Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?: “Greater Houston still has less than a third as many people as greater New York… https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/opinion/houston-harvey-infrastructure-development.html

…but it covers roughly the same area… has a smaller percentage of land that hasn’t been paved… terrible traffic and an outsized pollution footprint even before the hurricane. When the rains came, the vast paved-over area meant that rising waters had nowhere to go. So is Houston’s disaster a lesson in the importance of urban land-use regulation, of not letting developers build whatever they want, wherever they want? Yes, but….

San Francisco… famous for its NIMBYism—that is, the power of “not in my backyard” sentiment to prevent new housing construction… soaring rents and home prices. The median monthly rent on a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is more than $3,000, the highest in the nation and roughly triple the rent in Houston; the median price of a single-family home is more than $800,000…. San Francisco housing is now quite a lot more expensive than New York housing, so why not have more tall buildings?… Politics has blocked that kind of construction, and the result is housing that’s out of reach for ordinary working families….

America’s big metropolitan areas are pretty sharply divided between Sunbelt cities where anything goes, like Houston or Atlanta, and those on the East or West Coast where nothing goes, like San Francisco or, to a lesser extent, New York. (Chicago is a huge city with dense development but relatively low housing prices; maybe it has some lessons to teach the rest of us?)… This is one policy area where “both sides get it wrong”—a claim I usually despise—turns out to be right….

It’s not hard to see what we should be doing…. Regulation that prevents clear hazards, like exploding chemical plants in the middle of residential neighborhoods, preserves a fair amount of open land, but allows housing construction. In particular, we should encourage construction that takes advantage of the most effective mass transit technology yet devised: the elevator. In practice, however, policy all too often ends up being captured by interest groups… real-estate developers… affluent homeowners… less willing to let newcomers in…

http://delong.typepad.com/2017-09-04-cbsa-report-chapter-3-data.csv