Yesterday, the Mercatus Center released the third edition of Freedom in the 50 States by Will Ruger and Jason Sorens. The authors break down state freedom among regulatory, fiscal, and personal categories. At the study's website, readers can re-rank the states based on the aspects of freedom that … [Read more...]
Q&A with David Schleicher
I recently spoke with George Mason University Law Professor David Schleicher about his research on land use law and economics. Here is our conversation including links to some of his academic articles that have earned a lot of attention in the land use blogosphere.Emily: What are some the costs … [Read more...]
Emergent Order in Cities and Markets
Last week at The Atlantic Cities, Allison Arieff posted a Q&A with Alex Marshall about what Marshall asserts are Jane Jacobs misunderstanding of how cities work. Marshall says: Human interaction takes place, but it shouldn’t obscure what makes it possible, which is government. As much as I … [Read more...]
The Renewed Debate on Inclusionary Zoning
Stephen Smith and I co-wrote this post. In case you haven't been following Stephen elsewhere, he's also been writing at The Atlantic Cities and Bloomberg View. This year, some of the first apartments and condos subject to inclusionary zoning laws in DC are hitting the market, stoking … [Read more...]
From the experts on charter cities
After my post on charter cities, I received some interesting feedback from Michael Strong, CEO of MGK Group, the company investing in Honduras' charter cities and Brandon Fuller, a Research Scholar at NYU's Urbanization Project. The Urbanization Project is headed by Paul Romer who is no longer … [Read more...]
The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 16 – 18
This post follows on the earlier discussion of the The High Cost of Free Parking.Chapter 16 -- Turning Small Change in Big ChangesHere Donald Shoup gets to the idea of using Business Improvement Districts to manage street parking as Brandon Smith mentioned in the last post's comments. When … [Read more...]
Why do condos even exist?
It sounds like a dumb question – they exist because people like the security of owning a home combined with the services and lower costs that apartments offer, duh! But upon further reflection, condominium-style tenure can be a bit problematic.The main problem, as I see it, is that a building … [Read more...]
Rent control by any other name
Earlier this week, David Alpert wrote a piece at Greater Greater Washington on the benefits of inclusionary zoning and why economists should support it. I would counter that IZ as designed in DC is not an efficient program for providing affordable housing, and to the extent that it does provide … [Read more...]