Builders seeking approval for proposed real estate developments must in almost all American localities navigate a complex series of required procedural steps, but for those who persevere and succeed in obtaining a permit, one eleventh-hour device can bring all those efforts to naught: the objector lawsuit. Easy to file but difficult to resolve, lawsuits by […]
Does your city do its part to measure housing production?
We identified large 91 cities and counties that regularly fail to report their building permits to the Census Bureau – including some surprising culprits.
Homelessness exits: Systems or individual factors?
We can all understand the distinction between individual and systemic causes of homelessness. Can we apply the same rigor to potential solutions?
Housing filters (dorm / shelter edition)
An old dorm becomes a new shelter for homeless families in DC.
Decriminalizing Jaywalking: The Early Data
In recent years, three states have legalized or decriminalized jaywalking: Virginia and Nevada did so in early 2021, and California legalized jaywalking at the start of 2023. The traditional argument for anti-jaywalking laws is that they protect pedestrians from themselves, by limiting their ability to walk in dangerous traffic conditions. If this argument made sense, […]
Arlington Missing Middle lawsuit decision
Thanks to local journalist Margaret Barthel for finding and posting the elusive judicial decision that has struck down Arlington, Virginia’s, missing middle ordinance, pending appeal.
Agenda: Dynamic congestion pricing for autonomous vehicles
Autonomous vehicles will cause a congestion apocalypse on downtown streets unless we price their use of the roads.
A Case for Urban Renewal
Is it even possible today to write a vigorous argument in favor of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s? I doubt it. Jeanne Lowe’s 1967 “Cities in a Race with Time* is a sympathetic account of the urban renewal era in its own terms. How does it hold up?
Master Classes
Check out Alain Bertaud’s Master Class lecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India.
Transit oriented development in Bengaluru could lead to additional $64 Million per year
A new paper in the Journal of Development Economics by Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, and Andrii Parkhomenko estimates the welfare gains of Transit Oriented Development in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru metro or the Namma metro is around 170Km long including the planned sections. Bengaluru has low building heights and the paper’s counterfactual depends on […]
Hot takes and pensées, #UEA2024
Delete all Seattle’s highways. Invent new neighborhoods. Explain macroeconomic trends with home size. Money flows uphill to water. Do NIMBYs really hate density? Urban economics is on a tear.
Where sale prices are going up
The conventional wisdom (based on Census estimates) seems to me that urban cores have lost population since COVID began, but are beginning to recover. But mid-decade Census estimates are often quite flawed. These estimates are basically just guesses based on complicated mathetmatical formulas, and often diverge a bit from end-of-decade Census counts. Is there another […]
Book Review: (de)Coding Mumbai
In Mumbai, there is a specific type of architect who has become the interpreter of regulations and there are those architects who are aestheticians working on building skins. As much as there is convenience in this split, it has taken away a big part of the agency of the architects in the city.