Why is the rent so damn high? And why does it take hours to commute from cheap, plentiful housing to modern economy jobs? If you are living in a big city in America, you likely face this problem. And it isn’t just an American problem: From Ireland to New Zealand to The Philippines, the … [Read more...]
High Rents: Are Construction Costs the Culprit?
(cross-posted from planetizen.com)I have argued numerous times on Planetizen that increased housing supply would reduce rents. I recently read one counterargument that I had not fully addressed before: the claim that no amount of new housing will ever bring down urban rents because housing in … [Read more...]
Does Density Raise Housing Prices?
My last post, on urban geographic constraints and housing prices, led to an interesting discussion thread. The most common counterargument was that because dense cities are usually more expensive, density must cause high cost. But if this was true, cities would become cheaper as they became less … [Read more...]
The “Geographically Constrained Cities” Fantasy
One common argument against building new urban housing is that cities are geographically constrained by their natural and political boundaries, and thus can never build enough housing to bring prices down. This claim rests on a variety of false assumptions.The first false assumption is that the … [Read more...]
Exempting Suburbia: How suburban sprawl gets special treatment in our tax code
This is the third post in a series about government policies that encouraged suburban growth in the US. You can find the first part here and the second one here.Suburban sprawl gets preferential tax treatment in the US. As a result, it is cheaper to spend a dollar on housing than on … [Read more...]
Financing Suburbia: How government mortgage policy determined where you live
The government exercises tremendous power over residential design in the US. Its influence is nearly invisible, because it works through complex financing programs, insurance incentives, and secondary markets. These mechanisms go unnoticed, but their effect is hard to miss—they remade the United … [Read more...]
A Great Book for Market Urbanists
One long-forgotten housing option is residential hotels; a century ago, most renters lived in hotels and shared space with short-term tenants. I just read a book, Living Downtown, about the rise and fall of residential hotels. Rather than discuss them in detail I refer you to my amazon.com … [Read more...]
Subsidizing Suburbia: A forgotten history of how the government created suburbia
This is the first article of a five-part series on suburbia in the United States.In primary school, one of my friends lived in a duplex. This fact blew my mind. To my inexperienced 7-year-old mind, a duplex barely registered as a house. Her family shared a driveway with their neighbors, and … [Read more...]