The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less - NYT
I've had this excellent NYT opinion piece queued up to share for a while, because it essentially argues for adopting the Houston approach to housing regulation for the whole country: The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less (no paywall gift link). In fact, Houston shows up quite favorably in a lot of their excellent graphs. Below I share the opening, an AI summary of the main points, and the excellent conclusion that this deserves to be a bipartisan issue (bold highlights mine).
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"I would be the first to argue that if an economist claims to know of a cure-all policy — a reliable way to relieve a long list of social ills in one fell swoop — common sense tells you to stop listening.
So it is awkward for me to declare that I know of something close to a panacea policy: one big reform that would raise living standards, reduce wealth inequality, increase productivity, raise social mobility, help struggling men without college degrees, clean the planet and raise birth rates. It’s a sweeping reform that Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives could all proudly support.
The panacea policy I have in mind is housing deregulation. Research confirms that there are large benefits in saying yes to tall buildings, yes to multifamily structures, yes to dense single-family development and yes to speedy permitting. The growing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement already has high-profile wins in Minnesota, Oregon, California and beyond, but even YIMBY devotees rarely appreciate the scope of the merits of loosening rules on housing.
- The economic argument for housing deregulation rests on basic supply and demand principles: allowing more construction leads to lower prices. This is evident in historical data, showing that housing prices were relatively stable before stricter regulations in the 1970s, while rising significantly afterwards.
- Housing deregulation would directly improve the standard of living by significantly lowering housing costs, which currently represent a significant portion of the average American's budget.
- The distributional effects of deregulation would be impactful in reducing wealth inequality, as rising home values have been a key driver of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
- Deregulation would enhance social mobility by removing barriers to moving to higher-wage areas. Current strict regulations often make the cost of living in such regions outweigh any potential wage gains, discouraging relocation for many.
- Deregulation would create numerous job opportunities in the construction sector, a large and well-paying industry, particularly benefiting men without college degrees, who have faced challenges in the job market.
- Environmental protection is a common rationale for restricting construction, but deregulation can actually lead to more sustainable practices by encouraging denser housing in urban areas, resulting in lower carbon emissions.
- While concerns exist about homeowner resistance, the bigger obstacle to deregulation is public misunderstanding of basic economic principles, with many believing that increased housing supply will not lead to lower prices.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have embraced housing deregulation yet. YIMBY activists lean left, but they are only one voice in the progressive coalition. Republican states usually have less housing regulation, but more from tradition than from principle. Yet, given housing deregulation’s many demonstrated benefits, this policy agenda deserves bipartisan support. Democrats should cheer the effects on equality, social mobility and the environment. Republicans should be delighted to see free markets spreading broad prosperity, creating new working-class opportunities and fostering family formation. In a rational world, the panacea policy of housing deregulation would be a done deal. Hopefully whoever wins the next election will agree."
Labels: affordability, density, development, economic strategy, governance, home affordability, land-use regulation, opportunity urbanism, perspectives, politics, YIMBY
Next big moonshot for Houston? TX will pass CA and HTX will pass LA, auto vs. transit job access and realism
A few smaller misc items this week:
- Texas will surpass California, and both DFW and Houston will pass LA in population over the next 40 years. "The American future seems to be more Lone Star State than a Golden one."
- Houston Public Media/NPR asks "What could be the next big moonshot for Houston?" Among the answers, clean energy struck me as the most ambitious and most appropriate for Houston (ideally cost-effective carbon capture!). My own suggestion for a Houston moonshot? METRO could aspire to offer half-hour or less express trip times from every park-and-ride and transit center to every major job center and both airports using a network of MaX Lanes. A high goal but very achievable and it would support Houston's growth for decades to come. More on it here.
- New Geography: Auto vs. transit job access ratios for the top 50 metro areas (hat tip to Bill). Essentially comparing how many jobs are accessible by car within 30 mins (the typical commute) vs. by transit. A Houstonian can access 97.3 times (!) as many jobs by car than by transit within the same commute time. Even in NYC with excellent transit a car can still reach 9.7 more jobs than transit in the same time. The conclusion is compelling:
Where for Transit from Here?
With this minimal transit use relative to the auto and especially in view of the huge transit market share losses since the pandemic, it would seem useful to rethink the role of transit.
Transit does well for work trips to the largest downtown niche markets (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco), though pre-pandemic market shares are unlikely to be replicated in the future because of the popularity of hybrid and remote work, lower office occupancy and the likely improvement in virtual meeting technology.
The reality is that transit is not a substitute for the auto and there isn’t enough money to make it one. Professor Jean-Claude Ziv and I found that making the auto a genuine alternative to transit could be prohibitively costly, annually requiring the entire metropolitan area gross domestic product in some cases. This would leave nothing else for anything else.
It would be foolhardy to suggest that transit is an alternative to the auto (despite this having sbeen implied by federal, state, and local policy for decades of decline), In a non-utopian world, no reasonable increase in subsidies could make it so.
It may be best to identify the small areas within metro areas where transit could actually be an alternative to auto. This would be in neighborhoods where automobile ownership is particularly low, which, in most metros are also areas of greater economic need. Investing billions more to coax middle class commuters off the roads seems a daft approach given the realities.
Labels: census, growth, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, perspectives, transit
METRO+DART Ridership Update: summer slump and Beryl erase spring gains
This week we have another great analytical guest post from
Oscar Slotboom. Dallas DART's extensive and expensive light rail strategy is looking more and more like a total failure as suburban cities try to reduce their tax subsidy to DART.
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When I last reported on
Metro ridership in
April, ridership had reached a post-Covid high in February, down only 14.7% from the 12-month pre-Covid average. An upward bump in April pushed ridership to another post-Covid high at only 13.5% below the pre-Covid level. Summer months are usually low ridership months, and Hurricane Beryl caused Metro service outages during the week of July 9-12. July ridership was 22.3% below the pre-Covid average. However, in spite of the substantial service outages due to Beryl, July ridership was only slightly lower than June. So we can probably expect a strong rebound, especially since September and October are normally the highest ridership months.
In Dallas, June ridership (
page 55) was 23% below the pre-Covid baseline. As the plot shows, ridership has been flat in the last 9 months, appearing to end the four-year trend of slow recovery. It's interesting to note that the image shown below mentions that on-demand services are included in the ridership data, but a version of this plot presented one month earlier (
page 4) without any mention of on-demand services showed ridership down 28%.
Multiple member cities of DART, including Plano, are
attempting to reduce their tax subsidies to DART.
Nationally, public transit
ridership is down 25% compared to pre-Covid levels and appears to be holding steady with little or no upward trend. Of course, there are wide variations in performance by city and Houston is above average.
Plot credit: the
Antiplanner
Labels: Metro, rail, transit
