November 2015

What City Observatory did this week 1. Ways forward to more equitable land use law. Following up on last week’s posts about William Fischel’s new book, Zoning Rules!, and its arguments about how America got into its current housing crisis, we look at what Fischel, one of the country’s foremost scholars on land use law, […]

Even we at City Observatory believe in taking a break from all things urban on Thanksgiving. But in the spirit of the holidays, we wanted to take just a minute to share some of the things we’re thankful for. To begin with, we’re thankful for cities themselves: the places we live in and explore, that

It’s hard to think of an issue that is more quintessentially local than zoning. It’s all about what happens on the ground on a specific piece of property in a particular neighborhood. It’s the bread and butter of local governments and neighborhood groups. Zoning and land use seem about as far removed from national economic

It’s the hardiest perennial in the real estate business: “Now,” your realtor will tell you, “is a great time to buy a home.” Back in 2006, just as the housing market was faltering, that’s exactly what the National Association of Realtors (NAR) was telling us. In fact, in November of that year, the NAR launched

Last week, going off a recent book by William Fischel, we published a parable that explained the evolution of American zoning over the 20th century, from non-zoning land use in the early years to the introduction of true zoning in the 1910s and 20s, and the “land use revolution” of the 1970s that helped create

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. While many economists emphasize the positive effects of low gas prices—more disposable income in consumers’ pockets, which can act as a stimulus—it’s also important to acknowledge the costs. Reducing the price of driving, shockingly enough, makes people drive more—leading to more traffic

Yesterday, we published a “zoning parable,” based on William Fischel’s arguments for why and how zoning regulations developed in American cities over the 20th century. Today, we’ll expand a bit on one of the book’s major arguments in non-parable form. The 70s: What happened? For people who care a lot about housing but aren’t ready

This year, William Fischel, a professor at Dartmouth and one of the country’s leading scholars of land use policy, published a new opus on zoning: Zoning Rules! There’s far too much in the book to do a comprehensive review, but we’re going to pick out some of the most interesting and important arguments for posts

At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion.

What City Observatory did this week 1. What filtering can and can’t do. In most cities, the majority of homes that are affordable to people of modest or low incomes don’t receive special affordability subsidies—they’re just cheap market-rate housing. But since very little housing is built for people of below-average income, how does it get