DCP divided the city into “neighborhood tabulation areas” (NTAs) with population ranging from 15,000 to 100,000. DCP’s data showed that the city as a whole lost 2 percent of its under-18 population between 2010 and 2020, but that some areas had significant gains.

The biggest gainers were Long Island City (over 200 percent) and four areas where the under-18 population increased by between 50 and 75 percent (the Financial District, Midtown, Midtown South, and Downtown Brooklyn).

There seems to be a positive correlation between child growth and housing supply growth, even in these expensive areas. In the Long Island City NTA, the number of housing units increased by over 100 percent between 2010 and 2020- so it is no surprise that the number of children increased. Housing supply increased significantly in three of the four NTAs that added the most children. The number of number of occupied housing units increased by 23 percent in the Midtown South NTA, by 26 percent in the Financial District NTA, and by 86 percent in the Downtown Brooklyn NTA. (Central Midtown was an exception to the rule; housing supply increased more slowly there). By contrast, in Manhattan as a whole, the number of housing units increased by only 7 percent, and the number of children actually declined.

Moreover, affluent areas that added very little housing supply tended to gain under-18 residents at a much slower pace. For example, in the three Upper East Side (NTAs) (Lenox Hill, Carnegie Hill, Yorkville) the number of housing units increased by only 1.9 percent and the number of under-18 residents by only 8.9 percent. In two Upper West Side areas (the Central Upper West Side and Lincoln Square) the number of occupied units increased by only 1.4 percent and the number of under-18 residents by only 12.2 percent. In the West Village, the number of housing units actually decreased, and the number of under-18 residents increased by 6.9 percent.

The general pattern among these elite neighborhoods seems to be: where lots of housing is built, lots of children move in. Where very little housing is built, the child population still sometimes increases, but not by as much.

(NOTE: More data is available at popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov )

The post Swimming against the tide appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.

This post appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.

Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.

However, since the pandemic, technology has made it possible to live a whole life in the city without leaving our homes. Many people can work full-time remotely, connecting online to attend meetings and get information. They can have their food delivered to their home, meet friends online, and have their preferred entertainment streamed to a device while sitting on their couch. They can exercise on a stationary bike, guided by a coach on their screen.

This online life can be wholly planned, and, like anything fully programmed in advance, it soon becomes tedious and inefficient, similar at the personal level to the Gosplan, or State Planning Committee, that guided the planned economy of the Soviet Union. The pleasing randomness, long provided by active city life, is missing.

Randomness makes city life exciting and productive, and how we design cities can multiply or reduce the chances of serendipitous encounters of people and ideas. Creativity and innovation, two of the most desirable traits of metropolitan environments, depend on unplanned meetings between people of different skills, tastes, and backgrounds.

In cities, most trips, even if they involve a car, bus, or subway, start and end with walking. As we move through a city at a walking pace, we collect unexpected visual information about the areas we cross. Simply traversing the pavement exposes a pedestrian to unexpected, diverse inputs. Jane Jacobs described this process in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, writing, “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

Let’s look at how urban designers can increase the acquisition of random information by multiplying chance encounters.

Cities are divided between two fundamentally different areas: streets and private lots. Planners and engineers design streets, while households and firms design what is built on private lots. Planners, through land use regulations, often severely constrain the design of private lots.

Private commercial establishments where people usually meet, like cafés, bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, clubs, and churches, are essential to the creativity of cities. The openness of commercial establishments toward the street is the best way to transmit information on what they have to offer. This is why cafés and restaurants with outdoor seating are so attractive. Municipalities should allow cafés and restaurants to expand into the public space when the width of the sidewalk permits it.

Active frontages—streets lined with colorful entrances, windows, cafés, and shops—give people reasons to stop and engage, leading to more chance encounters. Conversely, blank walls or inactive street frontages (often found around large, single-use buildings like parking garages or warehouses) can discourage pedestrian activity and social interaction.

City dwellers usually love walking through an open-air market, because the display of goods for sale maximizes the amount of random information they encounter. Food markets’ variety of colors and fragrances provides visitors with unfamiliar, stimulating sensations. Establishments that cannot be open on the streets, like concert halls, theaters, and department stores, can still provide information to pedestrians through posters and elaborately designed shop windows.

Urban planners can follow a few rules to increase the richness of information collected by pedestrians.

1. Do not segregate commercial or cultural use from residential use through zoning regulations. Do not restrict commercial establishments to a single use. For instance, a gym or a bookstore should be allowed to open a bar or a restaurant on its premises, because a city benefits by maximizing chance encounters.
2. Do not oblige businesses to have parking lots between the sidewalk and the building. Walking along a parking lot impoverishes the information collected. While private, off-street parking is often indispensable, the parking should be underground or in the back of the building, not in front.
3. Do not impose setbacks in residential streets on the ground floor. The setbacks often need to be protected by monotonous fences.

The Corbusier-inspired “towers in the park,” the high-rise, single-use slabs surrounded by green space, are the ultimate urban design sin. This layout sanitizes streets from random information, because sidewalks are too distant from buildings to provide information to pedestrians. Randomness enriches urban life and ought to be fostered at every opportunity.

The post In Praise of Randomness appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Sites and services projects are government-sponsored packages of shelter related services, which range from a minimal level of “surveyed plot” to an intermediate level of “serviced sites” to an upper level of “core housing” complete with utilities and access to community-based services. The level of services depends on the ability and willingness of beneficiary populations to afford them. Typically, such projects represent a sharp break with preexisting government shelter policies in that they attempt, in principle, to focus directly on lower-income deliver shelter and services with small or no subsidies.

Mayo and Gross, World Bank Economic Review, 1987

A 2021 paper by Guy Michaels and colleagues found that S&S has been effective in the long run in Tanzania.

Mumbai retrospective

For my own look back, I revisited a 1983-84 S&S site in Mumbai, called Charkop Kandivali in 2010. I had been part of the appraisal team on the World Bank side. Mumbai planner VK Phatak (whose book I’m keenly awaiting) was also part of the appraisal team on the regional development authority side. VK personally supervised the implementation of the project.

The key elements of the S&S design I participated in is that there are different prices of lots with different standards. Not all World Bank
S&S projects applied this pricing method based on different infrastructure standards within the same site.

The pricing method and the design are based on this document that I wrote with Marie-Agnes and James Wright. It was published in 1988 (WB publications need a lot of reviews and clearance before being approved).

Why not imitated?

Money could be made with S&S. Why was it not reproduced at a large scale by the private sector? The answer is that the Housing Board would not allow the private sector to use these standards. The private sector was obliged to use minimum standards that were a multiple of those used in S&S.

The post Retrospective: Sites & Services appeared first on Market Urbanism.

• The Historical Housing Prices Project gives rents and home prices from 1890 – 2006 for US cities. It’s based on newspaper listings and was led by Ronan C. Lyons, Allison Shertzer, and Rowena Gray. I’ve added Ronan’s blog, Time & Space, to the links below.
• City Density displays and compares the population density of scores of world cities across their linear transects. I’ve added Aussie creator Jonathan Nelson’s substack to the links as well.
• Human Terrain shows the same data, I believe, but in a 3D map format.

The post Dataviz links: Over time, across space appeared first on Market Urbanism.

At the heart of Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities is a simple idea: cities are the basic unit of economic growth. Our prosperity depends on the ability of cities to grow and renew themselves; neither nation nor civilisation can thrive without cities performing this vital function of growing our economies and cultivating new, and innovative, uses for capital and resources. It’s a strikingly simple message, yet it’s so easily and often forgotten and overlooked.

Everything we have, we owe to cities. Everything. Consider even the most basic goods: the food staples that sustain life on earth and which in the affluent society in which we now reside, abound to the point where obesity has become one of the leading causes of illness. Obesity sure is a very real problem and one we ought to work to resolve (probably through better education and cutting those intense sugar subsidies). Yet this fact alone is striking! For much of mankind’s collective history, the story looked very different: man (and it usually was a man) would spend twelve or maybe more hours roaming around in the wild to gather sufficient food to survive. Our lives looked no different to the other animals with which we share the earth. An extract from The Economy of Cities:

‘Wild animals are strictly limited in their resources by natural resources, including other animals on which they feed. But this is because any given species of animal, except man, uses directly only a few resources and uses them indefinitely.’

What changed? Anthropologists, economists, and historians will tell you it was the Agricultural Revolution, which occurred when man began to settle in small towns and cultivate the agricultural food staples that continue to make up the bulk of our diet: wheat, barley, rice, corn, and animal food products. But this merely raises another question: how did the Agricultural Revolution that took place ten millennia ago come into being? Jane Jacobs’ (very compellingly argued) answer is that we’ve got it all backwards: the city is what makes civilisation possible. Agriculture, and everything that proceeded from it, is merely an export of the city, just like the factories, automobiles, and microchips which first arise in cities and are then spun out into a region’s wider territory.

Here’s how it might have happened: at some point in the distant past, the world was parcelled up into territories controlled by various packs of hunter-gatherers. But hunter-gatherers need tools to hunt. Those tools, in turn, are produced by a couple of basic commodities: at first primitive stone tools, then increasingly complex spears made from obsidian and glass, and finally weapons made with copper and iron. As our tools became increasingly complex, their production necessitated resources obtained from particular locations – not available everywhere by obtainable through trade. Hence the rise of the world’s first cities: places where people would come together and barter for those primary sources of production, necessitating permanent civilisations. The surplus from trade, captured and enabled by the city, could then be allocated to new and innovative uses of labour.

Animals, for example, were held for the local trading population, at first for immediate consumption, but then it made sense, as the surplus increased, to breed them in new and innovative ways. Hence the rise of animal agriculture – first in cities, then as land became more valuable, spun off into the surrounding countryside. So too for the seeds which led to plant agriculture: initially for immediate consumption, their storage (and the surplus entailed) permitted experimentation with cross-pollination and paved the way for more advanced plant agriculture. Agriculture, Jacobs shows us, was perhaps the very first significant export spun off from cities!

Jacobs herself notes the idea is surprising, for it completely reverses the typical chain of cause-and-effect that we are so familiar with and that comes so intuitively. After all, in our everyday observations, it is rural areas which become developed into cities, hence why we might believe that first came agriculture. But this cannot be the case: further archaeological research has indeed confirmed Jacobs’ theories, showing that large-scale urban centres in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia (see the example of Göbekli Tepe) preceded the agricultural revolution. Civilisation, made possible by the agricultural revolution, quite literally emerged with the advent of the world’s first cities.

The striking thing is that this is still the case today. Just like in the earliest cities, which permitted innovation when new work was added to old work and advancements in technique were made – quite literally creating new industries and products through the experimentation that surplus permits – cities continue to be the base of all human innovation and ingenuity. For it is in the city that ideas permeate most effectively, that humans collaborate and learn from one another, building on previous knowledge and success.

For new firms to start, they require a rich ecosystem of existing knowledge on which to base new ideas and innovation. They require capital to turn ideas into reality, that capital being just one of the many exports that cities provide. In turn, as innovations and products emerge in cities, these are added to a city’s exports, growing its markets for additional goods imported from elsewhere.

Every city is, in this way, deeply interconnected and reliant on the success of the cities that came before. What’s curious is that Jacobs doesn’t define the city in terms of scale; rather, to be considered a city (as opposed to a large town), an agglomeration must have the capacity for economic self-generation – in other words, it must be able to sustain itself through this innovative process of adding new work to old work, innovating at every increment.

There is no end to the potential growth that might emerge from cities. In Jacobs’ words: ‘once we stopped living like other animals, on what nature provided us ready-made, we began riding a tiger we do not dare dismount, but we also began opening up new resources – unlimited resources except as they may be limited by economic stagnation.’ The potential growth stemming from cities is precisely because they draw on more than the immediate resources provided in their vicinity. Rather, cities grow, replacing imports and imports, through human ingenuity, talent and the application of ideas to concrete problems.

It has often been proclaimed, particularly in the environmentalist movement, just like the Malthusians that came before, that the human race faces an impending destruction for there comes a point at which we simply run out of resources. That is not the case, when one understands the process that Jacobs is describing. Planet Earth contains almost the same resources that it did twelve millennia ago when absolute poverty was the rule everywhere. In bringing millions of people together in one place and setting in motion this process of constant economic renewal and improvement, wealth was created as ideas about how to reorganise those same resources spread so much faster, setting off a process of ‘cataclysmic reciprocal growth.’

It’s hard to let go of old ideas in favour of new, sounder ones, especially when they are so deeply entrenched. Yet despite there being evidence, quite literally all around us, that it is cities that create growth, policy remains firmly grounded in the old paradigm. Policies aimed at spreading or redistributing wealth across nations as a way of developing them achieve nothing of the sort. It might provide temporary relief (more likely the gains will be captured by some vested interest) but does little to kickstart the self-generating, reciprocating growth process that allows cities to grow. Nor can industrial policy, subsidies to lure big enterprises, or tariff barriers create the growth or desired effects. Big companies, Jacobs goes at length to explain, are highly efficient because they are very vertically integrated. Yet the real growth engine for cities is smaller companies, operating with some level of slack that permits them to expand into new markets and carry out the process of adding new work to old (or in other words, further specialisation).

Then there is the countryside and rural areas. The Economy of Cities is brilliant because Jacobs’ shows us that their development is entirely dependent on the development of cities, and not the other way around. Cities, and the activities that occur within, are what produce the growth that is then expanded out into the countryside as space becomes scarce and new innovative uses for capital and land are found in cities. The success of our cities is therefore not a zero-sum game, it is something of importance to every single one of us.

Politicians, city planners and those in the development space ought to pay close attention to these. Growth cannot be bought; the only way to achieve it is to focus on cultivating its underlying drivers.

The post Lessons from Jane Jacobs on The Economy of Cities appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But Erdmann makes a stronger claim:

Supply has never and will never cause a collapse of prices and rents. It causes stability. 

Is that true? In a case like Austin or Phoenix, sure: prices are not too far above the cost of construction, and abundant supply cannot (durably) push the price of new housing below the cost of construction.

But YIMBY has more to offer to San Francisco, Auckland, or London. In those cases, prices are far above construction cost. That means that even when demand is relatively soft, there’s money to made in construction. As Erdmann allows:

After a decade of more active construction in Auckland, rents appear to be 10% to 15% below the pre-reform trend. That’s a big win. After a decade. That’s what success looks like.

That’s the promise – 5 to 15% relative rent declines, decade after decade. But there are several good reasons to believe this won’t happen in an even, steady pattern, at least not all the time. Hopefully by 2040 we’ll have data from several cases and be able to describe the dynamics of market restoration with much more confidence.

The post Can YIMBY policies cause large price declines? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey, the author of this collection of essays, studies philosophy and economics on the dual degree between Columbia University and SciencesPo Paris. Having grown up between London and Paris, he is energised by the questions of urban economics, the role of the metropolis in the global economy, urban governance and cities as spontaneous order. He works as an Applied Research Intern at the Mercatus Center.

Since man is a political animal, and an intensely social existence is a necessary condition for his flourishing, then it follows that the city is the best form of spatial organisation. In the city arises a form of synergy, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, for the remarkable thing about cities is that they tap into the brimming potential of every human being. In nowhere but the city can one find such a variety of human ingenuity, cooperation, culture and ideas. The challenge for cities is that they operate on their own logic. Cities are one of the best illustrations of spontaneous order. The city in history did not emerge as the result of a rational plan; rather, what the city represents is the physical manifestation of millions of individuals making decisions about where to locate their homes, carry out economic transactions, and form intricate social webs. This reality is difficult to reconcile with our modern preference for scientific positivism and rationalism. But for the Polis to flourish, it must be properly understood by the countless planners, reformers, politicians and the larger body of citizens inhabiting the space.

Enter Jane Jacobs. As the story of cities reached a point at which the assault on them seemed so great, so forceful and so fierce that it seemed there was no turning back, Jacobs, in her Magnum Opus ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ became one of their staunchest advocates, reminding us of their role in cultivating diversity and progress whilst also underscoring the logic on which they operate. It has been over half a century since Jacobs published this seminal work of literature. Its effects have certainly been felt, ushering in a shift in how planners, developers and policymakers alike approach urban planning, shifting their focus onto mixed-use developments, more walkable downtowns, and the cultivation of metropolitan diversity. Yet this book was never intended as an obscure manual for city planners and government mandarins. Rather it should be read as a robust defence of dense urban living aimed at underscoring its importance to overall human flourishing. This essay posits that the uses of cities go far beyond the economic dimension – they extend themselves into forging deep and meaningful human ties, stimulating intellectual and spiritual advancement, and playing an important role in what makes humans human. Revisiting The Death and Life of Great American Cities allows us to see how this continues to be true today and why the vitality and success of our cities are of importance to all who care about the success and flourishing of the human species.

Economic dimension of cities

Addressing the obvious first, very little of the material advancement that humanity has seen throughout its existence would be possible were it not for the economic diversity that cities help to cultivate. If this argument is made explicit at several points throughout the Death and Life of American Cities, it is implicit at every point throughout the book. In connecting millions of people in one place, the city acts as a giant labour market, allowing employers to find talent and workers to make a living. Cities are what translate abstract supply and demand graphs into tangible economic exchange, allowing buyers and sellers to convalesce in one place and permitting mutually beneficial exchange to take place. In a chapter entitled ‘The Need for Concentration,’ Jacobs highlights the role that high densities play in generating economic diversity, namely, that at low densities, businesses offering certain specialised goods could never afford to sustain themselves for there simply wouldn’t be enough demand. The calculation is reversed at higher densities. ‘By its nature,’ she writes, ‘the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by travelling; namely, the strange.’ Concentration goes further than providing businesses with consumers. Businesses do not exist in a vacuum, they exist and rely on an intricate network of support from suppliers, financial institutions, vendors and other interested stakeholders, all of which must be derived from somewhere. Connecting all of these people in one place greatly increases efficiencies and further allows for the quick transmission of ideas and innovation. This idea might further be connected with that of Joseph Heinrich’s in chapter 12 of his 2016 book, The Secret to Our Success. There exist many great minds whose discoveries have transformed the course of our civilisation (Edison, Kepler, and Einstein, to give a few examples). But progress and advancement do not depend on these great minds alone, what is needed is the broader diffusion and integration of these ideas into the society at large. Genius alone won’t suffice, as Heinrich’s anthropological examples on Tasmania demonstrate; that long-disconnected island, isolated from the progress and ideas of the broader society, regressed significantly during that time when it was disconnected. Cities, if permitted to do so, have the opposite effect, serving as both cultivators and connectors of new ideas that otherwise would never have been.

Context in which The Death and Life of Great American Cities Emerged

Jacobs goes to great lengths to show why (then) contemporary approaches to urban planning and policy were greatly undermining the role of cities in connecting and cultivating economic diversity. She opens her book with the line: ‘This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.’ That planning and rebuilding to which she was referring in 1961, and to some extent still present to this day despite the influence her works have had, was based on the belief that cities, despite their economic advantages, were not desirable places to live and were instead hotbeds of vice and criminality. Spearheaded by British urban planner Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City proposed an alternative to dense urban growth, designating permitted land uses in specific areas, segregating residential, commercial and industrial uses, and most importantly suppressing densities so they could never rise above a certain point. A slightly amended version of these ideas came in the form of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (look it up if you’re not already familiar – it’s striking!); modernism in physical form which quickly sprang from the academic to the physical realm with the construction of vast swathes of housing projects across the United States, Soviet Union and beyond. Adding to the malaise of the city was the City Beautiful movement, kickstarted by the Columbian Exposition of 1893 which began a movement of concentrating civic buildings all in one place. The proponents of these three types of new urbanism against which Jacobs takes aim were rarely ill-intentioned, she stresses throughout. However, their ideas were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what led to successful economic diversity in cities.

For a city to succeed, grow and thrive, mixed-use of both commerce and people is needed so that an area can sustain itself uniformly throughout the day. For new ideas and businesses to emerge and take hold, the city must contain a variety of both new and old units; old units allowing economically risky ideas or with low overheads to exist. For neighbourhoods to improve, change must be gradual rather than cataclysmic, ensuring that communities and neighbourhoods have the time to form robustly. Density, more than anything, matters, but it is essential that this diversity exists in a way that the city can make use of. Density, unless accompanied by mixed-uses, short blocks which permit street life and sustain a variety of economic uses, means very little. From that effective density (that is, a density that is effective because it is combined with reasons for people to intermingle and interact with people outside of their usual social circles, if even lightly), stems all of the other benefits that cities confer: strong communities, safer streets as there will be many people to watch over them, new businesses which can tap into the city’s broader resources, and the opportunity for spontaneous and unplanned social interaction.

In response to the stultifying controls that have been imposed on our cities in the form of planning, land use, parking requirements, and density thresholds (among others) has emerged a vital movement of pro-housing advocates in the post-Jacobs era. The modern YIMBY, or Yes-In-My-Backyard, movement has rightly focussed on reducing controls and ensuring we build as much as possible, wherever possible. Condominiums, high-rises, sprawling suburban developments; new developments in any form are welcomed by YIMBYs as a means of reducing housing costs and enabling people to tap into the untapped potential that cities offer. And rightly so: pro-housing advocates often refer to the so-called ‘housing theory of everything,’ which links a lack of affordable housing to a plethora of social issues, including poverty, lack of access to education, and environmental degradation. There are strong reasons to be sympathetic to these arguments: increasing housing affordability benefits not just those who are already in cities, so too does it permit thousands more to tap into the places where they can be most productive, tap into, and create new opportunities. But Jane Jacobs offers something for us YIMBYs too, by showing us that our cities offer so much more than just economic benefits. But this is only so if urban development takes a particular form.

Cities as cultivators of diversity

‘A city’s greatest asset,’ Jacobs declares, is its ‘very wholeness in bringing together people with communities of interest.’ Cities play a central role in cultivating civic life, they allow individuals with similar interests to come in a way and interact spontaneously in a way that’s never possible at smaller densities. In suburbia, human interaction is governed by ‘togetherness,’ the requirement that much shall be shared,’ amongst residents ‘or else they must settle for lack of contact.’ Parents attend the same PTA meetings, soccer games, and birthday parties. The bar for friendship in suburbia is necessarily higher, for it entails a much greater level of commitment and intimacy. ‘Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results.’ Cities, and particularly lively sidewalks, permit another type of civic life to emerge: one where humans are loosely connected and can then choose to develop these relationships further if they so choose. Jacobs provides vivid examples from her street: the local grocers that one can ask for favours like holding keys, individuals who watch over the children of others and keep them out of trouble, ‘connectors’ who know many individuals loosely and, in connecting them, bring about the political fabric required for self-governance.

One critique levelled at Jacobs’ urban vision is that it is overly rose-tinted. This is not the case: in New York, in London, in Paris, there continue to exist pockets of urban life with a strong underlying social fabric, needed now more than ever in an age where people are increasingly inward-looking as a result of social media. Surrounding the Great Cities is another model: areas like the Clarendon neighbourhood in Virginia are a good illustration of how we can tap into the benefits of density and concentration whilst still allowing those in the suburbs to tap into these vibrant areas.

The city, notes Aristotle in Book 3 of Politics, ‘must be regarded not just for the sake of living together,’ but rather ‘for the sake of noble action.’ Jacobs is in many ways an intellectual heir of this thought: presenting why the spatial dimension matters in how we live, showing how concentration and lively mixed-use sidewalks cultivate further diversity, progress and strong civic life, then underscoring why not any form of planning will do: only that which permits for spontaneous use cases, that is not overly regimented, and most of all allow for cross-use and walkability, will suffice.

Jacobs and the defence of cities

The genius of Jane Jacobs is that her critique, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is not limited to that. This work of literature, and the richness in which her prose and descriptions come together to form an image of the city truly do make it a work of literature, fundamentally challenges the status quo and persuades us as to why urban life is so desirable. Americans have come to view the American Dream and suburban life with a white picket fence as synonymous. Jacobs urges us to look beyond that, to recognise that the city is not a place we should be resigned to living in because of the economic effects. Rather, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a reminder of how the diversity of cities is just a reflection of the individuality and uniqueness inherent in every one of us.

The post The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Revisited appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Edgar Olsen and Dirk Early estimate that Housing Choice Vouchers – aka Section 8 – have a respectable benefit to taxpayer cost of 77%. Other forms of social housing, including LIHTC, perform much worse, delivering value to recipients of between 19% and 51% of the cost to the taxpayer.

But how good are the estimates? Olsen and Early do their own work on the benefit side, using 2013 American Housing Survey data. It’s not the last word on the matter, but it’s clear, recent, and replicable.

On the cost side, however, Olsen and Early rely on other researchers’ findings. The best evidence comes from papers published in 1980 (for public housing), 1981 (for HUD-subsidized privately owned projects), and 2002 (GAO). The only recent evidence is on vouchers, from Olsen’s own work (2019).

This shows, frankly, a shocking incuriosity from government functionaries and academics, the majority of whom favor greater spending on social housing. As Olsen and Early note, most of the increase in U.S. social housing comes from LIHTC spending — which the meager available evidence finds to be the very least effective way of providing social housing.

Congress won’t have the courage to shift LIHTC spending to vouchers. But it should, at minimum, require a rigorous update of the Government Accountability Office’s 2002 study.

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