Last couple years, downtown Dayton added lots of housing, not cheap (by regional standards), but in spite of that business seems down in downtown bars/restaurants.
This is pushing my rent up (whatever, I can afford it) but if you're not going out why not live in boring suburb apt for 300-500 less?
"emasculate this city" wtf
But that's what this story is about? If you reduce the costs of construction, you get more housing. Reducing regulatory and financial barriers to utilizing a cheaper construction modality is of a piece with making zoning more permissive or limiting delays in approvals in that respect.
So I was prepared to be embarrassed that a 14 year old blog post I wrote was circulating, but I re-read that and I think it holds up pretty well. Nothing in there I wouldn't endorse today, I don't think. (I did eventually make my peace with twitter, but I probably shouldn't have.)
I used to be annoyed that Mayor Harrell was so disinterested in housing that he was running years behind on the Comp plan. I retract that annoyance; thanks for being lazy, Bruce, as your laziness created the opportunity for a Mayor who takes the housing crisis seriously to do it right.
The Gods of peer review smiling upon my inbox this afternoon: two pretty promising-at-first-glance R&R's within 30 minutes of each other. Time for a celebratory beverage.
An excellent book, and a helpful prequel to the story of Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren's shared crusade to keep those filthy renters out of single family home communities.
This sounds kind of ridiculous, but it fits with the available evidence a little too snugly to dismiss
Corporate ownership of single family house rental Discourse makes me insane because none of the neo-Brandeisians are willing to come out and say "I think that lower middle class SFH renters should be evicted and forced to live in apartments so that upper middle class families can buy those houses."
Eight years ago, I was a city planner in Central Queens. One of the worst part of the job was having to tell homeowners that it wasn't legal to build an ADU. Now New York City has a whole website dedicated to helping homeowners build an ADU. The arc of justice is long, etc.
housing.hpd.nyc.gov/adu
The arg is that Warren should take the interests of renters seriously, not that homeownership should be actively discouraged.
Banning build-to-rent means less rentals on the market, which means higher rents, which will make it harder for renters to ever get to a down payment (or save generally).
This sorry episode, and Sen. Warren's shameful conduct throughout, is a fine example of how fundamentally unstable the 'left' part of left-populism is. A left-populist appeal brings people in with "let's go after private equity" and they barely notice they're actually attacking renters.
If your goal is to dissuade anyone from even attempting to build housing in jurisdiction, it's not a waste of time at all. Even if it ultimately fails to block this project, the message being sent here could easily dissuade others from attempting.
Probably shouldn't read too much into it, but this (in what I think is considered the leading Marxist geography journal) seems significant. Materialist class analysis of urban political economy not rigged to reach pre-determined NIMBY/degrowth conclusions!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
To state the blindingly obvious, places like Yountville desperately need much more housing in general and affordable housing in particular, including efficiency studios and larger family size homes. That he's pitting one against the other is what poker players call a "tell."
That's just a standard NIMBY tactic. "I don't oppose (X), I just oppose (version of X that might actually happen) for nitpicky reasons" has worked to delay and often kill a huge number of housing projects over the years.
The obvious wisdom and effectiveness of Housing First is obscured by the fact we've made "a tiny, no-frills apartment" an expensive status symbol in huge swathes of the country by creating an artificial housing shortage
Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...
American planning in a nutshell: building apartments in a wealthy neighborhood? You need special permission and must rent 20% of them at a loss to poor people.
Combining 10 apartments into a mansion for one extremely rich family? By-right process, no subsidized housing requirement, and a tax break.
I, a Mariners fan, am not particularly predisposed to have much by way of capacity for sympathy for Angels fans. But almost every time I learn some new peice of information about that organization I feel a bit of it.
"I, a second-wave gentrifier, have looked into the issue carefully and am soberly forced to conclude that it's these third and fourth wave gentrifiers who are causing all the problems"
I see Ross has found an answer to the question: "How can I comment on the housing crisis in a manner that will demonstrate how much cooler I am than these phillistines?"
every faction in politics will invent their own bespoke conspiracy theory to avoid confronting the inescapable truth that we just need to make it easier to build denser housing
What precisely counts as 'equitable' is of course the subject of reasonable disagreement. But "putting a finger on the scale to benefit a (better-off group) at the expense of a (worse-off group)" should probably fall outside of any reasonable definition of the term.
That an openly anti-renter policy -- that was very recently tried, with predictable results! -- is such an easy sell to left-populists is an important data point for the view that left-populism is inherently unstable, and will struggle to resist the gravitational pull of right populism.
But, of course, actual conservatives tend to be the biggest NIMBYs of all, who fight to keep housing that might be affordable to even the slightly less rich out of their neighborhoods. So the phrase, in this context, is meant to confuse and bias the underlying politics, not shed light.
Anti-new housing activists (yes, they exist) like to call allowing new housing to be built and sold "trickle down" because in conversations with liberals because they know the phrase has conservative valence from an entirely different context--they're trying to paint their opponents as Conservatives
There's sense in which the vacancy chains that new housing creates could be described as allowing older, less fancy housing to "trickle down" to those with less income. But that is, in fact, a good thing! The critique of trickle down econ was that it didn't work, not that it would be bad if it did.
Instead of giving rich people more money and crossing our fingers, hoping they'll do something socially beneficial with it, we're allowing them to do something socially beneficial with the money they already have. Those are different in important ways that calling them both "trickle down" elides.
"Trickle down" is a poor analogy. The critique of trickle down economics is that it's naive to give more money to rich people in the hopes that they'll do something socially beneficial with it.
Changing the law to make it easier to build housing in a housing shortage isn't like that at all: