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The Landlord Shrugged
In her epic novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand dramatizes a world in which producers go on strike. Rand once commented that part of her motivation for writing the novel was so that it wouldn’t come true. Sadly, it is coming true and often in ways that few will notice. In the novel, government enacted a…
A Flawed Framework
ByjbpAs I point out in my book, The Affordable Housing Crisis: Causes and Cures, for more than one hundred years housing policy has been dominated by the same flawed framework. Each “new” housing policy simply repeats policies that have previously failed. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an example. He ran on a promise…
The Conflict between Preservation and Affordable Housing
An inevitable result of government’s growing intervention in economic matters is a conflict between various policy goals. An example of these conflicting goals is the goal of preserving historic buildings and the goal of providing affordable housing. A common feature of preservation ordinances is that repairs to an existing building must use “in-kind” materials. For…
The Costs of Democracy
A recent article in The Los Angeles Times reports that “affordable housing” projects in California are routinely costing more than $1 million per apartment to build. This outrageous price tag is caused by both state and local policies, and it illustrates one of the costs of democracy. Democracy means unlimited majority rule, that the majority…
Friday Roundup 1-14-22
Last week, a judge ordered New York State to reopen its portal for rental assistance. The portal was shut down in November. On one hand, the state is dawdling in its efforts to provide relief to tenants (and by extension landlords) impacted by the pandemic. On the other hand, with its eviction moratorium and other…
Yelp is Causing Gentrification
A professor in San Diego has concluded that Yelp reviews of ethnic restaurants are contributing to gentrification and displacement. The reviews “contribute to the transformation of urban foodscapes — the physical, symbolic, cultural, lived, and imagined food environments — that have been built by people of color….” And because the reviewers are “primarily young, white,…