Gray Kimbrough Profile picture
Economist, @UNCG PhD, "serial millennial myth debunker," labor, housing and time use researcher, @AU_SPA adjunct prof. Views are my own and not any employer's.
Aug 27, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
I haven't seen any of the loud economist critics of student loan forgiveness come out against 529/ESAs, which provide significant subsidies for the college costs of well-off families (and essentially no benefit for poorer families). Those whose concern about the change to IBR is that it will be a government subsidy to universities should be ardently opposed to 529/ESAs, which provide significant government subsidies for university education for high-income families.
Jul 15, 2022 5 tweets 3 min read
The Office of the County Attorney responded to the potential violations of the Open Meetings Act that I identified at 60 of Montgomery County's Boards, Commissions and Committees (BCCs).

The response acknowledges violations at 24 BCCs. The full document: dropbox.com/s/gnd5rvdb09bt… Image The response asserts that many of these County committees are not required by the Open Meetings Act to post agendas and minutes online. For some BCCs, it notes that these materials were available in locations that I simply did not find using the County's websites and google.
May 19, 2022 8 tweets 4 min read
In an August 1935 issue of the Federal Home Loan Bank Review, the FHLBB (which oversaw the HOLC) urged appraisers to assess the potential for neighborhood change.

The article noted three major factors preventing change:
1) zoning
2) deed restrictions
3) neighborhood associations In 1926, the Supreme Court in Corrigan v. Buckley ruled that restrictions forbidding property sales to Black people were legal.

As one result, associations of white homeowners ("citizens' associations") announced their support for racial exclusion through deed restrictions.
Nov 5, 2021 9 tweets 4 min read
So let's talk about an NBER presentation I heard about today.

I'll lead with the takeaway: several economists continue to publish papers claiming causal links from HOLC maps through credit access to various outcomes. The overwhelming historical record says we shouldn't do this. This is a problem, because we keep seeing the same flawed argument from researchers both in and outside of economics. Junior researchers are also making the same mistake.

But we can take the history seriously and fix this mistake--and improve the quality of research output too.
Nov 3, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
Jaehee Song:

"white households have strong preferences for strict zoning in their neighborhoods"."

"a counterfactual zoning reform...would substantially increase the supply of small and cheap homes and benefit racial minorities, while minimally affecting existing home values." And I'm looking forward to reading Jaehee Song's other work, including "Exclusionary Zoning Practices in Response to Transportation Developments"

"My preliminary findings indicate that municipalities that expected more Black inflow imposed stricter minimum lot area regulations." Image
Nov 2, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
Montgomery County Civic Federation policy position in support of exclusionary zoning in 1941 vs. Montgomery County Civic Federation policy position in support of exclusionary zoning in 2021. ImageImage Exclusively representing white homeowners in the 1940s, the Montgomery County Civic Federation staunchly opposed anything but detached single-family homes in what it considered single-family neighborhoods.

On the left is from April 1941, on the right from November 1947: ImageImage
Nov 2, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
Every single time I look up a downtown Silver Spring homeowner who complains about the possibility of slightly denser housing nearby and says we shouldn't bother because the homes wouldn't be affordable ImageImage These people are completely unmoored from reality. Allowing slightly denser housing without allowing angry homeowners to veto it is actually not at all akin to voter disenfranchisement! Image
Oct 8, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
Washington of the Future, 1929 Zoning Will Prevent This, 1920s
Sep 21, 2021 6 tweets 3 min read
Part of why the popular narrative on redlining has been so popular is that it has allowed people to blame an external factor (like HOLC maps) rather than recognizing that a wide range of systems were inherently racist, and many continue to be racist. governing.com/context/redlin… Economists (including AEA secretary Richard T. Ely) and other academics pushed hard for racist appraisal methods which a variety of actors then turned into redlining maps.

I have not seen evidence of a reckoning on this from economists and the AEA.
Sep 15, 2021 6 tweets 3 min read
I learned about the Federal Home Loan Bank Review from a paper today so now I'm reading through the issues on FRED, and they are really something. Image The FHLBB constructed an index of construction costs in 1936 by specifying what would have been a very nice house in 1936. My last house, built in 1939, had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, but did not have an attached garage or a lavatory on the main floor! Image
Sep 1, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
I'm working on a deck to explain to people what exclusionary zoning is, and I've decided to use it to refer to the whole bundle of exclusionary restrictions on the housing that jurisdictions allow to be built. As always, the next slides are about how racist exclusionary zoning is, consistent with its intent.
Jun 23, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
The conservative former North Carolina governor and Charlotte mayor talks about ending exclusionary zoning in the same way as many Montgomery County residents seeing themselves as progressive: that allowing homeowners to build a bit more housing would "destroy" "quality of life." At the listening session with Planning staff that I attended, many Woodside and Woodside Park homeowners claimed that allowing duplexes would destroy their neighborhoods. They often feel more comfortable expressing this as a concern about "livability."
Jun 22, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
Me signing up weeks in advance for a public meeting to advocate for better protected bike lanes: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me reading an email reminder that it's tonight, and it's scheduled to be two hours long: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck. Image if you then you
don't love don't deserve
me at my me at my ImageImage
Jun 7, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
I joined the Takoma Park listserv, and it just a phenomenal window into the minds of people who see themselves as progressive, moved to one of the most consistently liberal cities in America, and absolutely detest those who can't afford to buy million-dollar houses. Me reading a message on the Takoma Park listserv
Jun 4, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
I've heard people say that 5% house price appreciation every year isn't much compared to, for example, the S&P 500.

This omits the crucial issue of leverage. Somewhat uniquely for small investors, housing allows you to own a fraction of an asset but accrue all of the gains. Say you put down $100,000 to buy a $500,000 house in June 2011. If it appreciated 5% every year, it's now worth $814k, so that $100k has turned into $414k.

$100k invested in the S&P 500 at the same time would be worth $319k now.
May 26, 2021 8 tweets 3 min read
This 2,184 square foot 4BR/3.5 bath house in the Woodside neighborhood of downtown Silver Spring last sold in 1979 for $300k in CPI-adjusted 2021 dollars. Most of the interior looks reminiscent of the 90s.

It could easily escalate to sell for more than a million dollars. By giving in to the NIMBYs, local leaders have effectively said that if you want to live in most of Woodside, you need to pay about a million dollars for a house built many decades ago--in a time of very different living tastes--and likely haphazardly renovated since then.
May 24, 2021 10 tweets 4 min read
There's been a lot of discussion of this paper from @jasonfurman, @kearney_melissa, and Willie Powell. I'd like to zoom in what the authors note as a the key takeaway here, that CPS data tells us pretty unambiguously that parents of young children didn't fare worse than others. I'll start by replicating the above figure using IPUMS-CPS data, to show that I am interpreting the basic data in the same way.

The authors interpret this as showing that parents of younger children didn't leave the labor force (or measured here, employment) more than others. Image
May 22, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
I have been staring at this for a while now, but cutting the CPS data as many ways as possible I haven't yet found *any* subgroup in the US that had zero (or minimal) decline in labor force participation around April 2020. Looking at prime-age (25-54) LFP rates by age of youngest own child in the household (0-5, 6-12, 13-17), I see significant drops for all mothers.

April 2021 LFP for mothers of teenagers appears to be significantly closer to Jan 2020 rates than for mothers of younger children.
May 21, 2021 5 tweets 3 min read
This change would make it impossible for me to perform most of my ACS-based analyses without applying for (and paying for) access to restricted-use data.

This is a massive reduction in ACS data access, to address a theoretical risk of identification of individuals in the data. At an AEA panel several years ago that @bencasselman organized (@HistDem was on the panel), Raj Chetty remarked that removing public data access isn't a big deal since much of the best research (i.e., published in "top 5" journals) already uses restricted data.

It's a big deal.
May 21, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
I made an appearance in this plea by Whizy Kim at @Refinery29 for people to stop worrying about whether millennials are entering adulthood correctly. refinery29.com/en-us/2021/05/… My key argument is that millennials have simply experienced lower levels of economic growth as they've entered their adult years than previous cohorts.

Expectations of what they should be doing haven't taken this into account, on top of not giving millennials agency to decide.
May 21, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
When most economists talk about labor reallocation, they ignore the real meaning of it:

-a single mom trying to figure out how she can get to a new job and find care for her kids
-middle-aged workers considering all of the difficulties in going back to school after so many years Cochrane appears to consider these workers far beneath him, but this is a broader problem for many economists.

How can you speak meaningfully to the consequences of economic dislocation without experiencing the pain of job loss, industry obsolescence, and forced transitions?