Last week I wrote a post highlighting how important it is for major cities to have places for low-income people to live. Without the opportunity to live in vibrant, growing cities, our nation's poor can't take advantage of the employment and educational opportunities cities offer. My post … [Read more...]
The need for low-quality housing
The market urbanism axiom -- permitting housing supply to increase is key to achieving affordable housing -- has been made recently by Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce and Daniel Hertz at City Observatory. However both argue that even with an increasing supply, low-income people will need aid in order … [Read more...]
Rent Control: A No-Win
In an otherwise excellent article on NIMBYism and luxury housing, affordable housing consultant Rick Jacobus writes: “economist Anthony Downs reviewed the published studies and found that while 'stringent' rent control imposed over a very long time had reduced private apartment construction in the … [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...]
Economist David Friedman Says India Must Go Taller To Make Homes Affordable
In this exclusive interview to PropGuide, legendary economist David Friedman, who studied at Harvard University and University of Chicago, says that the government should allow developers to build high-rises to make homes affordable for everyone by 2022.I met David Friedman at Starbucks in … [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...]
The deal-making behind the Silver Line
In political transactions, players cannot make deals using dollars, but nonetheless they engage in trades to pursue their goals. Policymakers may engage in trades both with other policymakers and with private sector actors . While these deals are not denominated in dollars, their gains from trade … [Read more...]
How land use regulations hurt the poor
Sandy Ikeda and I have published a new Mercatus paper on the regressive effects of land use regulation. We review the empirical literature on how the effects of rules such as maximum density, parking requirements, urban growth boundaries, and historic preservation affect housing prices. Nearly all … [Read more...]