A new paper in the Journal of Development Economics by Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, and Andrii Parkhomenko estimates the welfare gains of Transit Oriented Development in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru metro or the Namma metro is around 170Km long including the planned sections.The evolution of … [Read more...]
Where sale prices are going up
The conventional wisdom (based on Census estimates) seems to me that urban cores have lost population since COVID began, but are beginning to recover. But mid-decade Census estimates are often quite flawed. These estimates are basically just guesses based on complicated mathetmatical formulas, and … [Read more...]
How much does delay cost?
Everyone agrees that delays and uncertainty are costly for housing development. But it's very hard to put a number on it. The obvious costs (lawyer hours, interest over many months) are surely an underestimate. Professors Stuart Gabriel and Edward Kung have a useful answer, at least for Los … [Read more...]
Are we spiralling into a new dark age? | Analysis and review of Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead
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...]
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...]
Milton’s Zoning Referendum
"Wow!" the reporter said, "I knew you from Milton, but I didn't know you were from East Milton. Tell me what it feels like?"Sport sites in East Milton: Sgroiball and sleddingWell, until last week it was not that dramatic. East Milton is an old railroad-commuter neighborhood favored by … [Read more...]
Houston as an Affordability Model
In December, I was asked to testify at a House Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance hearing on government barriers to housing construction and affordability. I provided examples of reforms to land regulations that have facilitated increased housing supply, particularly relatively low-cost types of … [Read more...]
Hopefully, AI will create a perpetual housing crisis
I don't know how successful artificial intelligence will be. But let's agree, for the moment, to consider a reasonably optimistic case where AI delivers significant productivity gains across a broad range of tasks - but not in a way that radically alters our Newtonian constraints. What would happen … [Read more...]