Co-authored with Anthony Ling, editor at Caos Planejado Gentrification is the process through which real estate becomes more valuable and, therefore, more expensive. Rising prices displace older residents in favor of transplants with higher incomes. This shouldn't be confused with the forced … [Read more...]
How to Fix San Francisco’s Housing Market
Want to live in San Francisco? No problem, that’ll be $3,000 (a month)--but only if you act fast.In the last two years, the the cost of housing in San Francisco has increased 47% and shows no signs of stopping. Longtime residents find themselves priced out of town, the most vulnerable of whom … [Read more...]
On the Mixing of Incompatible Uses and Incumbency
I noticed an interestingly ironic thing today.The usual argument for the necessity of use-based zoning is that it protects homeowners in residential area from uses that would potentially create negative externalities - ie: smelting factory, garbage dump, or Sriracha factory.Urban Economics … [Read more...]
Planned Manufacturing Districts: Planning the Life Out of Districts
They are called different things in different cities, but they are similar in form and intent among the cities where they are found. For simplicity's sake, a Planned Manufacturing District (PMD), as they are called in Chicago, is an area of land, defined by zoning, that prohibits residential … [Read more...]
How Affordable Housing Policies Backfire
Affordable housing policies have a long history of hurting the very people they are said to help. Past decades' practices of building Corbusian public housing that concentrates low-income people in environments that support crime or pursuing "slum clearance" to eliminate housing deemed to be … [Read more...]
Culs de sac for safety?
At Cato At Liberty, Randall O'Toole provides a list of recommendations for reversing Rust Belt urban decline in response to a study on the topic from the Lincoln Land Institute. He focuses on policies to improve public service provision and deregulation, but he also makes a surprising recommendation … [Read more...]
The Value of Walkability
Last week DC Streetsblog reported on a new survey from Kaiser Permanente. The survey covers Americans' attitudes toward walking and their self-reported walking habits. While a substantial majority of people believe that walking has health benefits ranging from weight management to alleviating … [Read more...]
Irrelevant real estate trends
Earlier this week Wendell Cox wrote a piece at New Geography arguing that projections for increasing demand for multifamily housing relative to single family homes are incorrect. He was criticizing a study by Arthur Nelson that predicts increased demand for multifamily housing relative to … [Read more...]