If you live in a coastal city like New York, Boston or San Francisco, you know that the cost of housing has skyrocketed. This housing crisis did not happen by chance: Increasingly restrictive land-use regulations in the last half-century contributed to it.
Author Archives: Niloo Nouri
Tiny Homes, Big Goals
To house an ever-larger homeless population, San Francisco may have to think smaller.
Amid a growing homelessness crisis, San Francisco does not have enough supportive housing to accommodate everyone who needs it.
Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?
The waters are receding in Houston, and so, inevitably, is national interest. But Harvey will leave a huge amount of wreckage behind, some of it invisible. In particular, we don’t yet know just how much poison has been released by flooding of chemical plants, waste dumps, and more.
City chipmunks are happier, heavier and healthier than chipmunks in the wild, says researcher
Those chipmunks in your yard are survivors
The chipmunks in your yard might be healthier and happier than their counterparts in rural areas, says a Laurentian University researcher.
Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, a Canada Research Chair in applied evolutionary ecology, said his recent paper published in Oxford University’s Behavioural Ecology, suggests that chipmunks in the city live a surprisingly different life than their relatives in the country.
Brad Pitt’s tiny home and other affordable space-saving miracles
3 housing solutions that could impact global problems
Homelessness, lack of affordable housing, natural disaster damage — these are all global problems that can be alleviated through creative housing solutions.
Three types of homes that problem-solvers such as Brad Pitt and Patrick Kennedy are employing to help are tiny houses, micro-units and shipping container homes.
SF added jobs eight times faster than housing since 2010
Meanwhile, rents are up 43 percent in ten years
If housing in San Francisco was as plentiful as data about housing in San Francisco, most renters would be on easy street.
The rental site ApartmentList crunched some census numbers in over 400 cities going back to 2005 to figure out, which metros kept up with construction relative to job growth and which ones were lying down on the job.
Yes, Red Tape and Fees Do Raise The Price of Housing
And no amount of hand-waving about “land values” changes that.
Few public policy issues can match urban housing politics for its incendiary combination of passion and misconception. To wit: the confounding idea that relaxing regulations and fees to decrease the cost of homebuilding won’t make homes more affordable.
Housing Policy Lessons from Vienna, Part II
Allowing multi-family housing in all residential zones, and aggressively promoting private bidding lowers housing costs
…Vienna is often mentioned as a model for how American cities might do a better job of providing more widespread affordability. While tantalizing, many of the descriptions of the secrets of its reported success are cryptic and incomplete.
The right Rx for California’s housing problems
Christopher Thornberg’s “Stop Dissin’ the Housing Market—Set it Free!”, which recently appeared on these pages, is just what California’s housing markets need. Hail to this Beacon Economics PhD! Want more housing? as Thronberg asks: Stop messing with markets!
I’m an architect in LA specializing in multifamily residential. I’d like to do my best to explain a little understood reason why all new large development in LA seems to be luxury development.
From July 6, 2017
A big part of my job is to “spec and mass” potential new large scale developments for developers who are considering building in LA at a particular site. Understanding the code and limitations makes it pretty easy to understand why no developers in the city seem to be making the lower cost units everyone wants.
