the full results. I should have thought to provide them initially but didn't realize there would be interest. Also, I don't know a good way to put STATA or Excel charts here, so apologies for the screenshots.Here … [Read more...]
Some Empirical Evidence on Preference for Cities
This semester I took an econometrics class because I got an MA with the bare minimum of quantitative classes. For the class, I wrote a paper asking the question, "Are consumers willing to pay a premium to live in dense urban areas?" It's easy to see that urban density is correlated with higher … [Read more...]
Brookings Study Ties Exclusionary Zoning to Gaps in School Performance
Last week the Brookings Institute released a study by Jonathan Rothwell on the relationship between exclusionary zoning and school performance. He points out that this is the first study linking zoning to educational outcomes. The findings demonstrate that cities with stronger exclusionary zoning … [Read more...]