Here’s one reason we have a housing shortage: New development creates diffuse benefits, but has concentrated costs. Local control over land use ensures we’ll undercount the benefits.
Neighborhoods are designed, slowly and constantly, by the people who live in them. We make decisions about what gets built and who gets to use it or live in it through a network of community meetings, zoning boards, and city and state governments. In the process we create something we call “housing policy”. I have […]
Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. […]
Someone (apologies for I forget who) Tweeted out this report from the Met Council called simply “We Still Need More Housing” the other day. It’s got some great charts in it. Here are three of them. Keep in mind that this is all metro-wide data. For example, check out this chart, comparing MSP to other […]
Minneapolis is growing. We’ve heard lots of talk about how Minneapolis is losing affordable housing faster than we can replace it. We say housing should be a human right (and it should!). We hear about rising rents and first-time buyers unable to find starter homes. Whether you want more public housing or you want the market […]
After 2017’s City Council races in Minneapolis and Ginger Jentzen’s strong showing, rent control has re-entered the housing discourse in the Twin Cities again, despite the fact that it is preempted at the state level. It’s my belief that the preemption and much of the opposition to rent control is based in a certain inflexibility […]
Many people have observed on this site and others that we’re not building enough housing in the United States, and that this has a significant impact on affordability. Housing lasts for a long time if properly looked after, so if the population and people’s household arrangements don’t change, we don’t need to build much housing. Neither […]