Housing

Tune out the noise of various tenant-landlord tiffs in our pandemic-altered world and consider this fundamental question that carries actual signal from—of all places—the Broadway stage: What is the purpose of rent control?  read more »

This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living.  read more »

An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing.  read more »

If you’ve read this blog over the years you know that I’ve increasingly written about a general staleness in urbanist discourse. I’ve characterized it as seeing a need for new ideas in urbanism discourse, superstar cities becoming the victims of their own success, or the needs of interior cities being glossed over in favor of the coasts.  read more »

The newly published US Census Bureau state and District of Columbia population estimates contain some surprises about changing growth and net domestic migration (movement between states) patterns.  read more »

In a recent YouTube video Avoid These Cities (Housing Crash 2022) EPB Research provides an analysis of the national market. In general, West Coast is bad and East Coast is OK, especially the southeast. The overly regulated western states with higher raw land prices and huge city fees result in higher home prices.  read more »

Yesterday, Tyler Cowan mentioned in the Marginal Revolution blog that he wished books on urban areas “would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.”  read more »

In recent weeks, more and more commentators are suggesting that house prices in New Zealand have started to fall, and are expected to fall further.

For many homeowners, especially those who have bought within the last year or two, this news will be terrifying, and for them I have a great deal of sympathy. They were sold the lie that house prices would always and everywhere rise much faster than incomes, and that therefore the best way to financial independence was to borrow to the maximum extent possible and buy a house – better still, several houses, the more the better.  read more »

The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong connections between an organically expanding city, housing affordability and upward mobility.  read more »

There is considerable confusion with respect to the terms of urban geography, not only among the population in general, but also among the media, and sadly, among academics. Perhaps the greatest confusion is between the terms “metropolitan area” and “urban area.”  read more »