So moves the overton window. If it can move an inch, it can move a mile. The goal is to turn the urban working class against the swpls, to shatter the left’s fragile high-low coalition for a generation.
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Category Archives: Housing
The New York Times: America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals
Brookings Institute: Zoning, taxing, hoarding: Housing policies for the middle class
Over the past decade, housing costs in the United States have risen faster than incomes. While housing affordability has long been a problem for low-income families, middle-income families are increasingly facing affordability challenges, especially in urban areas with strong labor markets. How do current housing policies help – or harm – the well-being of middle-class families?
On May 8, Brookings’s Future of the Middle Class Initiative and the Center on Regulation and Markets hosted an event to explore how policy can help reduce housing stress on the middle class. The event started with the presentation of a new report by Brookings Fellow Jenny Schuetz. California State Senator Scott Wiener, sponsor of Senate Bill 50, also known as the “More Homes Act,” gave the keynote address. Expert panels then discussed zoning reforms and tax policies related to housing.
Source: Zoning, taxing, hoarding: Housing policies for the middle class
The Nation: Liberal America’s Single-Family Hypocrisy
Brooklyn Eagle: Meet NYCHA’s overtime king: a $315,000 plumber
City Journal 10 Blocks podcast: How Markets Shape Cities
Urbanist Alain Bertaud joins Michael Hendrix to discuss how urban planners and economists can improve city management.
Bertaud’s book Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities argues that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities’ growth. The book is a summation of what Bertaud has learned in a lifetime spent as an urban planner, including a stint at the World Bank, where he advised local and national governments on urban-development policies.
Previously, Bertaud worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador, Port Au Prince, Sana’a, New York, Paris, Tlemcen, and Chandigarh. He is currently a senior research scholar at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.
https://www.city-journal.org/how-markets-shape-cities
Brookings: Reforming land use regulations
Arguably, land use controls have a more widespread impact on the lives of ordinary Americans than any other regulation. These controls, typically imposed by localities, make housing more expensive and restrict the growth of America’s most successful metropolitan areas. These regulations have accreted over time with virtually no cost-benefit analysis. Restricting growth is often locally popular. Promoting affordability is hardly a financially attractive aim for someone who owns a home. Yet the maze of local land use controls imposes costs on outsiders, and on the American economy as a whole.
New York City enacted its pioneering zoning code in 1916. The Supreme Court only established the constitutionality of Euclidean zoning, which restricts neighborhoods to single uses, in 1926. Yet, these restrictions didn’t meaningfully prevent new building in much of America until the 1970s. Abundant new construction, not just in Texas but also in New York, Los Angeles and greater San Francisco, ensured that as late as 1970, prices remained close to the physical costs of construction in much of America.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/
