Michael Andersen

🏗️We put together this rendering to show the progress of Midtown's infill development since the start of the Midtown Improvement District and Blueprint Midtown. Today, more than 100,000 people spend time in this square mile of the city. Check out this new visual!

The House just dramatically weakened a landmark affordable housing bill that passed the Senate earlier this year. The Senate bill had groundbreaking restrictions on Wall Street’s purchase of single-family homes, but the new House version significantly weakened the bill’s limitations on institutional investors in the housing market. The new version would make it possible for private equity firms and other large investors to purchase more homes than the initial version allowed. The new bill’s definition of a “single-family home” would also now exclude manufactured housing and newly-renovated homes. And the new version removes a controversial mandate that homes built for rent have to be sold to tenants within 7 years, incentivizing companies to permanently rent their properties. When the Senate passed their landmark bill, Wall Street and housing developers immediately started lobbying the House, spending tens of thousands on key lawmakers. That spending appears to have paid off.

Cities have been losing families. We also know families strongly prefer housing with 3+ bedrooms. So would families still benefit if we built a bunch of studio apartments? I think so. In a new post, I review economic research on the connectedness of these housing submarkets.

Do NOT buy a house Unless you're a billionaire Rent for now Wait for a 2008 type market crash to buy ur 1st house You'll thank me later.

Seattle's housing crisis, brought to you by the industry that has built more housing than anywhere else in (except Austin), resulting a meaningful fall in rents (not like Austin but still)

Again, the YIMBYs have won the messaging war so decisively that when someone like Jayapal offers vague nonsense like "we must choose people over developers" she gets ratio'd by her own side, hard. The momentum is there, we just have to translate it into more actual homes.

I keep seeing things in the spirit ot “if we ask builders what they need to build, they say financing is more important than zoning”. And I think this type of argument is not a good way to help us find good policy. Zoning (and permitting reform etc) aren’t like financing. The key difference is that up-zoning is (simplified) “free”: We get more housing and more tax revenue without having to spend money. In its most trivial form, financing is the exact opposite: If interest rates are high, then little gets built. But there’s no good policy implication from this: We could of course subsidize supply directly, but that’s very expensive. How can we set policy well? We look at an intervention (up-zoning, permitting reform, etc) and estimate the costs and benefits. I can tell that, in NYC, pure zoning constraints are very large, and relatively simple approaches at upzoning would (in my estimate) lead to large increases in housing. There might many places where zoning isn’t a big constraint. And maybe there are financing reforms with high cost-benefit, but we can’t infer that just by asking builders about relative importance. We need to measure the costs and benefits!

With a sufficiently robust migration response, local housing supply deregulation would be expected to have zero effect on prices; if migration responds enough to price differences, the whole effect would be on population.