![Urban[ism] Legend: A Home Is A Good Investment](https://i2.wp.com/ec2-34-201-95-206.compute-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/homeowners-insurance.jpg?fit=320%2C350)
Despite its poor track record, homeownership is the bad investment idea that never seems to die. Even though the financial crisis revealed the risks that homeowners take on by making highly leveraged purchases, policymakers are still developing new programs to encourage home buying. Both the Clinton … [Read more...]
Visions of Progress: Henry George vs. Jane Jacobs
Henry George and Jane Jacobs each have an enthusiastic following today, including, I’m sure, some readers of The Freeman.For those who might not know, Henry George is the late-19th-century American intellectual best known for his proposal of a “single tax” from which he believed the … [Read more...]
Supply and Demand: A Response to 48hills
In a recent piece published by 48hills, former Berkeley planning commissioner Zelda Bronstein takes aim at...well...too many things for me to succinctly recount in detail. So instead of attempting to respond to every single argument littered throughout her 7,000 word article, I’ll focus on the big … [Read more...]
Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor
People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example.My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of … [Read more...]
The Answer to Expensive Housing: Build More
If you restrict the supply of housing, other things equal, what will happen to the price? That’s not a trick question. Any competent Econ 101 student would answer correctly that the price will rise.One reporter for the Washington Post gets it. In a hopeful sign of spreading economic literacy, … [Read more...]
Cities And The Growth Of Our Collective Brain
In his famous 2010 Ted Talk Matt Ridley points out that a growing human population has facilitated increasing standards of living because more people means a faster growth rate of innovation. He explains that humans' propensity to exchange means that as a society we all benefit from each other's … [Read more...]
Tech for Housing: An Experiment in YIMBY Activism
Tech for Housing was founded to organize Bay Area tech workers around supply friendly land use reform. Tony Albert, Joey Hiller and myself, all saw an unmet need for tech-centric political outreach and decided to try our luck. And as tech workers ourselves, we had certain ideas around the best ways … [Read more...]
Quantifying the effects of California zoning rules
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...]