People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example.My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of … [Read more...]
The Answer to Expensive Housing: Build More
If you restrict the supply of housing, other things equal, what will happen to the price? That’s not a trick question. Any competent Econ 101 student would answer correctly that the price will rise.One reporter for the Washington Post gets it. In a hopeful sign of spreading economic literacy, … [Read more...]
Palo Alto: The Land of Too Many Jobs
Co-authored by Tony Albert and Jeff Fong SF Curbed recently sat down with Patrick Burt, Mayor of Palo Alto, to get his response to the high profile resignation of Kate Vershov Downing. Downing, of course, was the Palo Alto Planning Commissioner who publicly announced that she will move her family … [Read more...]
Cities And The Growth Of Our Collective Brain
In his famous 2010 Ted Talk Matt Ridley points out that a growing human population has facilitated increasing standards of living because more people means a faster growth rate of innovation. He explains that humans' propensity to exchange means that as a society we all benefit from each other's … [Read more...]
NIMBYs Outdo YIMBYs In Organizing Ability
A problem that pro-housing YIMBYs face in communities nationwide is that the NIMBYs opposing them are much better organized. The reason boils down to the classic problem of concentrated costs and dispersed benefits: the beneficiaries of new housing are scattered, while those who benefit … [Read more...]
Quantifying the effects of California zoning rules
Yet another study in a long line of others provides evidence that land-use regulations restrict housing supply. A new paper identifies a correlation between land-use regulations in California cities and the growth rate for housing units. Kip Jackson finds that California zoning rules and other … [Read more...]
Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities”
Monday, Y-Combinator, an early-stage technology startup incubator, announced it will “study building new, better cities.” Some existing cities will get bigger and there's important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. … [Read more...]
ReasonTV on SF’s YIMBY Movement
Last week, Reason.tv (the multimedia outlet of Reason Magazine) published a video about San Francisco's YIMBY movement. The video describes the decades of underdevelopment in San Francisco as the result of community activism intended to limit the supply of new construction. As a result, San … [Read more...]