Housing

Housing Affordability in California: Part 3 — A Way Forward

Bakersfield_CA_arch.jpg

Urban containment has significant costs. In commenting on the association between London’s urban growth boundary,1 and the higher costs of housing, The Economist said: “Suburbs rarely cease growing of their own accord. The only reliable way to stop them, it turns out, is to stop them forcefully.  read more »

“Straight Line Crazy” offers insights for post-pandemic real estate

straight-line-crazy.jpg

This won’t start off about real estate but it will end there — like so much of life.

At the Shed in Hudson Yards, “Straight Line Crazy” is enjoying a sold-out run of months, if not longer. It is the story of Robert Moses, who outfoxed every politician in New York to create a proprietary stream of public money that financed his role as the city’s lynchpin builder from the 1920s into the 1960s.  read more »

West Coast Blues

will-the-west-coast-blues-turn-red.jpg

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.  read more »

Housing Affordability in California: Part 2 — Urban Land Markets

The_Embarcadero_San_Francisco.jpg

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe1 to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.2  read more »

The California Headquarters Exodus Continues

Bank-of-America_relo.jpg

A new Hoover Institution (Stanford University) report indicates that California continues to shed corporate headquarters locations to other states.  read more »

Housing Affordability in California: Part 1 — The Situation

Cover-of-Metro-Land_1921.jpg

There is probably no issue more requiring resolution in California than poor housing affordability. It is a threat to the preservation of the middle-class and the competitiveness of the state.  read more »

Pandemic Increases Homeownership

NewHome-under-construction.jpg

The nation’s number of occupied homes grew by 3.9 percent between 2019 and 2021, representing 4.7 million units of new homes  read more »

Do Cities Have a Future?

manhattan-carlos-oliva-3586966.jpg

The great core cities don’t die — but only if they are willing to change. Today the world’s great cities, such as New York or London, face dramatically changed conditions, notably the rise of remote work, fears from the pandemic, and rising crime.  read more »

What Really Divides America

democracy-watch.jpg

Reading the mainstream media, one would be forgiven for believing that the upcoming midterms are part of a Manichaean struggle for the soul of democracy, pitting righteous progressives against the authoritarian “ultra-MAGA” hordes. The truth is nothing of the sort. Even today, the vast majority of Americans are moderate and pragmatic, with fewer than 20% combined for those identifying as either “very conservative” or “very liberal”.  read more »

Population and Housing in 2021

MovingVan.jpg

The 2021 American Community Survey confirms that major population shifts took place due to the pandemic. But those shifts aren’t necessarily reflected by declines in housing prices  read more »