News and Commentary
In Full Stack Economics, Timothy Lee summarizes recent papers finding desirable cascading effects of new luxury housing: “Often, the person who rents the new apartment is moving out of an old apartment in the same metropolitan area. That creates a vacancy that can be filled by another renter. That person, in turn, may be vacating a third apartment.”
In a piece at Vox, Nicole Narea describes the inhospitable housing supply which Afghan refugees face: “High prices and low supply leave cash-strapped refugee agencies struggling to compete, and could limit how quickly they can resettle families and how many people they can serve.”
In Urban Turf, Nena Perry-Brown notes that New York and Washington DC added more housing units per square mile than any other counties. DC housing also outpaced its population growth from 2010-2020.
In Reason, Christian Britschgi notes that a California environmental law is capping not only housing, but also university enrollments and hospital expansions.
In The Hill, Howard Husock challenges the developing budget bill’s strategy on housing affordability. “What it terms, for example, ‘historic investments’ in affordable housing, development and revitalization are instead vast expansions of failed and suspect programs — initiatives that should be reformed, not expanded.”
In an article at Greater Greater Washington, Matt Ring and Jenny Schuetz examine the distribution of DC’s housing growth and how it relates to climate issues.
In a recent column at the New York Times, Paul Krugman discusses California NIMBYism’s effect on the state’s migration flow and resulting political sorting. “The two Americas created by the collision of the knowledge economy and NIMBYism correspond fairly closely to the blue-red division: Democratic-voting districts have seen a big rise in incomes, while G.O.P. districts have been left behind.”
New Research
In a recent paper, Enrico Moretti assesses high-tech clusters’ effects on the productivity of inventors. He finds that “In a counterfactual scenario where the quality of U.S. inventors is held constant but their geographical location is changed so that all cities have the same number of inventors in each field, inventor productivity would increase in small clusters and decline in large clusters. On net, the overall number of patents produced in the US in a year would be 11.07% smaller.”
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