Why housing costs remain a major hurdle for lowering inflation
Housing inflation continues to be a stubborn impediment to the consumer price index (CPI) falling back to the Federal Reserve’s target. Despite broader economic inflation cooling significantly from pandemic peaks, the shelter inflation index has...
Market set for recovery
The multifamily housing market is showing promising signs of recovery, with recent data from CoStar Group revealing a significant increase in demand and stabilization of vacancy rates. Absorption rates have notably risen from 118,000 units...
The housing theory of childless cat ladies
Would a YIMBY building boom rejuvenate urban family life or produce sterile, megacity hellscapes? Housing Boom = Baby Bust? America’s low birth rate is in the news again, thanks largely to Vice Presidential candidate Sen. J.D....
Is land-use regulation holding back construction productivity?
Ed Glaeser is perhaps the pre-eminent urban economist working today, and I’ve cited his work repeatedly when looking at land-use restrictions and burdens on new development. So I was very interested to see he’s coauthored...
Office to apartments
download pdf Hybrid work is likely here to stay. This shift isn’t just changing lifestyles—it’s also affecting commercial spaces. Office vacancy rates post-COVID shot up almost overnight, and they remain near 20 percent nationwide, the...
Economics and the hidden order
The “real world” is calling. But the real world is a real mess. So how do we clean up the mess? That’s a massive task: too big for any one person. This looks like...
Why Johnny can’t build
We were once a nation of builders—from the toll roads and canals of the early nineteenth century and the railroads of the second half of that busy century, to the construction of power, energy,...
Major U.S. Supreme Court decisions coming down the track MAJOR UPDATE
June 28, 2024 Update: The Supreme Court in an unprecedented victory for multifamily and other businesses, has today reversed its 40-year-old decision in Chevron v. Natural Resource Defense Council. This law governed how courts...
Lawyers take big government to the Supreme Court
“We all get to vote, but the ability to make legislation is no longer in the hands of the people we elect,” Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger said. As the administrative state implements more regulations...
The incredible disappearing Starwood CRE investor
The $10 billion fund from Starwood Capital Group has been trying to preserve its available cash and credit by limiting investor redemptions. In the first quarter, the fund was hit with $1.3 billion in...
Rent control still the wrong solution to housing woes
Restricting the price of housing kills incentives to supply places to live. Rent control is having something of a moment: In Los Angeles, tenants are invoking a law that imposes limits on apartments built on...
Rules that make dishwashers, wash machines perform worse also illegal
Plaintiffs argue that the Department of Energy has no legal authority to impose its own water use limits on energy-consuming home appliances. The federal regulations that make dishwashers and washing machines worse are also illegal....
INFOGRAPHIC: Interest rates slow apartment development
Rising interest rates, tighter lending and flattening rents in parts of the country have left property companies from California to Florida waiting for financing that may not come soon. +500 days (up 45% from 2019)...
INFOGRAPHIC: Disparate impact of high interest rates
Disparate impact of high interest rates has adversely impacted millions of low- and middle-income families—and housing providers. More often high interest rates depress stock and housing prices, and other asset values— impacting all income...
Monopolies, elections and power, oh my
Technology is engineered toward empowering individuals, not government. Therein lies the problem. From the Gutenberg press to automobiles to a networked world enabling people to work remotely, history’s greatest innovations—in some way great or small—liberate...
