"Renting in Providence puts city councilors in precarious situations." That was the Providence Journal's leading headline a few days ago, as the legislature waited for Governor Daniel McKee to sign a pile of housing-related bills (Update: He signed them all). Rhode Island doesn't have a superstar … [Read more...]
Tell It to the Judge: New Lawsuits Take Exclusionary Zoning to Court
As various housing reform bills work their way through the lawmaking process in American state legislatures, several new legal challenges to local land use and zoning ordinances are simultaneously underway in state and federal courts. Among these courtroom efforts are challenges to occupancy … [Read more...]
Homeownership and the Warren Housing Bill
Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill has received a lot of love from those who favor of land use liberalization. Like Cory Booker’s housing bill, the Warren bill would seek to encourage state and local land use reform using federal grants as an incentive. Warren’s bill would significantly increase … [Read more...]
The Progressive Roots of Zoning
by Samuel R StaleyBefore the twentieth century land-use and housing disputes were largely dealt with through courts using the common-law principle of nuisance. In essence if your neighbor put a building, factory, or house on his property in a way that created a measurable and tangible harm, courts … [Read more...]
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” should be required reading for YIMBYs and urbanists of any ideological stripe. Rothstein argues that housing segregation in the US has been the intentional outcome of policy decisions made at every … [Read more...]
People Over Process: Why Democracy Doesn’t Justify Exclusion
Some people accept the idea that restrictive land use policy is just as bad as all the research suggests, but persist in supporting the status quo. They argue that if a community chooses to regulate its built environment, that choice should be respected as having moral weight because it’s the … [Read more...]
The Other Broken Window
My first article for TheFreemanOnline dealt with the “broken window fallacy.” But in the literature on social theory, there’s actually another important idea that also uses the metaphor of a “broken window.”In his comment on The Freeman’s Facebook page, Flavio Ortigao raised this point when he … [Read more...]
Parking In A DC Bike Lane Is Extremely Cost-effective, For Drivers
This month, the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) published an analysis citing traffic ticket data to illustrate the following point:Of the 723,237 parking tickets issued in this 5 month period, only 2,420 were for parking in bike lanes. That’s about 3 out of every 1,000 tickets. That … [Read more...]