On October 10, The Wall Street Journal published a review of “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World” by Sara Bronin of Cornell University. The author of the review was Professor Edward Glaeser of Harvard University, surely one of the top housing economists.
I took issue with one of Prof. Glaeser’s points, and commented as follows (in the “Conversations” section following the article.
Prof. Glaeser is right in saying “When it comes to land controls, I’m pretty confident that the public sector has made the bigger blunders. However, I disagree with his characterization of the sides as "libertarian" and "interventionist." It is not a two-way continuum. On peripheral development, which is crucial both to a well functioning housing market and housing affordability, too many libertarians are with the interventionists in opposing organic development on and beyond the urban fringe. This urban containment and compact city philosophy is at the heart of much of what has become impossibly unaffordable housing that characterizes metropolitan housing markets from Vancouver to Toronto, Coastal California, Australia, London, and too much of Europe. Tragically, urban containment is an existential threat to the middle-class.
I have routinely dealt with these issues in the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability editions (published since 2005).
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.
Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.
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