Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” should be required reading for YIMBYs and urbanists of any ideological stripe. Rothstein argues that housing segregation in the US has been the intentional outcome of policy decisions made at every … [Read more...]
People Over Process: Why Democracy Doesn’t Justify Exclusion
Some people accept the idea that restrictive land use policy is just as bad as all the research suggests, but persist in supporting the status quo. They argue that if a community chooses to regulate its built environment, that choice should be respected as having moral weight because it’s the … [Read more...]
A Guide to Urban Development [Guia de Gestão Urbana]
Caos Planejado, in conjunction with Editora BEI/ArqFuturo, recently published A Guide to Urban Development (Guia de Gestão Urbana) by Anthony Ling. The book offers best practices for urban design and although it was written for a Brazilian audience, many of its recommendations have universal … [Read more...]
Only In California: Twisting an Anti-Exclusionary Law To Rationalize Exclusion
As a Market Urbanism reader, you are hopefully fluent in the problems of exclusionary zoning. If you're new to the term, there are some good pieces on the topic here and here. Basically: exclusionary zoning is the use of zoning to price people out of a community. The classic example is minimum … [Read more...]
Does Home-sharing Create Negative Externalities?
A decade or two ago, a traveler who wished to stay in a city temporarily had no alternative to a hotel. Even if the owner of a house or condominium wished to rent out a room for a short period of time, the costs of advertising in a newspaper would have at least partially canceled out the … [Read more...]
Trickle-Down Housing Economics? Laying Reagan’s Ghost to Rest
In a recent 48 Hills post, housing activist Peter Cohen aimed a couple rounds of return fire at SPUR's Gabriel Metcalf. The post comes in response to Mr. Metcalf's own article critiquing progressive housing policy. Mr. Cohen bounces around a bit, but he does repeat some frequently used talking … [Read more...]
The Right to the City
This post draws heavily from Tom W. Bell’s “Want to Own a City?” and would not have been possible without his prior writing and research The "Right to the City" is an old marxist slogan that’s as catchy as it is ill-defined. Neither the phrase's originator Henri Lefebvre, nor David Harvey, a more … [Read more...]
The benefits of the market in both infrastructure and urbanism
Alain Bertaud, a senior research scholar at the Urbanization Project, has had a long career in urban planning, and many of his writings have a market urbanist flavor. He is currently working a book called Order Without Design, and last year he published an excerpt from that book called "The … [Read more...]