A recent Youtube video on New York City's "Billionares' Row" (a smattering of very expensive buildings at the northern edge of midtown Manhattan) has received over six million views. Much of the video is rather propagandistic: it uses perjorative terms like "loopholes" to describe how the … [Read more...]
Financialization and housing costs
One common explanation for high rents is something called "financialization." Literally, this term of course makes no sense: any form of investment, good or bad, involves finances.But I think that the most common non-incoherent use of the term is something like this: rich people and … [Read more...]
contradictory anti-housing arguments
Over the years, I've heard a wide variety of arguments against new housing. One of them is the "mysterious foreign investor" argument. According to this theory, new urban housing will all be bought up by billionaire foreign investors, who will purchase the property and never rent it out, thus … [Read more...]
Local iniquity
There was an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this week on the rise of extended stay hotels, which specialize in renting to a group within the working poor- people who have the cash for weekly rent, but cannot easily rent traditional apartments due to their poor credit … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Housing Bias
The best book on zoning and NIMBYism you’ve never read might well be The Housing Bias by Paul Boudreaux. The author is a law professor, but you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s a journalist. His writing is engaging - and occasionally funny – and he does what is unthinkable for many scholars: drives … [Read more...]
Why rents aren’t keeping up with house prices
Global house prices have been out of control for quite some time. This has helped to reduce economic growth, increase unemployment and was even diagnosed as the greatest cause of inequality in the developed world in a 2016 paper by Matthew Rognlie. However, rents have failed to show the same … [Read more...]
The Duplex: Gateway Drug to Urban Density
After over a century, Berkeley, California may be about to legalize missing middle housing - and it’s not alone. Bids to re-legalize gradual densification in the form of duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and the like have begun to pick up steam over the last several years. In 2019, Oregon legalized … [Read more...]
Latest rent research
A recent paper by UCLA researchers discusses 2019-20 literature on the relationship between new construction and rents. The article discusses five papers; four of them found that new housing consistently lowers rents in nearby buildings.For example, Kate Pennington wrote a paper on the … [Read more...]