by Kevin CarsonThis article won the 2011 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing.Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their … [Read more...]
The Rent is Too High and the Commute is Too Long: We Need Market Urbanism
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...]
Cities Should Not Design for Autonomous Vehicles
Coauthored with Emily HamiltonLast week, the autonomous vehicle company Waymo began testing cars in Chandler, AZ with no employees sitting in the front seat. While Waymo is busy creating systems of vehicle-mounted sensors that allow cars to safely navigate existing urban infrastructure and … [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...]
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...]
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...]
TILTs for Income Mobility
Land-use scholars have offered a variety of policy proposals that attempt to identify institutional reforms to reduce the incentive for homeowner NIMBYs to protest development. For example, in a 2013 paper law professor David Schleicher proposed a policy called Tax Increment Local Transfers (TILTs). … [Read more...]