Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Salim Furth
2y ago
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 McReynolds. But if you read two books about Japan, as you should, the second one should be André Sorensen’s essential The Making of Urban Japan. American (and European) YIMBYs point to Tokyo as an icon and model – proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability even when demand is very strong. But this body of work is over-reliant on a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog p ..read more
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Review: Homelessness is a Housing Problem
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Michael Lewyn
2y ago
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 others? They find that only two factors are significant: 1) overall rents and 2) rental vacancy rates. Where housing is scarce and rents are high, lots of people are homeless. Where rents are lower, fewer people are homeless, even in very poor places. (In fact, high city incomes correlate positively with homelessness, because more and better jobs lead to higher demand for housing). By contrast, many other facto ..read more
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Land Value Taxation and Intertemporal Tradeoffs
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Jeff Fong
2y ago
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 held out of use, society is better off. I think the story about incentives is correct. But I question whether pulling development forward in time is definitionally more efficient. In a world with transaction costs, tradeoffs abound and it’s worth thinking through the implications of an LVT. A Tale of Two Cities  Picture a growing local economy with increasing land values and an LVT. Now suppose we split ..read more
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Entrepreneurs and the Changing Political Economy of Housing
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Jeff Fong
2y ago
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 helping to short circuit the perverse incentives that give rise to NIMBYism in the first place. New companies may be encouraging homeowners to embrace density and helping to break the tie between homeownership and anti-deveolpment attitudes in the process. Creating Demand for Density Belong is an early stage startup making it easier for homeowners to rent out their single family home. The main use case is that of a ho ..read more
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Protecting Housing Affordability by Protecting the Right to Build Housing
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Emily Hamilton
2y ago
Legislators in Colorado and Tennessee have introduced bills modeled on Arizona’s Private Property Rights Protection Act, a law that requires municipal governments to compensate landowners when new land use regulations make land less valuable. Both states already have areas with housing affordability problems due in part to land use regulations that are already on the books. Requiring local policymakers to compensate property owners for downzoning going forward won’t do anything to reduce existing barriers to housing construction, but they can at least help prevent the problem from getting wor ..read more
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Reasons to be a Census skeptic
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Michael Lewyn
2y ago
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, virtually every urban county in the U.S. (even urban counties in growing metros like Dallas and Atlanta) lost population between July 2020 and July 2021. But is the hype justified? I suspect not, for a variety of reasons. First of all, Census Department estimates have, in recent years, tended to underestimate urban populations, at least in some cities. For example, in 2019 the Census estimated Manhattan’s population as 1.628 ..read more
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Are there places in America with diversity *and* equality?
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Salim Furth
2y ago
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 middleclass Americans, at least in the special circumstances of these Pennsylvania communities and others like them around the country, the terrible burden of race has been lightened greatly. Roger Starr, Integration Without Tears, 1994 We know there are large and persistent gaps between the principal racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Those gaps feel especially stark to people who live in gentrifying ne ..read more
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Do HOAs justify zoning?
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Michael Lewyn
2y ago
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 northern cities; b) Sun Belt cities also have more homeowners’ associations (HOAs) with restrictive rules; and therefore (c) perhaps zoning reform will fail because homeowners will react to restrictive zoning by creating more HOAs, which will limit density and housing supply just as much as zoning. It seems to me that this argument has some weak links. The most obvious is that it is not clear that the correlation h ..read more
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California should indeed build new cities – but don’t let Nathan J. Robinson anywhere near them
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Salim Furth
2y ago
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’t disappointing”) called for building new cities in California. The essay was a typical of the “anti-anti-NIMBY” genre: he hastens to admit that California’s really has a housing crisis. He even agrees that more homes are needed. But he dismisses the YIMBY movement with a lazy strawman argument (laughably implying that Los Angeles is a “market-built” city), and moves on to an idea with natural appeal to someone who was born ..read more
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Houston Impressions
Market Urbanism | Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists
by Salim Furth
2y ago
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 there. So when a Canadian buddy suggested meeting up in the Bayou City for barbeque ahead of his conference there, I jumped at the chance. Houston dusk Houston has long been a trivia answer as the “only big city without zoning”, but it has risen in urbanists’ estimation in the last decade as the consequences of zoning became worse in most cities and, at the same time, Houston aggressively deregulated: In 1998, Houston ..read more
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