2022-07-01 14:22
One reason local governments are often hostile to Airbnb and similar home-sharing websites is that politicians believe that the interests of short-term renters and long-term renters are oppo… Read More
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Urbanism for Capitalists | Capitalism for Urbanists
2022-06-20 13:28
Arbitrary Lines is the newest must read book on zoning by land use scholar and Market Urbanism contributor, Nolan Gray. The book is split into three sections, starting with what zoning is an… Read More
2022-05-25 20:14
In my previous post, I reviewed an old book on Japan while teasing a new one:
If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spo… Read More
2022-04-28 20:43
If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReyn… Read More
2022-04-19 21:44
In Homelessness is a Housing Problem, Prof. Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Page Aldern seek to answer the question: why is homelessness much more common in some cities than in othe… Read More
2022-04-18 14:24
Georgists assert that a Land Value Tax (LVT) ensures land is always put to its most efficient use. They claim that increased carrying costs deter speculation. And if valuable land is never h… Read More
2022-04-06 14:48
Discussions about land use reform focus on policy – as they should. Overcoming NIMBYism will require deep legal, political, and regulatory reform. That said, entrepreneurs may be helpi… Read More
2022-04-01 14:53
Legislators in Colorado and Tennessee have introduced bills modeled on Arizona’s Private Property Rights Protection Act, a law tha… Read More
2022-03-29 01:45
Over the past week, the press was chock full of 2020-style headlines like “Census Bureau Confirms Pandemic Exodus from SF.” That’s because according to the Census Bureau, v… Read More
2022-03-28 18:28
The relationship between blacks and whites in the residential subdivisions out beyond the suburban ring suggests that middle-class people of both races recognize each other as equals. Among… Read More
2022-03-20 17:09
At a recent webinar, Prof. Christopher Serkin of Vanderbilt Law School made an interesting argument. He pointed out that a) Sun Belt cities tend to have less restrictive zoning than norther… Read More
2022-03-17 16:17
Urbanist and YIMBY Twitter had a field day dunking on Nathan J. Robinson, whose essay in his publication Current Affairs (yesterday’s tagline: “the one thing left that isn’… Read More
2022-03-14 12:45
Given that I’ve written a few papers about Harris County, Texas, and even helped republish a book about the city of Houston, it’s a little embarrassing to admit I had never been… Read More
2022-02-16 19:06
One argument I have run across recently is that the high cost of housing is caused by mysterious corporate investors are buying up real estate and forcing up the cost.
The stupidest ver… Read More
2022-01-14 17:24
On Marginal Revolution today, Tyler Cowen responded to several questions from a commenter, Celestus, including one that more and more Americans are asking: “I’m a remote worker… Read More
2022-01-06 22:25
A recent Youtube video on New York City’s “Billionares’ Row” (a smattering of very expensive buildings at the northern edge of midtown Manhattan) has received over si… Read More
2021-12-16 19:18
LA at DawnGeographer at English Wikipedia., CC BY 1.0I visited Los Angeles last month, and I fully intended to take transit from my aunt’s house in Long Beach to a meeting downtown and… Read More
2021-11-10 20:58
One argument against bus lanes, bicycle lanes, congestion pricing, elimination of minimum parking requirements, or indeed almost any transportation improvement that gets in the way of high-s… Read More
2021-11-02 15:33
In laudable news, the Pew Charitable Trusts have backed a research project at NYU’s Furman
Center to commission and publish work “to understand how specific land use
reforms&hell&hell…Read More
2021-10-19 21:34
I am currently reading A Fortress in Brooklyn, a (mostly) fine book about the relationship between Williamsburg’s Satmar Hasidim and real estate policy.
One chapter discusses Sat… Read More
2021-10-06 20:47
In July, I showed that an otherwise careful group of researchers at the Othering and Belonging Institute were using a measure of statistical racial segregation that confounds diversity with… Read More
2021-09-13 11:53
A few weeks ago the Times reported that Lloyds Banking Group had purchased 45 new homes to let in Peterborough. This is part of a plan for Lloyds to own 50,000 homes by 2031. Given the media… Read More
2021-08-22 02:50
One common explanation for high rents is something called “financialization.” Literally, this term of course makes no sense: any form of investment, good or bad, involves financ… Read More
2021-08-19 11:30
Reading Hayek in HollandPhoto by Peter Furth
During a working vacation in the Netherlands, I had the dissonant experience of reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in one of… Read More
2021-07-12 04:00
In the standard urban growth model, a circular city lies in
a featureless agricultural plain. When the price of land at the edge of the
city rises above the value of agricultural land, &ldqu&hell…Read More
2021-07-05 10:47
Headlines last month proclaimed that “Cities Have Grown More Diverse, And More Segregated, Since the 90s.” The headlines originate in the key findings of a new, detailed study fr… Read More
2021-07-02 20:43
Over the years, I’ve heard a wide variety of arguments against new housing. One of them is the “mysterious foreign investor” argument. According to this theory, new urban… Read More
2021-05-21 14:45
There was an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this week on the rise of extended stay hotels, which specialize in renting to a group within the working poor- people who have… Read More
2021-03-09 10:45
The best book on zoning and NIMBYism you’ve never read might
well be The Housing Bias by Paul
Boudreaux. The author is a law professor, but you’d be forgiven for thinking
he&rsqu&hell…Read More
2021-03-03 11:50
Global house prices have been out of control for quite some time. This has helped to reduce economic growth, increase unemployment and was even diagnosed as the greatest cause of inequality… Read More
2021-02-24 09:44
After over a century, Berkeley, California may be about to legalize missing middle housing – and it’s not alone. Bids to re-legalize gradual densification in the form of duplexes… Read More
2021-02-21 19:57
A recent paper by UCLA researchers discusses 2019-20 literature on the relationship between new construction and rents. The article discusses five papers; four of them found that new housin… Read More
2021-02-11 20:16
Night City: the cyberpunk themed sandbox of William Gibson’s darkest tech-themed dreams, and despite the host of game-breaking glitches, home to all the anti-urban nightmares that the… Read More
2021-02-10 09:37
A major barrier to the market urbanist’s ability to make the case for building more housing is the question of aesthetics. When you refer to density in cities, it’s easy to p… Read More
2021-01-28 17:00
Welcome to Twin Peaks: home of black coffee, cherry pie, murder, intrigue, and the endangered pine weasel. To kick off season two of Pop Culture Urbanism, I dive into David Lynch’s ecc… Read More
2021-01-12 16:04
Current events being what they are, I’m happy to be writing about something positive. Once again, we’re getting an ambitious housing reform package in the California legislature… Read More
2021-01-07 01:11
Someone just posted a video on Youtube using Houston, Texas as an argument in favor of zoning. The logic of the video is: Houston is horrible; Houston has no zoning; therefore every city sh… Read More
2021-01-04 21:49
One common argument against new housing is that the laws of supply and demand simply don’t apply to dense cities like New York, San Francisco ands Hong Kong, because new housing or upz… Read More
2020-12-26 00:05
You might think the North Pole is the most magical place on earth. But behind the magic, our deep dive into the history of Christmas movies reveals that there’s more to it than that… Read More
2020-12-20 15:26
For over a century, policymakers have argued that homeowners take better care of their neighborhood and are just generally more desirable in other ways. As early as 1917, the federal L… Read More
2020-11-18 19:43
I and many other scholars have argued that minimum parking requirements increase the cost of housing (by taking up land for parking that could be used for housing, and by imposing costs that… Read More
2020-11-13 13:38
Arlington County policymakers have issued a call for ideas on improving housing availability and affordability. If you’d like to submit your own ideas, you can do so here through the r… Read More
2020-10-01 23:59
A stickplex is a dense residential structure or group of structures built with inexpensive materials and techniques, most commonly woo… Read More
2020-09-21 21:16
Find the full-length report draft here.
New York’s political community and the general public have yet to come to terms with reality on congestion pricing. While COVID-19 has suppre… Read More
2020-09-10 09:00
Tuck-under duplexes in Palisades Park, NJ (Google Streetview)In two previous posts, I’ve raised questions about the competitiveness of missing middle housing. This post is more petty:… Read More
2020-09-09 09:00
In yesterday’s post, I showed that missing middle housing, as celebrated in Daniel Parolek’s new book, may be stuck in the middle, too balanced to compete with single family hous… Read More
2020-09-08 09:00
Everybody loves missing middle housing! What’s not to like? It consists of neighborly, often attractive homes that fit in equally well in Rumford, Maine, and Queens, New York. Missing… Read More
2020-09-02 20:28
The Manhattan Institute, a conservative (by New York standards) think tank, recently published a survey of New York residents; a few items are of interest to urbanists. A few items struck m… Read More
2020-09-01 00:29
I just read a 2018 book by a variety of authors (most notably Jonathan Levine, author of Zoned Out), From Mobility to Accessibility: Transforming Urban Transportation and Land Use Planning… Read More
2020-08-21 12:53
If there’s one thing that unites TV and film since the fifties, it’s the archetype of the dastardly developer – forever destroying homes and hiking rents. But it wasn&rsquo&hell…Read More
2020-08-14 17:54
Has the Water Tribe gone full NIMBY? Can Avatar Aang overcome his angry impulse to preserve? Why is Ba Sing Se so segregated? And what can we learn from the success of Republic City? In this… Read More
2020-08-07 13:49
How can Spider-Man possibly afford to live in New York? And how can we make the city more affordable for dear Aunt May? In the first episode of my brand new YouTube series on pop-culture urb… Read More
2020-08-05 17:22
In 2015, urban studies professor Anne Haila published a book on Singapore’s land ownership and housing system called Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State. The Singapore housi… Read More
2020-07-10 21:51
Charles Marohn’s recent article in The American Conservative on the evils of single-family zoning received over 200 comments. The most provocative responses were the ones forthrightly… Read More
2020-06-22 18:08
This book, available from solimarbooks.com, is a set of very short essays (averaging about three to five pages) on topics related to urban planning. Like me, Stephens generally values walka… Read More
2020-06-08 17:12
After reading an article suggesting that New York’s subways seeded COVID-19, Salim Furth’s response to that article on this blog, and one or two other pieces, I decided to write… Read More
2020-05-07 22:24
The COVID-19 epidemic has led to a lot of argument about the role of urban form; defenders of the Sprawl Faith argue that New York’s high infection and fatality rate is proof that tran… Read More
2020-04-19 19:44
New York City is an epicenter of the global novel coronavirus pandemic. Through April 16, there were 1,458 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents in New York City. Always in the media eye, an… Read More
2020-03-02 20:54
My sense is that parks and similar forms of public space tend to be far less controversial than housing or industry. But an interesting paper by Israeli architecture professor Hillel Schock… Read More
2020-01-29 19:06
I had always thought dollar stores were a nice thing to have in an urban neighborhood, but recently they have become controversial. Some cities have tried to limit their growth, based on t… Read More
2020-01-28 17:55
Jeremiah Moss, a New York blogger, just wrote a long article complaining about the bad habits of his new neighbors in the East Village. I suspect many, if not most readers, of his article… Read More
2019-12-12 21:27
One common argument against new housing is that it will turn “[neighborhood at issue] into Dubai.” Evidently, some people think Dubai is a hellscape of super-dense skyscapers… Read More
2019-10-24 16:17
In my email box today, I received a message from an anti-housing group, touting a study from the localize.city website* on sunlight on New York neighborhoods. The purpose of the study is… Read More
2019-08-27 15:38
Even the most supposedly reputable mainstream media is often less than careful in its coverage of housing issues. For example, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran an article on the Upper… Read More
2019-08-13 15:26
One common argument raised by NIMBYs is that zoning is not harmful to humans, because people priced out of expensive cities can always move to a cheaper one.
But a recent story illustrate… Read More
2019-07-22 23:56
One common argument against mixing housing types and densities is that if housing type A (for example, townhouses or single-family homes) is mixed with housing type B (for example, condos)… Read More
2019-07-17 16:50
With Spider-Man: Far From Home hitting theaters earlier this month, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has taken one of the series’ biggest risks yet: pulling Spider-Man out of New York Cit… Read More
2019-06-30 03:18
One common leftist argument against new housing is the “Red Vienna” argument: the claim that housing can only be affordable in places where the government dominates the housing m… Read More
2019-06-19 17:00
Political controversies over building new homes, shops, and offices have long revolved around an axis of “neighborhood vs developer.” Depending on your perspective, the “ne… Read More
2019-06-03 13:00
In this interview I talk to Onésimo Flores, Founder of Jetty, a (sort-of) microtransit company from Mexico City.
Marcos Schlickmann: Thank you for participating in this interview… Read More
2019-05-13 01:55
The Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C. is now home to the world’s newest Apple Store following an expensive rehabilitation funded by the retailer. Originally built as a public librar… Read More
2019-05-11 21:16
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: third fastest growing city in Africa. (pop. 4,364,541) Flickr user David Stanley1. Recently at Market Urbanism
A great new paper on how government fights walking by… Read More
2019-05-09 21:10
Some commentators are slightly agog over an academic paper by Andres Rodrieguz-Pose and Michael Storper; Richard Florida writes that they shows that ” the effect of [housing] supply ha… Read More
2019-04-26 11:49
by Shanu Athiparambath
Years ago, I worked for a magazine in Delhi. I wanted to live near the magazine office, but the rent was too damn high. In a low-rent area nearby, I rented a dingy… Read More
2019-04-17 19:28
One common argument against tall buildings is that they reduce street life, because the most expensive high-rises have gyms and other amenities that cause people to stay inside the buildings… Read More
2019-04-16 13:00
We are blessed and cursed to live in times in which most smart people are expected to have an opinion on zoning. Blessed, in that zoning is arguably the single most important institution sh… Read More
2019-04-15 00:04
Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill has received a lot of love from those who favor of land use liberalization. Like Cory Booker’s housing bill, the Warren bill would seek to encour… Read More
2019-04-08 14:00
As zoning has become more restrictive over time, the need for “safety valve” mechanisms—which give developers flexibility within standard zoning rules—has grown expon… Read More
2019-03-21 12:30
Anti poverty programs have been taking center stage as the 2020 Democratic primary heats up. Proposals from Kamala Harris and Corey Booker target high housing costs for renters and make for… Read More
2019-03-19 12:30
Over the past few years, Japanese zoning has become popular among YIMBYs thanks to a classic blog post by Urban kchoze. It’s easy to see why: Japanese zoning is relatively liberal, wi… Read More
2019-03-07 15:14
Many readers of this blog know that government subsidizes driving- not just through road spending, but also through land use regulations that make walking and transit use inconvenient and da… Read More
2019-03-01 19:36
A viaduct for the California High-Speed Rail Project
1. Recently at Market Urbanism
Any Green New Deal Must Tackle Zoning Reform by Nolan Gray
According to the Environmental Protec… Read More
2019-02-28 20:25
While reading someone else’s work, I recently ran across an article by David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, claiming that overseas oligarchs turning apartments all over the… Read More
2019-02-28 02:15
A common argument against Airbnb and similar home-sharing companies is that they raise rents, because every apartment used for short-term rentals could be used for long-term rentals. A… Read More
2019-02-19 14:46
Five years ago everything in California felt like a giant (land use policy) dumpster fire. Fast forward to today we live in a completely different world. Yimby activists have pushed policy… Read More
2019-02-04 14:00
Believe it or not, the YIMBY movement won a lot in 2018. It kicked off with January’s high of California State Senator Scott Wiener’s introduction of SB 827, which would have pe… Read More
2019-01-31 20:57
One reason for California’s high housing costs might be Proposition 13. This law, passed by referendum in the 1970s, may discourage housing production in two significant ways.
Fi… Read More
2019-01-24 15:00
With the Democrats scrambling to come up with a legislative agenda after their November takeover of the House of Representatives, an old idea is making a comeback: a “Green New Deal… Read More
2018-12-07 20:56
1. Recently at Market Urbanism:
Two Cheers for PHIMBY by Michael Lewyn
One alternative to market urbanism that has received a decent amount of press coverage is the PHIMBY (Public Hou… Read More
2018-12-05 10:33
This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. This is how Jane Jacobs opened her 1961 classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. It wouldn’t… Read More
2018-12-04 17:15
Alain Bertaud’s long awaited book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, is out today. Bertaud is a senior research scholar at the NYU Marron Institute of Urb… Read More
2018-11-20 19:05
In Generation Priced Out, housing activist Randy Shaw writes a book about the rent crisis for non-experts. Shaw’s point of view is that of a left-wing YIMBY: that is, he favors… Read More
2018-11-20 16:18
One alternative to market urbanism that has received a decent amount of press coverage is the PHIMBY (Public Housing In My Back Yard) movement. PHIMBYs (or at least the most extreme PH… Read More
2018-11-16 15:38
Long Island City – One one of the locations Amazon chose for HQ2
1. Recently at Market Urbanism:
Three Policies for Making Driverless Cars Work for Cities by Emily Hamilton
To av… Read More
2018-11-16 13:00
One advantage of a federal system is enabling people ill-treated by one government body to “vote with their feet” toward less abusive jurisdictions. That escape valve is one rat… Read More
2018-11-06 17:20
Some urbanists have become skeptical about the future of autonomous vehicles even as unstaffed, autonomous taxis are now serving customers in Phoenix and Japan. Others worry that AVs, if the… Read More
2018-10-25 11:24
Image by Ed Keegan (facebook)
1. Recently at Market Urbanism:
Response to “Steelmanning the NIMBYs” by Michael Lewyn
Scott Alexander, a West Coast blogger, has writt… Read More
2018-10-11 22:53
One common argument against all forms of infill development runs something like this: “In dense, urban areas land prices are always high, so housing prices will never be affordable abs… Read More
2018-10-08 01:25
Scott Alexander, a West Coast blogger, has written a post that has received a lot of buzz, called “Steelmanning the NIMBYs”; apparently, “steelmanning” is… Read More
2018-09-28 20:47
1. Announcements:
MUsings are back!! This week, we’ll get you caught up on the latest on our site and social media.
Be sure to check out and share the new documentary video prod… Read More
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