In Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs proclaims that 'we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.'Jane Jacobs wasn’t optimistic about the future of civilisation. ‘We show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age,’ she declares in Dark Age Ahead, her final book published in 2004. She evidences a … [Read more...]
Lessons from Cities and the Wealth of Nations: a manual for urban policymakers
Jacobs' adopted city of Toronto; source: Unsplash.Continuing this series of book reviews on Jane Jacobs’ works, I now turn to Cities and the Wealth of Nations. But there is already a fantastic piece on the Market Urbanism website, by Matthew Robare, who reviews this book and outlines what Jacobs … [Read more...]
Lessons from Jane Jacobs on The Economy of Cities
Four Cities Suite, by Hiro Yamagata (1983)At the heart of Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities is a simple idea: cities are the basic unit of economic growth. Our prosperity depends on the ability of cities to grow and renew themselves; neither nation nor civilisation can thrive without cities … [Read more...]
Can YIMBY policies cause large price declines?
Kevin Erdmann offers a helpful corrective to the "YIMBY triumphalism" of claiming that large relative rent declines in Austin and Minneapolis are results of YIMBY policies. He's mostly correct, especially about the rhetoric: arguing about housing supply from short term fluctuations is like arguing … [Read more...]
“The traditional model”
On Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen linked to a new paper in Real Estate Economics by Anthony W. Orlando and Christian L. Redfearn. It's a simple, empirical paper using data from 8 metro areas in California and Texas. It finds that net new housing creating appears to become more expensive and more … [Read more...]
No Solutions, Just Tradeoffs
File under "sad", not under "surprising":We provide evidence of intensified discriminatory behavior by landlords in the rental housing market during the eviction moratoria instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected from an experiment that involved more than 25,000 inquiries of … [Read more...]
The urban economics of sprawl
Should YIMBYs support or oppose greenfield growth? Two basic values animate most YIMBYs: housing affordability and urbanism. Sprawl puts those values into tension.https://twitter.com/salimfurth/status/1775556643909935597Let's take as a given that sprawl is "bad" urbanism, mediocre at … [Read more...]
And the Oscar for best paper goes to…
A friend asked what are the best papers supporting land use liberalization. That's a broad question, but here are some of my answers.AffordabilityThe basic case for zoning reform, across the political spectrum, is that the rent is too damn high. Michael Manville, Michael Lens, and Paavo … [Read more...]