housing

The Future of Cities: View from the Left Coast

New Geography — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 17:04:17 -0500

Save the date! Join us live for a Speaker Panel on Friday January 20,2023 from 11:30AM - 2:30PM PST.

The Western US has long been an innovator in developing the urban form, yet now that form is showing strain and there's a fierce debate about how western cities should grow.

The speaker panel will explore these issues, from homelessness to high housing prices and the impact of regulation.

Download event flyer (PDF opens in new tab or window)

Visit the event listing for more information:
Chapman University

Reports from Urban Reform Institute, Center for Opportunity Urbanism

New Geography — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:17:14 -0500

Archive of reports by the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and the Urban Reform Institute.

2023

Demographia International Housing Affordability 2023

Demographia U.S. Housing Affordability 2023

Building the New America

The Future of Appalachia

2022

The Last Utopia: The 15-Minute City

Exurbia Rising

The Next American Cities

Demographia International Housing Affordability 2022

Demographia U.S. Housing Affordability 2022

2021

Demographia International Housing Affordability 2021

Demographia U.S. Housing Affordability 2021

2020

How Urban Planning Caused the Housing Crisis

Beyond Feudalism

URI Standard of Living Index - 2020

A Policy of Delusion and Misdirection: Rethinking California's New Planning Regime

2019

Beyond Gentrification

2018

The Millennial Dilemma: A Generation Searches for Home

Localism in America

Perspectives on Defining the American Heartland

Houston Resilient

COU Standard of Living Index - 2018

2017

The Great Train Robbery

MaX Report

Hurricane Harvey

Job-Creating Transportation Infrastructure

Fading Promise

New American Heartland

COU Standard of Living Index - 2017

2016

America's Housing Crisis

Best Cities for Minorities

Restoring Localism

Putting People First

COU Standard of Living Index

The Cost of Not Housing

The Texas Way of Urbanism

2015

Maximizing Opportunity Urbanism with Robin Hood Planning

Golden Opportunity Lost: Can It Happen Here?

Core and Suburban Growth in Cities of Western Europe, 1971-2011

2014

America's Opportunity City

Opportunity Urbanism 2014

2012

California Getting In Its Own Way

2007

Opportunity Urbanism

Inequality in Megacities

Opportunity Urbanism Policy Framework

2005

The New Suburbanism

Texas Just Launched a Four-Pronged Attack on the Housing Crisis

Tory Gattis — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 19:09:09 -0400

This legislative session has culminated in a landmark victory for property rights and housing affordability in Texas. Thanks to the tireless work of advocacy groups like Texans for Reasonable Solutions, which championed this entire suite of bills, Governor Abbott has now signed four powerful pieces of legislation that represent the most significant pro-housing reform the state has seen in decades. This isn't a single, timid step; it's a coordinated, multi-front assault on the regulatory red tape that has driven up housing costs and limited options for Texas families.

For years, we've watched major Texas metros grapple with an affordability crisis born not of scarcity of land or lack of demand, but of an ever-growing thicket of municipal ordinances. These four new laws—HB 24, SB 840, SB 2477, and the capstone bill, SB 15—take direct aim at the root of the problem: artificial constraints on supply. Let's break down each of these strategic wins.

1. HB 24: Ending the "Tyrant's Veto"

One of the most pernicious, anti-growth mechanisms in Texas zoning has been the "protest-by-a-small-minority" rule, rightly dubbed the "tyrant's veto." Under the old law, if owners of just 20% of the land area near a proposed zoning change objected, it triggered a supermajority vote (three-fourths) of the city council for approval. This gave a handful of NIMBY ("Not In My Back Yard") neighbors disproportionate power to block new housing projects that a simple majority of elected officials, and likely the community at large, supported.

Championed by Rep. Dustin Burrows and Sen. Bryan Hughes, HB 24 fundamentally restores fairness to the process. The bill targets the most common use of the veto by raising the protest threshold for adjacent property owners to 60% and, crucially, removes the supermajority requirement for those protests.

The result: A small group of opponents can no longer single-handedly kill beneficial projects. This strengthens property rights for landowners who wish to develop housing and empowers city councils to make decisions for the good of the entire city, not just a vocal few.

Read the rest of this piece at Houston Strategies.

Tory Gattis is the Founder at BeSomeone - Talent Unbound PBC, and former CEO & Founder at Microschool Revolution. Tory is a McKinsey consulting alum, TEDx speaker, and holds both an MBA and BSEE from Rice University. In his spare time, he writes his long-running Houston Strategies and Opportunity Urbanist blogs for the Houston Chronicle, and writes and speaks as a Founding Senior Fellow with the Urban Reform Institute.

Blue State Housing Crisis is Costing Democrats Voters

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 16 May 2025 11:58:00 -0400

Amid the talk about tariffs and other Trumpian foibles, little attention has been paid to America’s festering housing crisis. This could prove a more lasting political issue in the US, as well as throughout much of the West.

These trends are the focus of a new report (to which I contributed an introduction) on global housing prices by Wendell Cox. High housing prices, he notes, are widely linked to strict regulatory policies, mostly seeking to hamper suburban growth and force development into urban cores. Almost all the US cities with the highest prices — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego — have enacted these urban containment or compact city strategies, which force people to live in denser, smaller, and more expensive inner-city housing.

Such approaches are widely popular with planners, progressives, and green activists. However, by restricting development on the more affordable suburban fringe, they drive up housing costs across entire metropolitan areas. This has deepened a stark and unprecedented divide between US regions. In much of the country — especially the Midwest, parts of Pennsylvania, and the South — home prices remain affordable, with median prices roughly three times the median income. By contrast, in coastal California and much of the Northeast, that ratio has surged to around nine to one.

All of this has turned housing into a potent political issue. In a Gallup survey last month, Americans ranked housing as their top financial worry behind inflation. In a Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds last year, housing ranked as the third-most important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. Meanwhile, around 65% of California residents consider housing costs a major concern — an astonishing figure.

Prices also affect levels of homeownership, long a linchpin of middle-class aspiration. January home sales were down 5% from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at its lowest level in 40 years, and one in three pay over 30% of their income in mortgage or rent.

The young — tomorrow’s voters — are the most directly hit. According to US Census Bureau data, the rate of homeownership among young adults aged 25–34 was 45.4% for Generation X, but dropped to 37% for Millennials. This decline comes despite nearly three in five Millennials viewing homeownership as a core part of the American dream.

Ultimately, the differential in housing will upset America’s long-term political balance. Housing costs are driving young people, immigrants and minorities to Sun-Belt and even Rust-Belt locales, while the Northeastern and West Coast metros continue to lose domestic migrants. Few young people can expect to afford living in California, where the rich now dominate the housing market, and more than a third of all real-estate transactions in recent years topped $1 million.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Feudal Future Podcast — Breaking Down Barriers in Housing Development

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:17:26 -0500

Discover why building a home in California now costs over $1.2 million per unit as we navigate the maze of the state's housing crisis with Gary London and Jennifer Hernandez. These experts shed light on the staggering decline in permits for single and multifamily homes.

Listen on Apple Podcast
More podcast episodes & show notes at JoelKotkin.com

Watch this Episode

Support Our Work

The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.

Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.

For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.

Tweet thoughts: @joelkotkin, @mtoplansky, #FeudalFuture #BeyondFeudalism

Learn more about Joel’s book ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism‘

This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.

The Next Australian City: the Suburban Evolution

Guy Gibson and Ross Elliott — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:01:10 -0400

Australia, much like America, is a nation of suburbs. The overwhelming majority of its people live, work and play in the suburbs of Australian cities. And while Australia is one of the most urbanised nations in the world, with two thirds of them living in their capital cities – and principally Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane at that – it is the suburbs of those cities that remain the preferred place to live.

The evolution of Australian cities and suburbs is a theme explored in this book by Suburban Futures, edited by Guy Gibson and Ross Elliott. It features 30 authors and includes international perspectives by Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox, Peter Gordon, Alan Berger and June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones. The Canadian experience is told by Antony Lorius and Laura Taylor. Every Australian state and territory is also covered, each by a different author – all experts in their field but all with different perspectives on the history and future of suburban development.

North American readers will find much that is familiar and much that is new in this book. The editors have sought to provide a fresh sense of legitimacy for the suburban story of Australia which – much like in North America – is frequently the subject of disdain and derision. “The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I'm happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world,” was an infamous comment by noted Australian urbanist Elizabeth Farrelly. That’s not a view shared by authors in this work, who nonetheless are unafraid to tackle valid concerns around connectivity, mobility, equity and amenity.

The Next Australian City is for this reason both enlightening about the Australian experience, and challenging in terms of how its cities and suburbs will be shaped by global and local forces into the future.

Available at Amazon.

Update on the Relationship Between House Values and Rents

Wendell Cox — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 17:46:01 -0400

According to the latest information (American Community Survey, 2022), the strong relationship between median house values and median gross rents remains --- at a correlation coefficient of plus 0.89 (on a scale of perfect correlation [plus 1.00] or no correlation [-1.00]). This result, calculated from matching data in the 508 reported upon metropolitan and micropolitan areas (also called “functional urban areas”), is statistically significant at the 99% confidence level.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Feudal Future: Addressing the Housing Affordability Crisis & Protecting the Middle Class Dream

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:36:15 -0400

Unlock the mystery behind why securing a roof over your head has become an arduous quest in today’s Western civilization. This episode promises to gift you with the perspectives of housing experts Joel Farkas, Wendell Cox, and Karla López del Río, as we navigate through the complexities of local and state regulations, fees, and the polarizing anti-sprawl policies that contribute to the housing unaffordability crisis. It’s a discussion that extends beyond numbers and policies, touching the lives of middle-class families and reshaping the demographic landscape of entire states.

Listen on Apple Podcast
More podcast episodes & show notes at JoelKotkin.com

Watch this Episode

Support Our Work

The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.

For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.

Tweet thoughts: @joelkotkin, @mtoplansky, #FeudalFuture #BeyondFeudalism

Learn more about Joel’s book ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism‘

YIMBY Can Populate Conference Halls (at Least)

Tim W. Ferguson — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 08:21:21 -0400

The Biden administration's Realtor subsidy scheme is the latest flag, but the politics of "affordable housing" cut across normal partisan bounds. A New York Times article examines how opposition to single-family zoning attracts left and right. But, my post asks, what about the broad middle of homeowners? https://timwferguson.com/2024/03/10/yimby-can-populate-conference-halls/

Make Housing Affordable by Abolishing Growth Boundaries, not Ending Density Restrictions: Reason Magazine Debate

Wendell Cox — Fri, 26 May 2023 17:44:14 -0400

In too many metropolitan areas, housing is no longer affordable for middle-class households, especially in markets subject to "urban containment," now the world's dominant planning regime. According to planning experts Arthur C. Nelson and Casey Dawkins, urban containment draws "a line around an urban area"; it includes urban growth boundaries and greenbelts. It is "explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging" infill, to limit or block organic urban expansion.

Urban containment is intended to increase urban land costs. Shifting demand inside the contained area produces an abrupt increase in land values at the boundary, distorting the land value gradient. As Nelson and Dawkins say, "This shift should decrease the value of land outside the boundary and increase the value of land inside the boundary"(emphasis added), which effectively sets a higher "floor value" for urban land. This is the "urban containment effect."

Read the full discussion at: the May issue of Reason.

Wendell Cox (Demographia): Affirmative
Christian Britschgi (Reason magazine): Negative