If investors and hedge funds are a major cause of high housing costs, why do they seem to be most common in cheap cities?
Texas MUD
Connor Tabarrok has an excellent new primer on Texas Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs), covering history, function, governance, and critiques.
North Carolina’s Surreal Housing Spring
With a divided and highly polarized state government, North Carolina hadn’t gotten much done on housing and land use policy in the past few years. That changed unexpectedly last fall, when S 382, a controversial bill that combined hurricane relief with measures to diminish the powers of the Democratic governor, passed with a little-noticed provision: […]
Digging deeper on natalism and urbanism
walkable suburbs have as many children as more typical suburbs
Outside Montana, No Housing “Miracle” in the Mountain West This Year
Montana passed a transformative land use reform package in 2023 – the “Montana Miracle”. This year, Montana’s legislature is again considering a lot of housing bills. The western United States overall has been the most dynamic region for pro-housing legislation, which makes sense since California is the state most associated with the housing crisis: California, […]
Resources for Reformers: Single-Stair Midrise Buildings
As a sense of urgency builds around North America’s housing affordability crisis, researchers have begun to look beyond zoning and permitting for ways to build more housing for less money. In the wake of a movement to bring more mass timber buildings to the US and Canada, some have turned their attention to the role […]
Cities for families?
In response to David Albouy & Jason Faberman’s new NBER paper, Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle, Lyman Stone asks if this means that cities will always have lower fertility? I think the answer is probably yes, but that’s extrapolating beyond the paper at hand. What this paper shows is that there […]
Deep Research: Supermajority laws around the states
Here are the results of my first use of OpenAI’s Deep Research tool. I asked for information that I know well – and in which inaccurate research has been published. It did a great job and relied substantially on my own research. But it also went beyond my list – identifying protest petition statutes in […]
Yes in God’s backyard… and yes up to three stories?
With state legislative seasons in full swing, a picture of the landscape of land use reform is emerging. One dynamic I’ve been tracking: Yes In God’s Back Yard (YIGBY) bills, designed to allow religious organizations (and sometimes other nonprofits) to easily use their land to build housing, are still in vogue with lawmakers. Salim Furth […]
Morton’s Fork and urbanism
I recently read about an interesting logical fallacy: the Morton’s fork fallacy, in which a conclusion “is drawn in several different ways that contradict each other.” The original “Morton” was a medieval tax collector who, according to legend, believed that someone who spent lavishly you were rich and could afford higher taxes, but that someone […]
How much housing does Massachusetts build?
In a recent post, I revealed the 91 large cities and counties that consistently fail to report complete data to the federal Building Permit Survey (BPS). But what about smaller jurisdictions, which often have weak record-keeping and slim staffs – and what about states made up of many such small jurisdictions? The gold standard for […]
Review: Key to the City, by Sara Bronin
A review of a book that endorses more flexible zoning, but doesn’t reject zoning entirely.
Snowy Sidewalks
Snowfall reveals a curiosity of the commons and – Alan Cole claims – something about the character of urban progressives.