Michael Wiebe

The problem is that incumbent homeowners foist the cost of infrastructure maintenance onto new development. The price signal is skewed by politics.

This is actually an interesting research question: when apartments are allowed, do they bring in richer or poorer residents?

Which price signals?

On "growth should pay for growth": homeowners are all too happy to accept higher property values (created by growth in population, jobs, and public infrastructure), but refuse to pay for the costs that make growth possible. Is that fair?

Tipping point?

Isn't that the author's job?

Automated checking?

Why "only"? That's a big deal!

How are you defining upzoning/rezoning?

Spot the fallacy:
"Expanding the urban growth boundary won't reduce housing prices, because the upzoned agricultural land just becomes more valuable, wiping out any cost savings."

Might have been a different Pete Fry.

Pop quiz: why does upzoning shift the supply curve for housing? Eg. rezoning agricultural land to residential.

The supply function tells us: for a given price, what quantity of homes will developers produce? Shifting the curve means this quantity is higher at every price.

bsky.app/profile/mich...

Schrodinger's zoning regulation: it doesn't prevent housing development, but must never be relaxed.

Exercise for the reader: what is the effect of upzoning agricultural land to residential?

Note: the land value residual approach is not a model of price determination. It tells us only about developer willingness-to-pay for land (ie. the demand curve), and not about supply.

Full model:
michaelwiebe.com/blog/2025/07...

Compare immigration (assuming no demand effect): by reallocating a worker from country A to B, the supply of labor in B increases (wage falls), the supply of labor in A decreases (wage rises), and the migrant's wage increases as they switch markets.

Upzoning reallocates a parcel from the house-zoned market to the apartment-zoned market. This ⬇️ the supply of house-zoned land (⬆️P_H ), and ⬆️ the supply of apartment-zoned land (⬇️P_A). The upzoned parcel itself increases in price as it switches markets (from P1_H to P2_A).

Round 1 assessed value is statsig lower. (The round 0 values are very precisely estimated)

Yes, data coverage is not as good, but similar results as other studies.

A new condo building in Honolulu has 310 income-restricted homes. These don't merely benefit the residents in the new units; through vacancy chains, those residents free up their previous homes for other poor people to live in.

This vacancy chain mechanism also works for the 202 market-rate homes.

The building studied in this paper has 310 income-restricted units, which also create vacancy chains.

Interesting new paper on the cost of permitting. This is hard to measure, and these costs have long been thought to be significant. This paper confirms this, estimating permitting costs at roughly 30% of the wedge between construction cost and the price of housing.
(HT @michaelwiebe.bsky.social)

Right-NIMBYs tend to be more transparently selfish.

Left-NIMBYism in a nutshell.

michaelwiebe.com/blog/2025/07...

When apartment-zoned land is scarce, it's expensive for developers to buy land to build apartments. But when apartment-zoned land is abundant, it is cheap.

Upzoning works by unlocking denser housing, which increases the supply of homes and reduces prices.

Tapping the sign:

Gentrification and displacement New housing enables rich people to move in without displacing the poor

www.buildingabundance.ca/p/gentrifica...