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Liberalizing Cities
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Urbanists and zoning reformers would really like estimates that tell us how changing the built environment will change our own habits. But many of the variables that inform Jones' estimates won't change with environment: age, race, income, education. The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Ever wondered how you could make your urbanism hobby a full-time job? Come work with me & Emily Hamilton at the Mercatus Center’s Urbanity project: Are you a gritty, liberty-minded researcher who is passionate about cities? This is a unique opportunity for an aspiring scholar to develop a portfolio of research in urban economics, planning, housing affordability, and land use regulations with talented scholars and staff at the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas. The ideal candidate will think like an economist, deftly handle complex datasets, and express himself or herself clearly in writing. This position reports to the program manager of the Urbanity Project. Responsibilities Include:•Collaborate with research fellows on quantitative research projects using GIS and data analysis software.•Read, understand and summarize scholarship in urban economics, planning, and land use law.•Translate and promote research through media and outreach engagement.•Support Mercatus scholars and affiliated fellows in consultations with city and state policymakers. Requirements Include:•Degree or equivalent knowledge in economics, urban & regional planning, or a related field•Experience with either a GIS or a statistical software package such as Stata and R; familiarity with and willingness to master the other•Strong verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills •Enthusiasm for collaboration and adaptability to a varying mix of responsibilities•A strong interest in the Mercatus Center’s mission, with a specific focus on cities and liberty https://us63.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePortal/en-US/mercatus/Posting/View/732
During the Trump Administration, liberals sometimes criticized conservatives for being anti-anti-Trump: that is, not directly championing Trump’s more obnoxious behaviour, but devoting their energies to criticizing people who criticized him. Similarly, I’ve seen some articles recently that were anti-anti-NIMBY*: they acknowledge the need for new housing, but they try to split the difference by focusing their fire on YIMBYs.** A recent article in Governing, by Aaron Renn, is an example of this genre. Renn agrees with “building more densely in popular areas like San Francisco and the north side of Chicago, in other cities along commercial corridors, near commuter rail stops, and in suburban town centers.” Since I am all for these things, I suspect I agree with Renn far more than I disagree. But then he complains that YIMBYs “have much bigger aims” because they “want to totally eliminate any housing for exclusively single-family districts- everywhere.” What’s wrong with that? First, he says (correctly) that this would require state preemption of local zoning. And this is bad, he says, because it “would completely upend this country’s traditional approach to land use.” Here, Renn is overlooking most of American history: zoning didn’t exist for roughly the first century and a half of American history, and in some places has become far more restrictive over the last few decades. Thus, YIMBY policies are not a upending of tradition, but a return to a tradition that was destroyed in the middle and late 20th century. To the extent state preemption gives Americans more rights to build more type of housing, it would actually recreate the earlier tradition that was wiped out. Moreover, even if the status quo was a “tradition”, that doesn’t make it the best policy for the 21st century. For most of the 20th century, housing was far cheaper than […]
Progressives often argue that American cities should imitate Vienna’s 1920s strategy of building enormous amounts of public housing while controlling rents paid to private landlords. But a look at the birth of Vienna’s public housing system shows why that system is not easily replicated. A book supported by the city government points out that the city had an enormous housing shortage after World War I, and that the working classes “began reclaiming the land surrounding the cities” (p. 13). The city then “offered its support in the form of the redesignation and purchase of sites”. Settlers received housing in return for committing to work on the building site (id.) Obviously, this strategy cannot be replicated today; there is not a huge amount of unowned or extremely cheap land that people can just commandeer and build on, and I am not sure many people can easily become construction workers in exchange for housing. In addition, the city financed housing in ways that are not easily replicated today. The book notes that tax revenue for housing came from a 1923 “tax on housing development .. a simple working-class apartment was taxed at an average annual rate of 2.083% of its pre-war rentable value, this went up to 36.4 for luxury homes.” This might have worked in 1923 because city residents had no suburbs to flee to; however, today, city residents can easily respond to large tax increases by moving. Moreover, in 1923 there was no zoning or environmental review or “community engagement” to give Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) activists a chance to delay or prevent housing construction. Today, even if government can afford to build new housing somewhere, the bureaucratic obstacles to such housing might made it politically impossible to build in some places, or expensive and time-consuming to build […]
Lydia Lo and Yonah Freemark have an interesting new paper ? EditSign on zoning in Louisville on the Urban Institute website. They point out that of the land zoned for single-family housing, 59 percent is zoned R4, requiring 9000-square-foot lots, which means no more than five houses per acre. From a transportation standpoint, this is not ideal. Even the most cursory Google search reveals that a neighborhood should have at least eight or ten units per acre to support minimal bus service. This is because if only a few people live near a bus stop, only a few people will ride the bus. So Louisville’s zoning generally prohibits density high enough for decent bus service. Similarly, from a housing supply standpoint, such zoning is not ideal either. Obviously, a development with 5 houses per acre contributes less to regional housing supply than one with 10 houses per acre. Much ink has been spilled over the evils of zoning places for nothing but single-family housing. But perhaps the density of housing is just as important as its form.
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In a tweet this week, the Welcoming Neighbors Network recommended that pro-housing advocates keep supply-and-demand arguments in their back pockets and emphasize simpler housing composition arguments: This advice makes an economist’s mind race. We know, after all, that supply and demand work. But we’re not so sure about composition changes. If “affordability” is achieved by building units that people don’t want (in bad locations, too small, lacking valued attributes), then the price-per-unit can be low without actually benefiting people on their own terms. Even if existing homes are bigger than many people want, at least some of the price decline from building smaller homes is the “you get what you pay for” effect. (Incidentally, this is the opposite concern from that held by econ-skeptics concerned about gentrification: they worry that new housing will be too good or that investment will upscale neighborhoods. This inverts the trope that economists “only care about money”.) A few days later, a Maryland state senator asked me that very supply-and-demand question: “What’s the evidence that large-scale upzoning leads to affordability?” This is a tough question. First, large-scale upzonings are very scarce. Second, even if one occurs, it’s not in an experimental vacuum. Three kinds of affordability Let’s specify that an upzoning likely promotes affordability in three ways: Supply and demand You get what you pay for Only pay for what you want The first channel is obvious – it explains why Cleveland is cheaper than Boston. The second source of affordability is valuable for people at risk of homelessness, but doesn’t make most people better off. The third source – what WNN recommends advocates emphasize – is that many regulations require people to pay for more housing (or pricey attributes) that they don’t want. In a lot of cases, the last two effects will go […]
In an encouraging post this morning, Matt Yglesias – one of the O.G. YIMBYs – summed up 10 years of success since his book, The Rent Is Too Damn High, was published. If you’d asked me, I’d have guessed that Too Damn High was published in 2015 or 2016, when YIMBY was in its infancy and researchers like me were starting to nose around zoning as a major regulatory cost. Yglesias was several years ahead of the curve. In his post, Yglesias gives free marketers a lot of credit for being for upzoning before it was cool. Market urbanists will certainly accept the compliment, and the legacies of Bernard Siegan and Bob Ellickson (1972…2022 – incredible!) are undeniable. But there’s another major part of the pre-YIMBY world that’s missing in this story, which is the progressive critics of suburban zoning. One of the graphs that keeps me up at night is the Google n-gram showing that “exclusionary zoning” was less a part of the discourse in the 2010s than it was throughout the 70s and 80s… and yet the activists of the time accomplished so little! The progressive critics of zoning, such as Paul Davidoff and Myron Orfield, were focused on allowing multifamily housing – especially if subsidized – in the suburbs. Urban housing markets were pretty slack at the time, and adding affordable housing in central cities risked concentrating poverty. A great book that covers a specific housing battle spanning the 1990s is Lawrence Lanahan’s The Lines Between Us. Alongside YIMBY As I understand it, these activists’ energy became formalized in the affordable housing industry. A lot of those institutions – and individuals – are still active. They have a mixed relationship with the YIMBY movement. In some cities and states, they’re enthusiastic participants. In others, they’re antagonistic. It […]
Rent control has devalued property so badly that you could make a million dollars by tearing down a nice 12-unit building in my neighborhood.
Two new estimates of the national housing shortfall offer a seeming contradiction. But we can synthesize the demand and supply models to get close to the truth: High-priced places should build much more housing than Up For Growth estimates and moderate-priced places will build much less housing than the JEC predicts.
