New York City’s Department of City Planning claims that the original 1916 zoning code allowed enough building stock growth to accomodate as many as 55 million people in the city. Readers can probably guess that today’s code is a bit less liberal, but Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real … [Read more...]
Cities and the Market Process: Part 3
This series looks at some of the ways that people organize themselves to live alongside each other in cities. Part 1 looks at inherent problems with top-down planning, and Part 2 looks at the costs of local governments sanctioning collective choice. From this negative start, I'd like to turn to some … [Read more...]
TGIF Links
1. A reader from Vancouver wrote in to let Stephen and me know about a proposed policy to tax foreign investors at a higher rate than local property owners. Support for this policy is growing among residents, and with a mayoral election this Saturday, some are hoping to get candidates to endorse the … [Read more...]
11/11/11 Day Links
1. Several people including Lydia DePillis, Charlie Gardner, and Steve Stofka have discussed the emergent order that we can see in the Occupy settlements. Similarly this video shows a beautiful illustration of the spontaneous urban development at Burning Man.2. The Atlantic Cities features the … [Read more...]
Midweek Links and Business
1. Stephen writes at The Atlantic Cities on Japan's largely privatized rail system. He points out that free market reforms have benefited both cities and transit there.2. For readers in the DC area, the Urban Land Institute is holding Capital Markets Interchange in McLean on November 10th. The … [Read more...]
Cities and the Market Process: Part 2
In the first post of this little series, I addressed the problems of top down land use regulation through the lens of Austrian economics. Because cities contain public space and infrastructure that is used by many residents and cannot be bought and sold in the way that many goods can be, Alon Levy … [Read more...]
Cities and the Market Process: Part 1
In a post about the tendency for emergent urbanists to promote the idea of cities having a single equilibrium, Alon Levy recently wrote that collective choice is the best manner for determining urban form. Many urbanists accept that some of the top-down regulations that limit density or use are … [Read more...]
Brookings Study on HCVs; Results to be Expected
This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog where we write about state and local policy issues as well as the broad concepts of economic freedom. A new Brookings study by Kenya Covington, Lance Freeman, and Michael Stoll finds that increasingly, … [Read more...]