55 blurbs
Changes to Innsbruck. Source: Beauty in my Backyard Samuel Hughes has a new Works in Progress essay asking again whether beauty can solve the housing crisis . He distinguishes NIMBYs (locals who oppose development of all…
3D printed structure. Source: Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials? One of Brian Potter’s latest Construction Physics installment s asks whether cheaper labor or materials can meaningfully cut …
The Snail Darter. Source: wikipedia You may have heard about the effects of the Endangered Species Act on big construction projects — like the famous case of the tiny “snail darter” fish and its role in delaying the Tell…
Halina Bennet has a summer housing roundup at Slow Boring : Beyond the already-covered ROAD Act, California's Governor Newsom signed AB 179, replacing the state's notoriously fragmented affordable-housing financing with …
A forthcoming paper by Michael Hankinson, Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis surveyed roughly 1,700 residents of expensive areas and found that most people do have a price. Over 80 percent accepted at least…
Aaron Shroyer and Sarah Brundage at NAAHL have the essential federal implementation guide for the ROAD Act . None of the law's ~47 housing sections are wholly self-executing: NAAHL counts 124 discrete implementation acti…
Does upzoning lead to new homes? Does it reduce the cost of homes? Michael Wiebe has an accessible review of the academic literature around upzoning in his living literature review, examining empirical studies on major u…
Kimberly Burnett has a new piece at Niskanen on HUD's new best-practices guidance for states and localities, focusing on one key recommendation: regulate modular housing by harmonized and objective performance standards …
The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85–5 on Monday; the House takes up the amended package today, and President Trump is expected to sign it within the week. The bill’s 45-plus provisions cover a wide …
"Should European housing politics be Americanized?" asks Samuel Hughes . American policy frames usually map badly onto European debates, but housing is an exception: Europe's housing shortages are arguably worse than Ame…
The first major federal housing bill in roughly 30 years just took a big step forward. After months of ping-ponging between the House and Senate, all four corners (the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Banking and…
A new VoxEU column argues that declining construction productivity has fueled an 80% increase in the relative price of US structures since 1970, offsetting the benefits of continued declines in the cost of equipment. “Co…
One factor in the high cost of housing is that we’re not better at building houses; construction productivity is relatively flat (not only in the US , but in many countries ). It’s often presumed that this is because hou…
The NYT editorial board endorsed the Massachusetts “Legalize Starter Homes” ballot measure , which would require localities to allow homes on small lots in areas served by public water and sewer. The endorsement lands al…
Pew’s Housing Policy Initiative is making a splash with its new video explaining “address chain” filtering: How new market rate construction frees up housing opportunities across incomes and neighborhoods as occupants of…
“The USPS owns over 8,500 properties and leases over 25,000 more. It also needs money.” In a new Brooking Report , Aaron Shroyer, Ben McAdams, and Glen Nuckolls argue we can kill two birds with one stone: the Postal Serv…
By now you’ve probably seen the viral clip of Marblehead resident David Modica asking his fellow townspeople the question heard ‘round the internet. Jerusalem Demsas wrote about it in The Argument , making the case that …
Alan Durning at Sightline has a new report arguing that the climate movement is underrating one strategy for reducing climate change: apartment buildings. Apartment buildings have lower carbon emissions than single-famil…
New York took two big steps on housing permitting this week. After weeks of late-budget deadlock, Governor Hochul’s SEQRA modernization is reportedly final with bill text coming next week. The deal reportedly exempts NYC…
“ Are we kind of being pricks? ,” asked a resident at Marblehead’s annual Town Meeting this week in a video that went viral (full disclosure: I live here and serve on the Housing Committee). After four votes over three y…
Our existing processes for how we decide what is allowed when there is disagreement are a key reason its hard to build things in the USA today. Over the last week, Marc Dunkelman and Alex Mechanick wrote an interesting p…
Two recent pro-housing champion advocates make the case that zoning reform is working. First, Nolan Gray of California YIMBY goes deep on the California data in “ Where Are All the Cranes? ,” documenting how ADU permits …
Oliver Kim has a detailed review of a new book on Singapore’s public housing system that complicates the YIMBY movement’s frequent invocation of Singapore as a model. The country houses 76 percent of the population in hi…
Alex Armlovich: How Skyscrapers Can Save The City (2011) . Ed Glaeser introduced almost everything YIMBYism is today in this Atlantic feature published years before the first modern YIMBY grassroots groups were even foun…
Our friends at the Centre for British Progress (with Labour Together) are out with a new paper on street votes —a mechanism that lets residents of a given street collectively hire an architect, agree on an upzoning plan,…
Vincent Rollet’s MIT job market paper on zoning and the dynamics of urban redevelopment — which won Best Student Paper at the 2025 European UEA meeting and lands him at Stanford and then UChicago — is getting attention f…
A new Urban Institute piece asks, what happens to housing production after “big upzonings” in strong housing markets? It turns out, a lot . Top economics journals have long considered case studies of upzoning too trivial…
Larry Katz, known today as a legendary labor economist, had a precocious side quest in urban economics as an incredibly incisive observer of the downzoning crisis that hit the Bay Area in the 1970s. His Commencement spee…
Sticking with housing, the burden of the housing shortage is falling disproportionately on new buyers and renters, according to a piece last month by Jess Remington . Prior to 2022, new homeowners and existing homeowners…
Everyone’s talking about building codes! Though we have not yet fixed most of the obvious growth control regulations, like zoning, permitting, & procedural review laws, housers are also looking ahead to the more obscure …
Our AGF post on the “Zoned Capacity Illusion” got a warm reception , with shoutouts from NYC’s Deputy Mayor during Mayor Mamdani’s Reddit AMA on housing; and from Matt Yglesias on why YIMBYs need to center zoning feasibi…
Industrial Policy for Housing Policy is a new blueprint for tackling the housing crisis from Arpit Gupta and Steve Teles. One bit I particularly liked was the five-part diagnosis of why factory-built housing has failed t…
Research in action: Why permitting reform matters . Evan Soltas translated his recent LA permitted reform paper, that we featured a few weeks ago, into a localized estimate of the value of permitting reform in NYC. Each …
In most product markets, transitory supply and demand shocks can spike prices, but as long as there’s open entry to the market allowing elastic supply, prices come back down near marginal supply costs . This is rare in A…
More progressives in the housing space are coming out against the Senate’s build-to-rent ban . The growing concern is that the ban could reduce rental housing supply when affordability remains a pressing issue. It’s a to…
Back in 2023, we asked Michael Wiebe to take a look at a 2021 article by Enrico Moretti titled “ The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors. ” We were interested because one of the inputs to ou…
Brian Potter examines the elusive cost savings of the prefabricated home , and as someone now living through the third modular construction hype cycle of my career, the piece is a useful corrective. There’s a reason we k…
Separately, Jerusalem Demsas writes about how urban divestment is ( still , as Pete Saunders reminds us) a much larger problem in the US than urban “gentrification”, but compositional & mimetic drivers of un-representati…
Last week, Abundance NY put out The Abundance Agenda , a roadmap to, well, Abundance for New Yorkers. I’m a fan of just how concrete the document is, both in terms of the big picture and the small. On the big picture, th…
The Senate passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89–10 on Thursday — a landmark pro-supply package that streamlines housing regulation, creates new building incentives, and modernizes federal programs. A…
Around 23% of the terrestrial territory of the Netherlands is a protected area; to secure a permit to build near these areas, environmental review about nitrogen impacts are particularly important. The country used to us…
The main thing Alex has been reading this week is the text of the Senate Banking Committee housing reform bill , for which he is deep in the details. It’s encouraging to see bipartisan movement on federal housing policy,…
How much do permitting burdens raise the price of housing? This is a big question in our housing work, and it can be hard to measure the exact contribution of zoning applications, historical preservation review, and othe…
Tokyo is the world’s largest city, with 38 million people sharing one agglomerated labor market. Despite high land prices, Tokyo’s structure rents are remarkably affordable by global megacity standards ; they allow high …
Sometimes a pro-housing reform’s most articulate communicator is that reform’s biggest opponent. In a remarkable video , NYC Councilmember Vicky Paladino describes how New York’s pro-housing ballot measures have ended th…
Ed Mendoza of the Metropolitan Abundance Project has a new feature leveraging research by the Pew Charitable Trusts on how new housing construction moderates older and more affordable “Class C” housing rents even more th…
What could the EU learn from housing incentive design ideas in the US? Progress Ireland notes growing US interest in flexible infrastructure funding grants awarded on a per-housing-unit basis . US policymakers have had t…
David Card, Jesse Rothstein, and Moises Yi had a cool study published last year to try and get a reliable estimate of the wage benefits you get from living in a superstar city. You might think you can tease this out by j…
This year’s remarkably bipartisan burst of federal housing policy legislation is back in action after the earlier breakdown of House-Senate talks: The House has put their package on the calendar this week, and the Senate…
Critical comment on ‘Does Rent Control Turn Tenants Into NIMBYs?’ - How does rent regulation affect incumbent resident outlooks on housing growth? Two common intuitions have opposite signs: Maybe rent regulation makes re…
Assessing the Cost of Impact Fees on Affordable Housing: An Analysis of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Projects in California - Housing policy watchers may be familiar with the RAND report on how Californian multifamily d…
To what extent is anti-growth zoning really a different problem from stagnant construction sector productivity? An NBER working paper sheds some light on the question. The construction productivity growth collapse after …
Abundance as we see it entails a pragmatic disposition towards governance and results that can transcend partisan and factional divides. Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement of SEQRA reform is a genuinely novel demonstration of h…
Griffith’s essay pairs well with this long X post by Seán Keyes , executive director of Progress Ireland, listing ideas for helping the Republic of Ireland get more housing, infrastructure, and energy production. Some of…
Meanwhile, this Boston Globe editorial on housing, continues their marked increases in pro-housing coverage of the last several years.