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Alex Armlovich Profile picture
Alex Armlovich
@aarmlovi
Sr. Housing Analyst @niskanencenter🏗️| Urban Econ 🌐🔰🚋 | @WorksInProgMag | former @cbcny | Legalize housing. Tax land. End poverty with cash
Jan 4, 2025 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
NYT is softening every edge in the framing but this article is a bombshell

Conclusive evidence that environmental scientists have been willing to use the ESA to knowingly invent "conservation species" and then (after passage in 1970) using the newly created NEPA to litigate Image Yikes. Imagine being the guy in 2015 who discovers a "snail darter" clone far from where it could possibly be located, and immediately realizing a DNA test will likely prove the snail darter was a faked species in 1973 Image
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Jul 7, 2024 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
NYC has an interesting approach to suppressing food delivery: Set a wage floor so high that it deters ordering.

Then on the labor supply side, the $20 minimum draws more workers than there is delivery demand.

You can't just log on for an hour of exercise at dinnertime anymore


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Image The old system on Doordash was essentially a live auction; each courier could view a trip & decide to accept or not. If couriers kept turning a gig down, the platform raised pay to clear the market.

Now with the wage floor, Doordash rations courier "slots". I can't even log on Image
Apr 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
New brief with @AWJustus on manufactured housing!

Manufactured housing bans in local zoning might be the purest form of income discrimination:

These homes easily comply with all the rules of strict single family zoning, but are banned anyway b/c they're "too affordable" @AWJustus This dynamic makes manufactured housing bans a clear "canary in the coal mine" for the wider toolkit of exclusion

Wherever you find manufactured housing bans, you'll also find apartment bans, punitive lot size & parking requirements, & other impediments to fair housing
Apr 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The YIMBY crisis persists b/c:

-Renters focus on the land price increases that new-construction amenities can bring, while

-Homeowners focus on the structure price decreases that new supply can causes The YIMBY crisis will end when this flips:

When homeowners realize their main asset is *developable land*, which gains value from the right to build; and renters realize that *structure* prices will go down with more units on the same amount of land
Mar 21, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Basic US housing completion stats are just devastating to NIMBY talking points--and honestly, it surprised me too.

America has never built so little housing per person since records began.

We haven't yet surpassed historic lows of pre-2009 *recessions*
fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgrap… Image "What about induced demand from upzoning"

buddy, we have never ever built so little. ever.

we could double construction and we still wouldn't reach the 1980s peak, let alone the 1970s or 1960s.
Mar 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
People once understood temporary disruption was an essential ingredient in widely-shared progress

The irony is that today's slower processes are less disruptive *but disrupt for a decade*.

Whereas the original subway construction was done w/your block in 1 month on average The original IRT laid 305,380 linear track-feet in 4.5 years...around 5600 linear feet per month.

Divide that average rate by 4 because it's a 4-track trunk, that's around 1400ft of 4-track completions per average month
Jan 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The "Arlington Miracle" is stunning:

Traffic counts in Arlington, VA fell to 1980s levels, after peaking in 2000, as the city added walkable neighborhood retail shops + tens of thousands of residents in Orange Line skyscrapers
arlingtonva.us/files/sharedas… Transit-oriented growth should shrink VMT *per capita* when newcomers don't drive...but I'd only expect it to hold *total traffic* constant w/growing population, at best.

Walkable retail can substitute for errand driving too--but still, negative traffic? Wow.

(h/t @salimfurth)
Dec 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I love CapitalOne Cafes

Years ago, NIMBYs complained too many bank branches were opening. NYC even banned new traditional bank branches in Harlem!

CapOne's idea was to operate in a useful "3rd place" coffee shop instead of what Urbanists consider a "deadening" street use Image So instead of a blank window with dead space & short hours, as some peripheral bank branches can be, Capital One provides bank branches inside of a nice coffee shop--and their customers get half off coffee!
Nov 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
NYC's 3 million parking spots have a market-value income of ~$3b annually

We choose to use this resource to subsidize parking, but an annual auction of Residential Parking Permits--averaging Metrocard's $127/month price--could reallocate that $3b subsidy to transit One version could be mark-to-market metering of all 3m spots while auctioning ~1.5m RPPs for reserved prepaid parking on the block you buy your RPP for.

Half the spots on each block auctioned for RPP "prepaid" parking; the other half only metered, to allow for guests/loading etc
Nov 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
NYC's potential return to the pre-1980 model of guaranteed inpatient beds for untreated serious mental illness, and SROs for the poor-but-healthy, could be a serious step forward in ending unsheltered homelessness

Implementation remains to be seen... Quality inpatient care--free of the crowding that doomed the old asylum model--is an alternative to today's "hostile design" approach of closing bathrooms, eliminating public space, & spiking benches in hope that untreated illness will simply disappear
Nov 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Worldview-destabilizing things you don't learn til you're older:

-Reagan didn't deregulate much outside finance

-Carter did all the big transport deregulation (CAB, ICC rail & trucking)

-New Jersey is good, actually. Many great cities--and beautiful, wide open natural spaces You don't have to believe me on face -- I wouldn't have either.

Look into them yourself! It's part of growing up.

"They got Dinkins the same way they got Jimmy Carter" is an obscure sentence, but if you understand it, you understand partisan political communication in America
Nov 25, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Amtrak's high-cost, bloated operating model consistently underperforms private, for-profit buses all over the US

Even on NEC, Megabus NYC->PHL is $7 to $15...you will never see those prices on Amtrak despite billions in public operating support

Even NJT->SEPTA is $35 I love Amtrak but it's a thoughtful love--I see their potential, but I won't pretend they do a good job

It's no longer low budget either--IIJA gives them $66 billion, but they're planning more of the same old low-frequency, low-speed high price garbage 🤷‍♂️
Oct 12, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Monetary policy is the same in a pre-2008 "scarce reserves" corridor system vs. today's "abundant reserves" floor system

But the narrative difference is huge!

When the Fed operated by creating & destroying reserves pre-2008, the narrative link to the quantity of money was clear Today, many don't believe the Fed controls money supply. They think setting the floor rate in an abundant reserves system is barely relevant to the price level

Yet the actual policy is no different from pre-2008 when the Fed controlled rates by creating or destroying base money!
Jul 20, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Classic American urban neighborhoods are the scarcest, most in-demand, most expensive places to live.

But I admit--I am puzzled why more people don't move to Chicago Image This would be a great dataviz. To be definitively convincing that the racism/crime/services/jobs problems aren't decisive, need to show that the South/West side neighborhoods *on the L* are also repopulating in this same pattern
Sep 23, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Well-targeted congestion pricing is part of a special class of "externality" taxes that, by burdening an undesirable thing, offsets the drag on desirable economic activity that would otherwise occur if the same revenue were raised with an ordinary tax Partnership for NYC estimates the tristate area suffers ~$20 billion travel times losses every year—a “time tax” that does not yield usable revenue. Congestion pricing will convert a substantial share of that un-spendable “time tax” into a spendable $1 billion for MTA capital