Connor Tabarrok has an excellent new primer on Texas Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs), covering history, function, governance, and critiques. … [Read more...]
Cities for families?
In response to David Albouy & Jason Faberman's new NBER paper, Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle, Lyman Stone asks if this means that cities will always have lower fertility? I think the answer is probably yes, but that's extrapolating beyond the paper at hand. What this … [Read more...]
Deep Research: Supermajority laws around the states
Here are the results of my first use of OpenAI's Deep Research tool. I asked for information that I know well - and in which inaccurate research has been published. It did a great job and relied substantially on my own research. But it also went beyond my list - identifying protest petition statutes … [Read more...]
How much housing does Massachusetts build?
In a recent post, I revealed the 91 large cities and counties that consistently fail to report complete data to the federal Building Permit Survey (BPS). But what about smaller jurisdictions, which often have weak record-keeping and slim staffs - and what about states made up of many such small … [Read more...]
Snowy Sidewalks
Alan Cole has a blog-length tweet about city sidewalks several days after DC's snowstorm: I suspect something similar happens in conservative towns, but Cole points out the dissonance of the local reaction: Most curiously of all, the residents all seem fine with this. If you asked them, … [Read more...]
Does your city do its part to measure housing production?
One of the core data sources for understanding homebuilding in the U.S. is the Census Bureau's Building Permit Survey. But a disturbing number of large cities and counties are lax in providing the monthly data that make the survey useful. The resulting lower-quality data impacts federal products, … [Read more...]
Homelessness exits: Systems or individual factors?
In a new essay for Works In Progress magazine, I explain how the familiar correlation between housing cost and homelessness works. The most intuitive explanation would be that in high cost cities, more people lack the income for very cheap shelter. But that's not true. Income varies more … [Read more...]
Housing filters (dorm / shelter edition)
From the Washington Post via Greater Greater Washington: New non-congregate shelter in for people experiencing homelessness opens in West EndThe shelter, in a former George Washington University dormitory, is meant for families without children under 18, individuals who were matched to permanent … [Read more...]
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