Commentary

Is there a “cross-ideological consensus” on zoning reform? Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, economist Ilya Somin made such a claim. Libertarians, he wrote, have opposed the strict laws that prescribe expensive, exclusionary, low-density homes in most neighborhoods across the country for some time; but now, as noted lefty economist Paul Krugman’s recent […]

When it comes to selling huge new road projects to the public, the highway lobby and their allies in government have many tools. Last week, we wrote about one of them: touting initial declines in congestion as success, without bothering to follow up as induced demand eliminates those gains in just a matter of years.

What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t bank on it. Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for President, has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank to help local governments pay for crucial infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. But it’s not so clear that such a bank is the answer to America’s infrastructure problems. Rather, the

Back in August, we wrote about the phenomenon of the “missing middle”: the fact that today’s urban (and suburban) development tends to take the form of either single-family homes or very large apartment buildings, but not so much in the middle. And that’s a problem! Small apartment buildings perform a vital function in classic “illegal

There are two big theories about who controls the pace of development in American cities and suburbs. One is the “growth machine.” In this telling, developed by academics like Harvey Molotch in the 1970s, urban elected officials and zoning boards are highly influenced by coalitions of business and civic leaders interested mainly in economic growth

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton laid out the broad outlines of her plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would make low interest loans to help fund all kinds of public and private infrastructure. In an explainer for Vox, Matt Yglesias lays out the case for an infrastructure bank, and sets out some of the

What City Observatory did this week 1. A $1.6 billion proposal. A film school teacher in San Francisco had some people talking about “ethical landlording” as a solution to the problem of too-high real estate prices. But substituting the private whims of land owners for prices as a way to determine who wins access to

Later this month, the Federal Reserve Board (or “the Fed,” as it’s often referred to) will raise interest rates. After seven years of very loose monetary policy designed to facilitate economic recovery from the Great Recession, the Fed now apparently thinks that the economy is healthy enough to stand higher interest rates. Clearly, the financial

There’s plenty of high-minded rhetoric at the UN climate change conference in Paris about getting serious about the threat of climate change. According to the Los Angeles Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic that, “even without a specific temperature-change limit and legally binding structure, a climate change agreement that negotiators in Paris are