💡🌆🏗️🏘️💡NEW IDEAS (and proven winners)! The @mercatus Menu of Options for state housing reform in 2025 is out today. Great work by @ebwhamilton and @OldUrbanist; the mediocre parts are mine😉
mercatus.org/research/polic… @mercatus @ebwhamilton @OldUrbanist Some highlights:
*Option 7: Require “Specific and Objective” Approval Criteria*
This is cribbed from @RISpeaker @JoeShekarchi, who has peppered Rhode Island land use law with the phrase - local requirements shouldn't be vague.

Is 2024 the Year of YIGBY? #YesInGodsBackyard bills have been introduced in at least 6 states. I'll be testifying on one in #Annapolis tomorrow. They're a diverse bunch, though - let's take a closer look
🔬🧵 Maryland's HB 538/SB484 is @GovWesMoore's priority, and #YIGBY is just one aspect.
Where? Any nonprofit's land.
Income mix? 50% affordable.
Status? Early hearings.
(We're going to let Dall-E have some fun with these)

Want to see the most reinvested - and most visibly gentrifying - street in America? Come on a little walk with me. This is going to be a slightly uncomfortable.
🚶🏻🧵 We're going to walk down #KennedySt NW from 13th to North Capitol St, in DC. But don't worry, it's not actually 13 blocks. For a preview, here's the 600 block right now.

NEW PAPER: A lot of YIMBY bills were introduced in the first half of 2023 - @JoshFerdelman & team tracked 200 for @mercatus. How did they do? Eli Kahn and I did our best to catalog and summarize the big trends. @JoshFerdelman @mercatus @WNNProHousing In the paper, we describe the YIMBY victories in the Big Four states, offer a theory of everything bagels, and identify the state legislator with the least walkable name.
mercatus.org/research/polic…

#Upzoning versus #InclusionaryZoning: Who would win? A lot of cities and states - like Florida (!) - pair permissive zoning with requirements that 10 or 20% of new units are set aside as deed-restricted affordable housing. Does it work? In New Rochelle, with a 10% mandate and upzoning to 48 stories, it did.
better-cities.org/wp-content/upl…

NEW RESEARCH: @MaryJoWebster and I document that multi-family zoning is strongly correlated with racial integration in the Twin Cities. In parallel, Matt Resseger finds the same in Greater Boston. Here's a brief summarizing & contextualizing both papers.
mercatus.org/publications/u… @MaryJoWebster @MaryJoWebster and I find that a multifamily-zoned block group in the Twin Cities metro has 21 percentage points more non-White residents than a similarly situated block group zoned single-family only.

The Columbus/Indigenous People's Day debate is utterly fruitless. Neither of those can be a holiday for all Americans at this point. So you can try to score points for your team, or you can join my longstanding call for #HolidayReform. (Those graphs are pre-Juneteenth).
My short theory of holidays is that the ones that "work" are those where people can agree on some common set of activities - BBQs, family time, gift exchange, whatever.

A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF U.S. HOUSING REFORM
by Salim Furth
🧵 Cities were squalid, corrupt, and violent, so reformers created suburbs and slum clearance.

How bad can a single paragraph be? Bad enough that @reason shouldn't publish @antiplanner again without a fact check. Let's walk through this:
reason.com/2022/03/13/how… @reason @antiplanner "Most New England states abandoned the county level of government,"
This is true of about half of Massachusetts counties. But there wasn't much to New England counties to begin with. In Mass, the counties were formed *after* the towns (in 1643) mostly to handle judicial affairs.

#YIMBY twitter, you don't want to miss #SB349 - "Increase Housing Opportunities" - introduced today in North Carolina's Senate. It's a fourplex bill. It's an ADU bill. It's got a @cmsandefur-flavor "no downzoning without cause" component. And it's got one of the biggest changes to a SZEA since Euclid: a jurisdiction may not entirely zone out any use other than industrial, nuisances, and strip clubs.

The new executive order on designing federal buildings is a good, logical extension of the GSA's longstanding role in making choices about how government should physically build. The criticisms seem to mainly be about anti-Trump mood affiliation.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… First of all, buildings don't just arrive randomly. Somebody has to make choices. Exactly zero (0) people on Twitter were bothered by this before the current administration slightly tweaked that process.

After I watched @HillbillyElegy, I was puzzled why movie reviewers hate it so much. (It has a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a level usually reserved for mailed-in sequels). Usually I'm a picky movie-viewer and I tend to agree with the reviewers.
rottentomatoes.com/m/hillbilly_el… I even re-read the book - which I first read in 2016 (smartly, before I read any of the 3,000 book reviews). So #inthisessay I'll have some comments about the book as well. Here are a few theses:

You want to transform car-oriented sprawl to a walkable 15-minute city? There's only one place in the US where that's happening on a large scale: Houston. And it's not perfect, of course, but it's diverse (in both buildings & people) and happening in real time. There are of course other, smaller-scale pockets of transformation. Palisades Park, NJ, is one: side-by-side duplexes have practically taken over the town. High parking minimums force them all to be tuck-unders.
(h/t native son Ed Pinto & @ebwhamilton for research on this)

As far as I can tell #SanFrancisco has only issued one (1) building permit for a 10+ unit building based on an application received since Jan 1, 2017. (Barack Obama was president then, remember him?) That permit was issued for 975 Bryant Street, which replaced an industrial building with what will someday become a 185-unit mixed-use building. (See Application #20170630808). Trammel Crow's website says it's in "pre-construction".

Getting into the first #1619Project essay, and the author (Nikole Hannah-Jones) is both laudably writing blacks into American history and shamefully writing some inconvenient others out of it. She really wants the white colonists to be not merely misguided, but evil. That's harder with the non-slaveholding northerners, who began and sustained the rebellion, so they disappear in her text.

I finally read Enrico Moretti's "The New Geography of Jobs" this week. It was better than I expected - both a good introduction to the topic and interesting details and research results that kept me engaged. Stylistically, he does an impressive job hewing close to the research results while avoiding jargon and identification strategies. It's a clear, coherent narrative about city growth and decline, with lots of evidence at each step in the argument.