I recently read a highly publicized pro-NIMBY book, Vanishing New York. The author, who goes by the pen name “Jeremiah Moss” tells a simple story: throughout New York, gentrification and chain stores are on the march, making the city rich and boring. The story has an element of truth: obviously, there are some places that […]
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Mini review: Vanishing New York, by Jeremiah Moss
The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies
by Kevin CarsonThis article won the 2011 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing.Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the … [Read More...]
The Rent is Too High and the Commute is Too Long: We Need Market Urbanism
Why is the rent so damn high? And why does it take hours to commute from cheap, plentiful housing to modern economy jobs? If you are living in a big city in America, … [Read More...]
The Progressive Roots of Zoning
by Samuel R StaleyBefore the twentieth century land-use and housing disputes were largely dealt with through courts using the common-law principle of nuisance. In essence if your neighbor put a building, factory, or house on his property in a way that … [Read More...]
“Curb Rights” at 20: A Summary and Review
At 4:30 am, alarms on my cellphone and tablet start beeping, just enough out of sync to prompt me to get up and turn them off. By 5:00 am, I riding as a passenger along an unusually sedate New Jersey Turnpike, making friendly conversation with my driver and … [Read More...]
High Rents: Are Construction Costs the Culprit?
(cross-posted from planetizen.com)I have argued numerous times on Planetizen that increased housing supply would reduce rents. I recently read one counterargument that I had not fully addressed before: the claim that no amount of new housing will ever … [Read More...]
Cities Should Not Design for Autonomous Vehicles
Coauthored with Emily HamiltonLast week, the autonomous vehicle company Waymo began testing cars in Chandler, AZ with no employees sitting in the front seat. While Waymo is busy creating systems of vehicle-mounted sensors that allow cars to safely navigate … [Read More...]
Does Density Raise Housing Prices?
My last post, on urban geographic constraints and housing prices, led to an interesting discussion thread. The most common counterargument was that because dense cities are usually more expensive, density must cause high cost. But if this was true, cities … [Read More...]
The “Geographically Constrained Cities” Fantasy
One common argument against building new urban housing is that cities are geographically constrained by their natural and political boundaries, and thus can never build enough housing to bring prices down. This claim rests on a variety of false … [Read More...]
The Role for State Preemption of Local Zoning
Urbanists have increasingly turned to state-level preemption as a tool for reducing the barriers to new housing supply, recognizing the improved incentives for land-use policy relative to the local level. In a piece for the Atlantic Cities, Nolan sums up the … [Read More...]
Exempting Suburbia: How suburban sprawl gets special treatment in our tax code
This is the third post in a series about government policies that encouraged suburban growth in the US. You can find the first part here and the second one here.Suburban sprawl gets preferential tax treatment in the US. As a result, it is … [Read More...]