The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America's two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in … [Read more...]
Why Does Houston Have Such A Great Restaurant Scene?
Browsing through peoples' posts of their favorite things to do in Houston, there's a recurring theme of eating out. USA Today called Houston "the dining-out capital of the nation": on average, we eat out more often than any other city in the country, at the second-lowest average price … [Read more...]
The need for low-quality housing
The market urbanism axiom -- permitting housing supply to increase is key to achieving affordable housing -- has been made recently by Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce and Daniel Hertz at City Observatory. However both argue that even with an increasing supply, low-income people will need aid in order … [Read more...]
Liberate the Garage!: Autonomous Cars and the American Dream
When it comes to the impact autonomous cars will have on cities, there’s plenty of room for disagreement. Will they increase or decrease urban densities? Will they help with congestion or make it worse? At the same time, there seems to be widespread agreement on at least two things: First, far fewer … [Read more...]
Reforming Zoning in a Kludgeocracy
To market urbanists and many others, it's clear that there is a positive relationship between high housing costs and land-use restrictions and that liberalizing zoning would lower housing costs relative to what they would be in a more regulated environment. Given this relationship, reducing zoning … [Read more...]
Return to Sender: Housing affordability and the shipping container non-solution
Washington, D.C. has a monopoly on many things. Bad policy, unfortunately, isn’t among them. Last month, a development corporation in Lexington, Kentucky installed a shipping container house in an economically distressed area of town to improve housing affordability. The corporation is a private … [Read more...]
The deal-making behind the Silver Line
In political transactions, players cannot make deals using dollars, but nonetheless they engage in trades to pursue their goals. Policymakers may engage in trades both with other policymakers and with private sector actors . While these deals are not denominated in dollars, their gains from trade … [Read more...]
Shell Games in NIMBYism
Yesterday the Cato Institute hosted an event featuring William Fischel's discussion of his new book Zoning Rules! with commentary by Mark Calabria, Matt Yglesias, and Robert Dietz. Fischel explained his theory that zoning was an effective tool for minimizing nuisances between land uses through the … [Read more...]