Is it even possible today to write a vigorous argument in favor of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s? I doubt it. Jeanne Lowe’s 1967 “Cities in a Race with Time* is a sympathetic account of the urban renewal era in its own terms. How does it hold up?
Master Classes
Check out Alain Bertaud’s Master Class lecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India.
Transit oriented development in Bengaluru could lead to additional $64 Million per year
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. Bengaluru has low building heights and the paper’s counterfactual depends on […]
Hot takes and pensées, #UEA2024
Delete all Seattle’s highways. Invent new neighborhoods. Explain macroeconomic trends with home size. Money flows uphill to water. Do NIMBYs really hate density? Urban economics is on a tear.
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 often diverge a bit from end-of-decade Census counts. Is there another […]
Book Review: (de)Coding Mumbai
In Mumbai, there is a specific type of architect who has become the interpreter of regulations and there are those architects who are aestheticians working on building skins. As much as there is convenience in this split, it has taken away a big part of the agency of the architects in the city.
Toward an Erdmann synthesis
Kevin Erdmann argues that mortgage credit standards are too tight. Others say the federal government is subsidizing homeownership. Can they both be right?
Congestion Pricing: Traffic Solver or Sin Tax?
The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips. This article appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s […]
Stone: Diversity didn’t cause the baby bust
A new paper proposes that increasing diversity explains 90% of the recent decline in birthrates. Lyman Stone says it’s nonsense.
Harris’ housing target: Compared to what?
Kamala Harris has pledged to build 3 million new housing units. Setting aside the methods, what does that mean? And, would it “end America’s housing shortage”?
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 Angeles: As a lower bound, simply by […]
Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces
Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.
The 15-Minute City Is a Distracting Utopia
As proposed, Moreno’s 15-minute city has no chance of implementation, because economic and financial realities constrain the location of jobs, commerce, and community facilities. No planner can redesign a city by locating shops and jobs according to their own whims.