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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
, 11 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
Hey folks! Today's @bopinion post is about policies to promote affordable housing!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
We all know that single-family zoning is bad for affordability...

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Pushing back against zoning restrictions is a central feature of Elizabeth Warren's housing plan! theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
BUT, a new paper shows that simply upzoning a neighborhood doesn't necessarily increase construction in that neighborhood!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
The study doesn't actually show that upzoning is bad for affordability. But it does show that upzoning doesn't necessarily cause more housing to get built.

Which is a big problem.

So what do we do about that?
One idea is to provide direct incentives for developers to build more housing.

Gavin Newsom wants to do this.

sacbee.com/news/politics-…
Another idea is to outsource the implementation to cities, and to punish cities that don't hit their housing targets.

Gavin Newsom also wants to do that!

citylab.com/transportation…
But there are even more radical options.

One is a Land Value Tax!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Another idea is public housing. People have figured out how to make public housing safer than in the past, which is very important.

citylab.com/design/2018/11…
A final idea: Housing co-ops.

To me, this feels the most similar to agrarian land reform in poor countries. Buy out apartment buildings and give them to the tenants!
So upzoning is only Step 1. Next, we need a big push for affordable housing construction. Potential tools include carrots and sticks for development, a land tax, public housing, and co-ops.

Let's try them ALL! Bold, persistent experimentation!

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
This is a good point. Reviving cities like Cleveland, Youngstown, St. Louis, etc., as well as uncountable small cities most people haven't heard of, is still a more important task than making San Francisco more affordable.
Here's a great book by @JamesFallows about this very topic: amazon.com/Our-Towns-000-…
Here's a great series of articles by @John_C_Austin on how to revive Rust Belt cities: brookings.edu/blog/the-avenu…
Read 15 tweets
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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
I admit that I don't understand how discouraging or taxing stock buybacks will encourage companies to pay their workers higher wages. What's the mechanism by which this would work?
@KClausing, @IvanWerning, do you know any good papers about this?
Also: This paper showed that a big dividend tax cut in 2003 left corporate investment basically unchanged. eml.berkeley.edu/~yagan/Dividen…

If effects of tax cuts and tax hikes are symmetrical, wouldn't this imply that taxing buybacks and dividends would leave investment unchanged?
Read 4 tweets
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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Come for the insights into the problems of the working poor

Stay for the casual xenophobia
Or actually, just stay for the ratio.

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the founders and original co-chairs of the DSA.

But it appears her page on the DSA website has been deleted...

dsausa.org/barbara_ehrenr…
Read 4 tweets

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