These homeowners sold to a developer for $2-5M, much higher than the typical price in the neighborhood. But please, tell me how restricting development maximizes property values (aka, the 'homevoter hypothesis').

What is the NIMBY response to this? - conclude that, if demand increases prices, we should just block demand - claim that supply-constrained cities have smaller *long-run* price increases, due to less induced demand - deny the evidence

A new luxury tower is bought up by foreign investors. What would happen in the counterfactual where the tower wasn't built? Would those investors instead buy up existing homes and hold them empty? Or look to another city for investments?

People think that up-filtering is some gotcha against YIMBYs, when in reality, a shortage of housing is what causes homes to filter up (ie. pass from poorer to richer occupants).

Question about NSS 1999 data: are schedule 1 (consumption) and schedule 10 (employment) supposed to merge on household ID? S1 has a str11 hhid, while S10 has a str13 key_hhold; the latter prepends subround and subsample. When I fix it manually, only 2% merge. #econsky

New high-end housing helps overall affordability when it frees up low-end housing, or absorbs a demand increase. But does this apply to mansion districts? If a new mansion in Vancouver just brings in another billionaire from SF, then there's no effect on the low-end market. 1/

Simple test for whether there is a housing supply shortage: if you remove all constraints on supply (zoning, height, FAR, etc), does the quantity of homes increase? If yes, then supply was constrained. If no, then it wasn't.

If dwellings per person is increasing over time, is that proof there's no supply shortage? Here there's ~0.5 dwellings/adult, or 2 people per household. But if the desired size is 1.5 per household, then we should have 0.66 dwellings/person—0.5 is suboptimally low.

"Removing constraints on housing supply won't make housing affordable, it'll just gradually solve the problem by improving affordability until we hit the 30% threshold." Really, 18 years to dig out of a decades-long shortage is pretty fast.

Misconception: land prices are determined as a residual of the price of housing. Fact: in a general equilibrium model, land and housing prices are jointly determined.

For which value of N do you take this deal? - prevent the eviction of 3 families - block 50 new homes from absorbing a demand increase, causing a demand cascade which displaces N other families

Supply and demand applies to office buildings: when demand for offices decreased due to remote work, market rents fell. And yet, people can't imagine this working for residential buildings...

In the extreme case with no new housing, rich newcomers replace poorer residents, so the filtering rate is positive, and there are no vacancy chains. With some new supply, new homes are mostly filled by newcomers, so chains are short. Short chains = supply shortage.

PSA: single-family neighborhoods are immature and under-developed. Mature neighborhoods have six-story apartments with shops, services, and transit.

Meanwhile, actual economics research finds that supply constraints drive both inequality and unaffordability: academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Pop quiz: if the filtering rate is + (the next resident in home is richer than the previous), what does that imply about vacancy chains? Filtering = a home moving across the income distribution as it ages; can be + or -. VC: the sequence of vacancies initiated by a new home.

This CMHC report on development charges includes only one (!) article published in an economics journal in this century. Why is there so little evidence on development charges and impact fees?

Which way, western man? Abundance vs disinvestment.

When demand increases and NIMBYs block new housing, that just means more rich tech workers competing with you in the rental market. But if YIMBYs get new housing built, it acts as a 'yuppie fishtank' and absorbs the new demand, keeping rents down.

When demand increases and NIMBYs block new housing, that just means more rich tech workers competing with you in the rental market. But if YIMBYs get new housing built, it acts as a 'yuppie fishtank' and absorbs the new demand, keeping rents down.

With developers like this, who needs NIMBYs? Nick Marks of Anthem Properties commenting on multiplexes: "People in residential neighborhoods are going to be pretty pissed off with all of the development". 1/

With developers like this, who needs NIMBYs? Nick Marks of Anthem Properties commenting on multiplexes: "People in residential neighborhoods are going to be pretty pissed off with all of the development". 1/

Blocking new housing doesn't stop rich people from moving in. Instead, it means unleashing them on the existing housing stock. In SF, increased demand from the tech boom was not met with new supply, so landlords withdrew their rentals to sell to tech workers. 1/

Blocking new housing doesn't stop rich people from moving in. Instead, it means unleashing them on the existing housing stock. In SF, increased demand from the tech boom was not met with new supply, so landlords withdrew their rentals to sell to tech workers. 1/

NEW VIDEO: North America’s Elevator’s Problem Elevators are absolutely essential to modern cities..... and it turns out North America kind of sucks at them. We partnered with @sightline.org to look into the many issues plaguing our elevator industry, and what it might take to fix it.

Are the transportation engineers okay?

Get elevator-pilled. youtu.be/Or1_qVdekYM

'Impact fees' are insanely regressive. San Diego charges a fee on commercial development when it creates jobs for low-wage workers; but *not* when it adds high-wage jobs. This is just a way of keeping poor people out. 1/

A new lawsuit against inclusionary zoning. Some thoughts on why this will improve affordability: 1/

A new lawsuit against inclusionary zoning. Some thoughts on why this will improve affordability: 1/

'Impact fees' are insanely regressive. San Diego charges a fee on commercial development when it creates jobs for low-wage workers; but *not* when it adds high-wage jobs. This is just a way of keeping poor people out. 1/

Suppose that new apartments do improve local amenities, inducing demand and raising local rents. This is bad for local renters, but good for renters in the neighborhoods from which the demand was induced; they get lower demand and lower rents. Is there a clear policy takeaway?

We force young families to live in dog-crate toy-houses instead of properly-sized apartments, because god forbid we change the "neighborhood character".

We force young families to live in dog-crate toy-houses instead of properly-sized apartments, because god forbid we change the "neighborhood character".

Why are people so resistant to "do both"? Ie. build more market-rate housing and more subsidized housing. Even if the spillover effect of new "luxury" housing is mostly attenuated when it reaches the low-end market, that's still a free benefit that we should take. 1/

Common left-NIMBY fallacy: "new housing takes decades to depreciate, so it doesn't help poor people today." But this ignores vacancy chains: building expensive new housing today frees up cheap old housing today.

Most housing models assume fixed household size and ignore how people economize on housing by doubling-up. What happens if we relax this assumption? 1/2

For example: in my original comment, I showed that the IV results are wrong because Moretti didn't sort by city when calculating a first-difference; fixing this coding error gives a null result. Can ChatGPT5.2 figure this out? 1/

For example: in my original comment, I showed that the IV results are wrong because Moretti didn't sort by city when calculating a first-difference; fixing this coding error gives a null result. Can ChatGPT5.2 figure this out? 1/

Let's play a game: In my replication of Moretti (2021), I found 10 major errors (coding and conceptual). Next week I'll post my revised comment (R&R at AER) with the ground truth. How many errors can you find? Use your best AI tools. github.com/maswiebe/mor...

Two reasons this argument is flawed: - homeowners like selling to developers for bags of cash, actually. - if homeowners cared only about property values, they would oppose new SFH subdivisions going up five miles away; since they don't, we know the premise is wrong.

What explains YIMBY success? Is it from correct ideas winning out, or from people suffering from high housing costs becoming a majority of voters? How much weight do you assign to ideas vs materialism?

YIMBYs as public-hearing NIMBYs: "I'm not opposed to public hearings, I just think we shouldn't have one for this development." "By all means, let's have the public hearing, but only residents in the new building are allowed to speak."

Which way, western man? Abundance vs disinvestment.

If we add one home to the housing stock and it's used for airbnb, does that mean new supply doesn't work? No. If we didn't add that home, the airbnb host would have just used an existing home for airbnb. So new supply frees up the existing home, keeping it in the rental market.

Would industry-wide shocks cause bias in the classic Bartik setup? (y=wage, x=employment) Take LLMs as a common shock to the tech industry; suppose they raise productivity, increasing both employment and wages in tech. #econsky 1/

Vancouver's inclusionary zoning policy in the Downtown Eastside had a 60% (!) social housing requirement. This is obviously miscalibrated, and as you'd expect, only two projects were completed under the policy (and they don't count because they needed subsidies anyway).

Single-family units are not affordable, so why do we allow them?

Moretti 2021 estimates the effect of tech cluster size on patenting. He uses patents per coauthor, ie. splitting credit for a patent across coauthors. Does this make sense? We're not trying to evaluate them for promotion, we're testing whether cluster size causes patenting.

If new condos cause gentrification (rather than vice versa), then what causes new condos?