Yet another study in a long line of others provides evidence that land-use regulations restrict housing supply. A new paper identifies a correlation between land-use regulations in California cities and the growth rate for housing units. Kip Jackson finds that California zoning rules and other … [Read more...]
ReasonTV on SF’s YIMBY Movement
Last week, Reason.tv (the multimedia outlet of Reason Magazine) published a video about San Francisco's YIMBY movement. The video describes the decades of underdevelopment in San Francisco as the result of community activism intended to limit the supply of new construction. As a result, San … [Read more...]
Exclusionary Zoning and “Inclusionary Zoning” Don’t Mix
Inclusionary Zoning is an Oxymoron The term “Inclusionary Zoning” gives a nod to the fact that zoning is inherently exclusionary, but pretends to be somehow different. Given that, by definition, zoning is exclusionary, Inclusionary Zoning completely within the exclusionary paradigm is synonymous … [Read more...]
Zoning, Buildings Codes, And Low-Quality Housing
Emily Washington recently wrote for Market Urbanism about the need for low quality housing, attributing some of the high cost of housing in U.S. cities to building codes that increase construction costs. Some provisions of building codes were encouraged by social reformers and reflect middle-class … [Read more...]
9 Barriers To Building Housing In Central City Austin
The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America's two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in … [Read more...]
Liberate the Garage!: Autonomous Cars and the American Dream
When it comes to the impact autonomous cars will have on cities, there’s plenty of room for disagreement. Will they increase or decrease urban densities? Will they help with congestion or make it worse? At the same time, there seems to be widespread agreement on at least two things: First, far fewer … [Read more...]
Return to Sender: Housing affordability and the shipping container non-solution
Washington, D.C. has a monopoly on many things. Bad policy, unfortunately, isn’t among them. Last month, a development corporation in Lexington, Kentucky installed a shipping container house in an economically distressed area of town to improve housing affordability. The corporation is a private … [Read more...]
San Francisco Turned Sisyphus: Why the City Can’t Fix the Housing Crisis On its Own
Housing prices in San Francisco are obscene. And, in large part, that’s because the city hasn’t permitted enough new construction. But that’s not the entire story. For as hard as San Francisco has resisted development, the Peninsula cities have resisted it even more. And in so doing they’ve pushed … [Read more...]