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...]
Swimming against the tide
One common anti-urbanist argument is that families simply don't want to live in cities. But analysis by New York's Department of City Planning (DCP) also shows that prosperous parts of New York City generally added children, at least in the decade before the rise of the COVID-19 virus.DCP … [Read more...]
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Revisited
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, revolutionised urban theory. This essay kicks off a series exploring Jacobs’ influential ideas and their potential to address today’s urban challenges and enhance city living.Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey, the author of … [Read more...]
The benefit-cost ratio of U.S. social housing
Via The Excellent Kevin Lewis, here's a paper that tries - at least - to estimate the benefit-cost ratio of the most common types of social housing in the U.S.Edgar Olsen and Dirk Early estimate that Housing Choice Vouchers - aka Section 8 - have a respectable benefit to taxpayer cost of 77%. … [Read more...]
Review: Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis
In Escaping the Housing Trap, Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges address the role of zoning in creating the housing crisis. Like some other recent books (most notably by Nolan Gray and Bryan Caplan) this book shows how zoning limits housing supply and thus has led to our current housing crisis. … [Read more...]
Market Affordable
Check out my new post at Metropolitan Abundance Project:How “inclusionary” are market-rate rentals? In metropolitan Baltimore, a family of four making $73,000 in 2024 qualifies for 60% AMI affordable housing, where it would pay $1,825 per month for rent, utilities included. A third of new … [Read more...]
The sudden death of the American condo
Condos are disappearing. They persist now mainly in pre-2010 buildings. Among multifamily homes built in the 2020s, just 1 in 25 is owner-occupied. What happened?Frasier's Seattle condo wouldn't be built todayI pulled American Community Survey data via IPUMS to get a better grasp of the … [Read more...]
Apples to apples housing cost comparisons
I recently ran across an interesting discussion on Twitter about housing costs. Someone praised Chicago's low housing costs, and someone else responded that because Chicago's most troubled neighborhoods are so unusually dangerous and disinvested (compared to the most troubled parts of a safer city … [Read more...]