This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. This is how Jane Jacobs opened her 1961 classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. It wouldn’t be an inappropriate opener for Alain Bertaud’s upcoming “Order Without Design”.While Jacobs was an observer of how cities … [Read more...]
New and Noteworthy: Randy Shaw’s Generation Priced Out
In Generation Priced Out, housing activist Randy Shaw writes a book about the rent crisis for non-experts. Shaw's point of view is that of a left-wing YIMBY: that is, he favors allowing lots of new market-rate housing, but also favors a variety of less market-oriented policies to prevent … [Read more...]
Two Cheers for PHIMBY
One alternative to market urbanism that has received a decent amount of press coverage is the PHIMBY (Public Housing In My Back Yard) movement. PHIMBYs (or at least the most extreme PHIMBYs) believe that market-rate housing fails to reduce housing costs and may even lead to gentrification and … [Read more...]
The land price argument and why it fails
One common argument against all forms of infill development runs something like this: "In dense, urban areas land prices are always high, so housing prices will never be affordable absent government subsidy or extremely low demand. Furthermore, laws that allow new housing will make land prices even … [Read more...]
Response to “Steelmanning the NIMBYs”
Scott Alexander, a West Coast blogger, has written a post that has received a lot of buzz, called "Steelmanning the NIMBYs"; apparently, "steelmanning" is the opposite of "straw manning"; that is, it involves making the best possible case for an argument you don't really support. There have been … [Read more...]
Why Do We Hate Developers?
Earlier this year, researchers Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) conducted a survey of 1,300 residents of Los Angeles County to understand the motives behind NIMBYism. As part of the study, they presented respondents with three common … [Read more...]
Housing Still Suffers the Same Ills That Caused the Great Recession—Just Not the Ones You Think
If you type “housing crisis” into Google search, “2008” is no longer the first result. The subprime mortgage crisis that toppled the global economy just a decade ago has been supplanted on Google trends by “housing crisis 2018.” This time, the crisis isn’t an overabundance of housing; it’s a chronic … [Read more...]
The Foreign Buyers Are Taking Over (Not!)
A headline in the Boston Globe screams: "Boston's new luxury towers appear to house few local residents." The headline is based on a report by the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, which claims that in twelve Boston condo buildings, "64 percent do not claim a residential exemption, a clear … [Read more...]