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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
One anti-YIMBY argument is that “slowing growth or declines in rent are often signals to stop building new housing. Rather than encouraging housing suppliers to continue producing new units, decreases in rental prices put…
A new NBER paper by Yu-Hsin Ho (an incoming Harvard grad student) and three co-authors including Chiang-Tai Hsieh, contrasts zoning-segregated U.S. metro areas to Taipei, Taiwan, which allows mixed uses almost everywhere. The most…
Supporters of new housing tend to believe that high housing costs increase homelessness, because expensive cities tend to have the largest number of homeless people. Recently, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute has argued…
Samuel Hughes asks an excellent question in Works in Progress: Why aren’t there any YIMBYs, or NIMBYs for that matter, in continental Europe? It’s not for lack of high home prices. Instead, Hughes hypothesizes…
Often, opponents of the pro-housing YIMBY* movement either do not care about the negative results of high housing costs, or are simply careless with the facts. Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia…
Recently I saw an argument on X that went something like this: Person A- infill is cheaper than sprawl because no one has to build new sewer lines! Person B- Sprawl is cheaper because…
Two useful resources came across my desk this week. From Sargun Kaur and Bhuvana Anand, an analysis of recent building reforms in eight Indian states – not all of which succeeded in expanding the…
Kudos to the Pew housing research team for successfully tracing a real-life moving chain in Washington, D.C. They started at the bottom, with a woman named Titi who was living in a homeless shelter,…
Via Kevin Lewis, a new paper in an influential econ journal demonstrates that mayoral elections have a large influence on housing supply outcomes. It also shows that developer’s political contributions pay off in ways…
On Twitter, Patrick Collison chided YIMBYs for using Paris as an example of density – because Paris happens to not only be a helpful example of high population density midrise urban form, but is…
