Auros Harman

Homelessness is a Housing Problem Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern (UC Press, early 2022)

You can ask whether we're getting something for our increased spending, and sure, houses are nicer, and Americans have bigger homes -- at least, those of us who have homes. But we banned building most kinds of CHEAP home for decades, so we have a lot of homelessness. homelessnesshousingproblem.com

Furthermore, in a society that is getting richer and more productive over time, you'd think the bare necessities would consume a _smaller_ % of income over time. That is indeed what has happened with food and clothing.

If you use any reasonable method to define the cost of housing, the cost has definitely gone up. "Years of median income for the median home" is a pretty good one, and that's way up over time.

And we can tell from prices, and applications for covenant-affordable units, that MANY of them would _like_ to live closer to work. We can also tell from, you know, ASKING them. There is an enormous shortfall in the number of smaller / cheaper units in most urban cores.

In the Bay Area the way working class people prevent housing from eating more of their income is to commute from further away. But that's terrible -- bad for the environment, bad for their mental and physical health, etc.

Nobody is saying the majority wants to live in NYC, or even Cambridge, MA levels of density. But prices tell us that a LOT MORE people want to live like that than currently get to. So we should make it legal to build more places like that, and give people choices on a level playing field.

I do agree we need to align incentives to rebuild local capacity, probably both to directly build social housing (“council estates”?) and to provide rapid, competent inspections for private development. Like I mentioned earlier in the US that’s the “Strong Towns” org’s view.

I dunno, man, I see a lot of local govs in the US that theoretically ought to face that trilemma where people repeatedly get elected promising voters they can wave away trade-offs. (If you’ve never seen the series Show Me A Hero, it explores anti-housing dynamisc like that in a suburb of NYC.)

Now that the state has finally started to impose consequences, many local govs, especially LA, say “you’re taking away local control!” Well we tried local control for 60 years, and you misused it! 🤷

In CA in theory we’ve had a process where the state told the region, and the region told each local jurisdiction, how much housing to produce, and left them free to decide exactly how. In practice though there was no penalty for just ignoring your assigned numbers, playing games to block building.

Well, yeah, this is why the YIMBY argument is consistently to move the decision about building housing upwards to regional / state decision makers.

Thing is, a lot of local politicians will tell voters what they want to hear: We'll keep delivering services while avoiding any development. Or, at best, build offices and hope _somebody else_ builds homes. Thus you get the Bay Area housing market. Metro London seems not-dissimilar.

Interesting, this more fits with the "Strong Towns" model of the problem in the US.

(Though of course, again, state capacity is a problem here -- it would take time to bring the right engineering and logistics expertise in-house. Alon Levy's Transit Costs Project has a lot of lessons about this.)

Abundance Across The Pond: Chris Curtis MP on Radio Abundance On our first international episode of Radio Abundance, host Steve M. Boyle sits down in London with United Kingdom Member of Parliament Chris Curtis to explore Transatlantic YIMBYism and Abundance.

See also: radioabundance.substack.com/p/abundance-...
I learned about Milton Keynes from that episode. Folks could stand to take some inspiration from the past administration that was willing to go out and build an entire new affordable city.

Government to strip councils of final say on major housing schemes Housing secretary to rule on schemes of 150 homes or more

On the bright side, apparently the Labour government _has_ gotten the memo: www.building.co.uk/news/governm...

I agree generally that "state capacity" is an issue in a lot of areas, and I like Viennese social housing as much as the next housing nerd, but "more localized control of housing production" seems to have worked out badly everywhere it's been tried. Insert "but maybe it will work for us" meme.

Why Britain doesn’t build - Works in Progress Magazine The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.

I dunno, what I've read is that local government has unusually _strong_ ability to _block_ new construction.
worksinprogress.co/issue/why-br...

Basically it's very hard for anyone to deliver prosperity when the single biggest household expense is in a market where you're saddled with incredibly onerous supply constraints, and you're not willing to try to loosen any of them.

Isn't the UK unusually committed to NIMBY-ism, even compared to places in the US like LA and SF? Major historic preservation rules (which are arguably more merited than in the US, but the implementation details are bananas compared to, say, Rome), and they have a strong degrowth-enviro community.

Those puffy tomcat cheeks!

I got some hostile reactions myself, including a man who screamed at me for handing campaign literature to his wife and daughter because they happened to be pulling into the driveway as I walked up. I got the impression he expected to determine for whom they were allowed to vote. :-/

When I was knocking doors in AZ, I wondered whether colleagues with more melanin might be in danger from this stuff.

(Not universally, obviously, but there definitely is an age gradient where more of the older volunteers think “the environment” is “the trees in my neighborhood”, and the younger folks get the bigger picture.)

I always describe that as the “missing the forest for the trees, literally” problem. No, you can’t cut down a few of the trees for a transmission line. But then we’ll be all surprised when the whole forest burns down because of climate change. I see this ALL the time among enviros over age 50.

I mean if you just took off the words, it'd be pretty cool. I like the non traditional shapes.

Every single report to shareholders from a large REIT includes something about how it's great that market-rate multifamily housing isn't getting built in high-cost coastal cities because the shortage is what allows them to rent gouge.

It occurs to me I should have actually tagged @fakedansavage.bsky.social . (Hi Dan! The Urban Archipelago is still a classic!)

Making Normal Neighborhoods Legal Again The growing movement to end exclusive single-family zoning—as Oregon just did in its cities—is not a radical or untested experiment: it’s a return to a historical norm. The actual radical experiment i...

"Traditional development" is what you see in places like Paris or Barcelona or Tokyo -- how every city was built for thousands of years up until the car industry and redlining created the suburbs.
archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2019...

The other great thing about this strategy is it doesn't require spending any money. If you just _make it legal_, private capital will do the actual building. Price per sqft shows a "revealed preference" for those dense, walkable neighborhoods; there's ENORMOUS unmet demand.