WASHINGTON – David Paitsel, 42, a former FBI agent, and Brian Bailey, 53, a D.C. real estate developer were sentenced today on bribery and conspiracy charges for their role in schemes involving confidential information held by the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development United States … [Read more...]
Unexpected correlation in Census housing data
Since 1973, the US Census Bureau has administered the American Housing Survey (AHS) in odd-numbered years. Surveyors ask questions about the quality and value of respondents’ housing, and have a battery of questions for the subset of respondents who moved recently, asking about their search process. … [Read more...]
An Autopsy of Hsieh & Moretti (2019)?
Update 11/20: Chang-Tai Hsieh counters that Greaney's critique ignores general equilibrium effects which make labor scale invariant. That doesn't address the alleged coding errors. We'll see - and perhaps I wrote an autopsy too early. Thanks to Bryan Caplan for getting Hsieh's response out to the … [Read more...]
Tyler Cowen: “Is Tokyo really a YIMBY success story?”
Tyler is stirring the pot over at Marginal Revolution, asking whether Tokyo's low rents are a YIMBY success or just a productivity failure: low productivity and low immigration keep demand down. He calls the latter "NIMBYism". That framing doesn't hold up very well, but we can discard it and think … [Read more...]
Solano County Dreamin’: Is there a market urbanist way to build a new city?
Conor Dougherty and Erin Griffith revealed the identities behind a Silicon Valley investor group, Flannery Associates, that had gradually purchased 55,000 acres of ranchland near Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, California. Scale check: that's a lot of land. San Francisco is 30,000 acres; San … [Read more...]
Rhode Island’s housing process package
"Renting in Providence puts city councilors in precarious situations." That was the Providence Journal's leading headline a few days ago, as the legislature waited for Governor Daniel McKee to sign a pile of housing-related bills (Update: He signed them all). Rhode Island doesn't have a superstar … [Read more...]
On coexistence
One common NIMBY* argument is that new housing (or the wrong kind of new housing) will "destroy the neighborhood." For example, one suburban town's politicians fought zoning reform in New York by claiming that allowing multifamily housing "is a direct assault on the suburbs."Indeed, many people … [Read more...]
Detroit: LVT would fix that
In a recent Mackinac Policy conference, Detroit's Mayor Mike Dugan proposed *drum roll* a land value tax. Sort of. Mayor Dugan’s proposal would create separate tax rates for land and capital improvements (i.e. the buildings on top). Specifically, he wants to decrease the tax rate on buildings by … [Read more...]